So Grim Fandango is basically my favorite video game of all time, as evidenced by the fact that I stayed up until midnight on a work night in order to play a Remastered Edition of a 17-year-old game that I've probably already finished a dozen times over the years. I'm only an hour in so far, but it's already clear to me that a ton of loving care went into this re-release, barring any crazy bugs or unexpected Star-Wars-Special-Edition-style changes I really think this is an excellent version of Grim Fandango.
I know some people were disappointed that the only real graphical upgrades were to the textures and lighting, but I can tell you that speaking as someone who is incredibly familiar with this game, I can see all sorts of very subtle but meaningful improvements to all sorts of things. It has a few problems, it's not perfect, but by and large I'm really impressed.
Some thoughts from the first hour:
- The first thing I noticed (which was a pleasant surprise to me) was that the game defaults to 4:3, with a very nice art-deco-styled border on the sides. I really expected them to crop the game to 16:9, which probably would've ended up being problematic for all sorts of reasons, so I'm glad they didn't do that. There is an option to stretch and distort the game to 16:9, which is madness.
- The music. Oh my God, the music! It's incredible. This was already one of my favorite video game scores, but replacing the synth samples with a full orchestra really brings the whole thing to life, I cannot wait to hear the rest of this score.
- Okay weird, the game's controls are point-and-click by default. I'm really glad this is an option, I know people hate the tank controls (and I admit the original controls weren't great), but it's really, really strange to see a cursor in Grim Fandango. I immediately switched to an Xbox 360 controller once I realized that was an option, and it defaulted to camera-relative controls, which work well for the most part (though the occasional crazy camera angle can be tricky). I'm so used to watching Manny slowly turn in place all the time, it's really weird to see him darting around the game, in a good way.
- You can switch back and forth between the remastered and classic graphics from the menu, which is another thing I wasn't expecting. You can really see how much better it looks compared to before, when you swap back and forth. And although all the background art seems like it's pretty much untouched, it doesn't look too blurry or low-res compared to the new character models, which is something I was worried about. Yes, the game still looks pretty dated even after the remaster, but you absolutely can't say they didn't put a lot of work into this remaster when you swap back and forth and compare for yourself. It looks pretty damn good if you ask me.
- My biggest disappointment so far is that the pre-rendered cutscenes just don't look great compared to the upgraded in-engine character models. It's weird, some shots look like they might be re-rendered, but most of them still seem to use the old character models with their blurry textures. I wonder if they actually re-rendered some shots based on the assets they had, or if it's just my imagination.
- One weird thing that only someone who's played the game a dozen times would notice, but all the in-game dialogue is a lot snappier, like the game is able to retrieve all the sound files a lot faster or something. I never noticed how long the pauses were between lines of dialogue in the original game until suddenly those pauses were gone. Like a lot of this game, it's really weird experiencing conversations that I've heard so many times before, except now the rhythm and timing of the whole thing is noticeably faster.
- Another weird thing, the game gives you a big warning near the beginning of the game that there are no autosaves whatsoever, so you should remember to save your game often. I'm all for purity and everything, but I wouldn't have minded an autosave feature one bit. Kind of a weird decision, unless maybe it just wasn't worth the trouble to implement.
- For the first time in my life, I can play Grim Fandango without being frustrated by elevator doors! They actually work properly! Crazy!
Anyway, I can't wait to hear what everyone else thinks about the remaster. I'm not exactly an unbiased review seeing as I've been in love with this game my entire adult life. But needless to say I'm more than happy with it so far, I'm sure I'll be back with more thoughts later. It's super bizarre playing a game that I'm so familiar with, only everything is just a little bit different in small ways. I'm excited to see what else they've done with it.
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