"Better than what I'd been expecting."

Hype can work in mysterious ways.

During the time from the announcement of Growlanser Generations, or from the announcement of Growlanser 2 and Growlanser 3, until its eventual release, I'd heard a lot about the games from my fellow Gamefaqs users, and most of it wasn't very positive. You couldn't have had a topic without someone bringing up how, both games might be good, but they both were mere shadows of Growlanser and Growlanser 4. Working Designs had decided to bring over the worst of the series apparently. Working Designs hasn't really let me down outside of the “adequate” amount of time they take up to localize a game, so I wasn't going to be swayed, but in large enough doses, hype can effect even the most stalwart, potential buyer.

The game plays great. Don't let some of the sources that claim Growlanser is a strategy game fool you. The battles have a more strategic feel to them than you're normal, turn based affair, but these games are still solidly in the RPG category. Combat is played out in a semi-real time situation. Every action has a wait time associated with it, and everyone moves simultaneously. Your characters will move around the stage, attempting to execute whatever action you set them out to do. However, at any point in the battle, you can call the menu back up and issue new orders to your troops. While the menu is displayed, battle is temporarily frozen.

After you successfully execute an attack, your character's Wait gauge will fill up. As the battle rages on, that character will be immobilized until the Wait gauge becomes completely empty. Once the gauge is empty, that character's mini menu screen will display itself, and you'll set a new action for your character. You can launch another attack, or take a different route. Maybe that character's attack was pretty unsuccessful, and you'd like to try your hand at magic instead.

Magic, unlike attacks, does not fill up your Wait gauge. You still can't cast spells unless your Wait gauge is empty, but upon choosing which spell you want, another bar will start to fill up. For each level of the spell you want to cast, the bar has to fill up an additional time. Once the bar has filled up enough times, it will display a screen where you choose who you want to target with the spell, and then it will go off. Of course, there are other actions you can take with magic. After the magic spell is ready, outside of the option to cast the spell, you can continue to charge it up, you can wait until the exact moment you want to let the spell loose, or you can stop casting altogether. If you choose to stop, you won't be penalized in MP.

Another situation you might find yourself in is the need to kill an enemy quickly or hurry to help an ally. If you chose to cast a high level spell, and during the chanting of the spell you find out you don't really need to cast it any longer, or you don't need it in such a potent level, you can stop right where you're at and cast it. If your ally is close to death, hurry up and cast that heal spell three levels under what you wanted.

Alongside magic, characters also have Techs. Techs don't use MP, but instead have a set limit of uses. Certain techs will guarantee that you'll inflict a critical hit, where some will hit enemies all around you. Others will raise your defense against a specific element, or double the damage, and MP, of the next spell you cast. Techs are a large boon in battles; specifically the Dash tech. Moving across the map at double the normal speed can change an extremely difficult battle into a “Mash the attack button” type of battle.

Of course, Growlanser Generations doesn't just utilize strategy in its battles. Managing your rings and gems are just as important, if not more important, then what actions you need to take physically against the opposition. Rings are what your characters weapons are essentially. Instead of buying new weapons throughout the game as is the standard fare in an RPG, your characters each get their own weapon, and there's no changing. If you don't want Wein, your main character, ripping through the enemies with his scythe, that's just too damn bad. Rings, each one different from the next come with three gem slots and stat bonuses. Each gem slot has a grade of 0-9. If you get a ring with the slots 7-6-0, then you can equip up to a Lv7 gem in the first slot, a Lv6 gem in the second, and you can't equip a gem at all in the third. At the start, you'll probably feel great with the 4-3-3 rings you find, but at the end of the game it's quite common to have everyone decked out with 9-9-9 rings that have exceptional stat boosts associated with them.

Gems are quite possible the most important aspect of Growlanser Generations. From the lower level gems that might increase your attack by 10% or heal 2MP each round, to the higher level gems that give your indirect range characters unlimited range or access to virtually every spell in the entire game, gems are what will make or break your roster. There are also gems that, upon leveling up, will increase your stats permanently, and gems that will lower your level at the start of battle permanently, but will keep your stats the same. These can be heavily abused to create a party that can stomp right through every battle in the entire game, including the boss.

Battles aren't just “Kill every enemy and you win.” There are different objectives outlined for you at the start of the battle that you have to achieve, from protecting villagers to just getting the hell out of there. They aren't varied enough to make every battle a completely different situation, but they do add some change, and it keeps you from just setting everyone to attack and not looking back. If after finishing the battle you completed all the objectives perfectly, you'll get a Mission Complete. If you finish the battle without failing any of the objectives, but you don't completely fulfill them either, you'll get a Mission Clear. For the most part, this doesn't have any bearing on battles, but there are parts of the story you'll miss out on if you put in lackluster performances.

Even though the battles are presented in a strategy type of way, and they take substantially longer than most turn based combat, the option to set character to Auto Battle is present. At the start of every battle, it brings up the character menu for every individual character. You can choose to set them to battle automatically, or even press a single button and give your entire party up to the discretion of the AI. Normally, the only thing your characters will do is attack under auto battle, but you can set it in the Options menu to allow the AI to use arias in addition to attacks. This makes random battles go a lot quicker and stops them from getting monotonous.

