This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

We are talking about the successfully kickstarted game, Grand Guilds, today. I will say that I only had a passing knowledge of its existence while it was undergoing its funding, and I was not a backer for the game. I instead stumbled upon it during a Switch sale, where it eventually won my purchase over, because of the description of the game.

Grand Guilds is a Deck Building, Card playing, Turn Based combat, RPG. Those buzz words, is what drew me to the game. Having really enjoyed my experience with Griftlands, and loving turn-based combat games like X-com and Fire Emblem, as well as just generally loving RPGs, I was sold before I looked too hard into the game. In Grand Guilds, you play through a linear story with multiple playable characters, each whom have their own deck of cards that you can build and make your own as you take them on an adventure through the world.

To start, we will talk about the deck building. Each character that you eventually unlock has a deck theme that is unique to them. One character wields water magic and is a healer, one is a ranger that uses bows and poisons, etc. When you take a deck into battle you are only allowed 15 cards which will get drawn randomly each turn of the battle. However you can craft a deck out of probably 20-25 different cards, which when compiling your deck you can put up to 4 duplicates of a card into a deck. So, if you are doing the math at home you could have 15 unique cards, or have only 5 different cards that you have in triples. The cards themselves have varying powers and luckily you don't need to work just plain movement cards into your deck. Some cards might be buffs that give you defense, power, or additional moves, and some might be attacking cards that need to be done up close or from a distance. Each card has a cost of either 1-5 action points, with 5 action points being your entire players turn, so when building decks you want to balance your deck so that you can sometimes play more than one card a turn. If you are into customization and deck building this is where you might enjoy the game, the decks aren't deep and I found it fairly easy to build a competent deck to beat the game for the characters I used, but if you really wanted to dive down this rabbit hole, there are 9 playable characters, so you could customize 9 different decks if you wanted.

That is sadly where all of the good things I am going to say about this game end. If deckbuilding is not the #1 reason you are buying this game, skip it.

Lets move on to how it plays. Grand Guilds is a string of fights with a very loose story that ties everything together. Sometimes with no story at all. There is never a moment in Grand Guilds where you explore a town, or talk to NPCs. The only time you are in control of your characters is during a battle. So while there are scenes between battles, different locations that your character walks through, you get to only play the battles.

Battles are played on a grid environment where it is usually, your 3 characters you picked against 4-5 enemies. At the start of the battle you are given a pool of 2-3 cards that you can opt to re-draw once, if you think you are going to get better cards, or you can hop into the battle with the cards given. Your team gets to go first and then the enemies. You get 5 action points, but can only move once at the cost of 1 action, so you can't convert all your points into movement should you need to get somewhere, or you can opt to not move at all and use all 5 points on cards you have. The enemies presumably follow the same rules, but you don't get to see how many cards they have in their hands or what they might be. As long as one of your characters is still standing at the end of the fight, you win, and are given some experience for completing the fight. if you lose a character during a fight, you get scored worse at the end of the fight, it says they were injured, but no actual negative effect happens. They won't be wounded for the next fight, or less effective. They don't need time to heal at base, and they still get the same full XP characters get for surviving. I found sacrificing a character a viable strategy when I needed to break up the group of enemies. If you lose a fight, you have to retry until you win.

Nearly every, and I mean every, fight is broken into 3 waves. You fight the first set of 4 enemies and win, you then load into the same map again, with usually a different starting location and all your characters are healed, and then fight 4 more identical enemies. Win that fight, and the third fight might be a boss, but in reality it will probably be another set of 4 identical enemies. The game mightdecide to make each fight increasingly more difficult, by replacing one of their melee fighters with a ranged one, but you will always fight the same battle three times. Then there is a story break and you are back to your hub where you can adjust cards.

Normally, I don't touch on this subject, because I haven't felt that is makes a huge difference based on the games I played, but only play this game on a computer with mouse and keyboard. During fights, you have to select your fighter, then select the card, and then the enemy or friend you want to play the card on. However, if the camera is partially obstructed because of either the walls of the play area, or an object in the way, you have to rotate the camera to be able to see if that tile becomes highlighted. On consoles you can only rotate the camera in one quarter moves only (4 times to do a 360).. so I had instances where I had to play my action in between moving the camera just to be able to select the right tile. Sometimes this was just a problem for one move out of an entire battle, but there are some locations that are narrow fights, that required me to have to move the camera for every action I took, even zooming in so far that I couldn't see two squares in front of me, just so I could get the camera past the walls of the play area. Using a controller felt very clunky, and you can adapt, it clearly wasn't really designed with controllers in mind.