The story is less typical of an RPG and more like a strategy game. Instead of the fantasy hero out to save the world from a cast out god who can destroy the planet yet not some pesky teenage boy, it focuses on the world at hand and the politics going on in said world. You're constantly at war, being sent here and there to defend a border or to take a part of the opposing territory. The main villains are not awakening ancients with the power of the past, but ambitious humans who may just have too much time on their hands to think their plots through. In Growlanser, there are multiple paths you can take during the game, and although the stories in the side paths aren't as rewarding as the main path, you do get to see the situation through another set of eyes, and quite possibly understand that it's not bad guy versus good guy as much as red versus blue.

In Growlanser 2, you play as Wein Cruz, son of an adventurer. You've dreamed of becoming an Imperial Knight, the highest attainable rank in the empire, since you were young, and now you're being inducted into that army with your friend Maximillian. Unlike you, Max feels that war solves nothing, and he has joined the army to attain a position of political power so he can unite the warring empires and bring peace to every corner of the land. That's where Growlanser 2 starts off. As you progress through the game, other characters will join you with their own desires and ambitions, and your quest to become an Imperial Knight will soon ride backseat to something more sinister.

In Growlanser 3, you play as Slayn who, like many heroes past, has no memory of who he is. You wake up in a bed, and soon you meet Annette Burns, who just so happens to be the daughter of the leading figure in these here lands. As you progress throughout the game, you'll find out more about who Slayn is, as well as what his agenda was, through normal story scenes and flashbacks.

The story in Growlanser 2 isn't that great, but it suffices and has multiple paths. The story in Growlanser 3 is quite a bit better, but has only a single, solitary path to follow. Both games have a slew of endings which you can obtain by kissing the collective ass of your entourage. In Growlanser 2, each character has a ten unit bar in their status screen that shows how much they like you. If you get the bar completely filled up, as well as fulfill a few other obligations for specific characters (Charlone), then the ending for that character is available to you.

Neither game has astounding graphics, although in a generation ruled by 3D games every vacation to the graphics of yesterday I welcome with open arms. There aren't any anime cutscenes that a lot of the 2D RPGs like to enlist now, and the animations aren't the greatest, but like a lot of my favorite games, they use what they have to perfection. Spell animations were quite good for the time these games came out, and there's no hour long spells that you have to sit through. Everything is quick and keeps the battle going.

I love the music. Rarely are there any games that I actually don't mute and put a few CDs in, and Growlanser Generations is one of them. The soundtrack alone almost convinced me to buy the Deluxe version of the game, which was an additional $40. Some of the tracks are used too many times, but they're good enough to not even seem repetitive to me.

Voice acting is hard for me to accurately review. On Gamefaqs, the majority of people who play RPGs and strategy games tend to think every single American voice actor sucks and the Japanese can't fail, and while I tend to agree that the Japanese voices are usually of higher quality than their localized counterparts, I'd rather have C-list American voices than A-list Japanese voices. Compared to other games, the voices in Growlanser are pretty good. There's a few characters who I think were voiced quite badly, such as Max, but most of the others are all well and good. No one takes themselves too seriously, and it shows. Whether or not you consider that a good thing or not is up to you.

If you liked the game, you'll probably replay Growlanser 2 at least one more time, just to gain access to all the character endings. As far as I know, it's impossible to achieve them all in one playthrough. There's a New Game + option as well, that lets you carry gems and rings over to the next game, but not levels. I'm not really a fan of the halfway New Game +, as it seems pointless to keep everyone's level low yet give you all the overpowered gems from the start, but it does allow you to breeze through the game even quicker. In addition to the endings, there's also two other paths you can take in Growlanser 2. I myself only witnessed one of these paths, as my four treks through the game either didn't allow me access or my goal didn't permit me to attempt them.

Neither game is very long. Going through Growlanser 2 without tackling any of the additional quests or backtracking to previous towns to hear some of the non important ramblings of villagers will probably take you about ten hours. My first time through the game was just a little over 17, but I'd done pretty much everything save seeing all the endings and taking the separate paths. Growlanser 3 lasts longer, with my first time through taking close to 50 hours, although I spent an excessive amount of time in the Arena. I didn't worry about getting all the endings in Growlanser 3, so I don't know if you need to play through the game again, so you'll probably spend more total time on Growlanser 2.

From the outset, I had already made up my mind that I was buying a mediocre set of games that I would eventually give up on half way through. After getting to play the games, I can't imagine how much fun Growlanser and Growlanser 4 are. I feel that, if I had bought the games with the understanding that they were as good as they actually are, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed them nearly as much as I did. If you're not put off by some of the titles Nippon Ichi puts out, or you have no problem playing through the Snes ports you see so often on the GBA, than Growlanser Generations is probably a choice title for you.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/04/05