The story of Grand Guilds is a genuine mess. Long story short, you start the game investigating why someone tried to steal a book from your guild's HQ, and eventually it descends to dealing with a war between the empire and the guilds underneath them, to supernatural fights with ghosts and witches, and finally ending with a fight between two dragons. While someone could argue that all fantasy RPGs have convoluted plots as a way to make the journey seem epic or to capture all the tropes people look for, this game takes it to another level. The writing is about on par with how I would have wrote a game when I was 12-13. Every piece of dialogue is written matter of factly, there is never any moment for subtlety or getting to know the characters, just keep moving forward.

Here is my favorite exchange that I think makes my point, this is obviously summed up by me.

Your characters are sent on a mission by your boss to do X, and told not to come back to HQ until your boss phones you.

Upon completing the mission. Char 1- "Great now, we got X, which is what boss wanted.. we should go back to HQ"

Char 2 - "We can't go back to HQ until the boss calls"

Char 1 - "Well where should we go until the boss calls?"

Char 2 - "The boss just called, we can go back to HQ now"

Char 1 - "Great"

Not only is there no reason for this scene, but they don't do anything with it. We don't find out anything about characters or their personalities, we don't move the plot, nothing. Its a reminder to the player that there was a reason they couldn't go back to HQ, but now its done and they can go back.

There is also a character, that I know the Devs/writers/whomever thought was the coolest shit around, because the scene he appears in, is one where he reveals a secret of each party member that they didn't know he knew. The written lines you can tell were written, with the belief that people playing the game would be amazed at this mysterious stranger and how cool it was to be a shadowy agent, but instead I was just dumbfounded by it.

After I beat the game, the story's lack of sense started to be made clear, because I looked at their Kickstarter tiers. There were multiple tiers where people could develop lore for the game, or make an enemy or even make a side-quest. So, presumably if somebody paid X amount of dollars to design an enemy and they really wanted a vampire in the game, then the developers had to find a way to shoehorn vampires into a plot that certainly didn't need them. The game also ends on a cliffhanger which I feel is a convenient way for bad writers to wrap up a story without an actual wrap up. Did this kickstarter game, really think it was going to be so successful that it could tease a sequel in their first ever game, or did we just not know how to close the story?

This is getting long in the tooth, but I still have to talk about that this game also has some bugs that really stopped the enjoyment of the game for me. Outside the camera issue discussed above, there was a bug that sometimes when I was buying a card for a deck, the overlay asking me if I want to buy the card would remain on screen even after I made my purchase and exited the shop. the only way I could remove the overlay, was to either close the game or back out to the main menu. I had issues with knocking enemies onto parts of the map where they shouldn't have been, but yet they were still alive. I wouldn't be able to target them with attacks or spells, and they couldn't do anything either. Unless I was using a character with area of effect spells, I would have to restart the fight because it would be un-winnable. This maybe isn't a bug but you could select characters for missions that specifically state they aren't available for that mission. At the end of the game, one of your characters goes off to fight the last boss alone, but yet you can pick them to go with your team on a mission to go help them, it doesn't make sense.

I can normally find the fun in any game I play, no matter how bad it is. Grand Guilds, was one of the hardest games to "Find the fun." I had some initial fun building decks, but then learned that I could really use the same 3 characters for 85-90% of the game and it didn't make sense for me to invest time in other characters for the one battle I had to use them in. I stopped crafting decks 5 hours into a 20 hour game, because I was winning most battles easily with what I built when I couldn't buy a lot of cards. I stopped doing side missions because it served no purpose, you don't need to grind for XP or money in the game, and with enemies scaling to your level, it becomes a waste of time. I read a review after I beat the game that was positive, and one of the takeaways they had, was that the music was amazing and something they would listen to even outside of the game. The music is generic fantasy music, that you can probably buy from people who sell stuff through RPG Maker forums. Outside of battles, the back half of the game doesn't even really have music, so I'm baffled if that person completed the game, or just watched the intro cutscene.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: If you really just like tinkering with decks you might get some enjoyment out of this game, but nearly every aspect seems like this game isn't finished, but it is.. It seems like the target demo is 12yr old boys based on the writing, and how every female in the game is wearing clothes so you can see lots of cleavage. The only character that is not donning a sexualized outfit is the main character, whom at least twice in the game is basically threatened with rape. I have this game at #67 out of 71 games.

Up Next: Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion). Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for Listening.