@the_nubster: Yeah, those spiky clusters of vines that blended in with the background, as well as having that fog-of-war style darkness, made some sections in the first game way more frustrating than they would have been with some visual clarity. Really bummed they haven't improved it.
As a massive Grandia 1 & 2 fan, I remember being very quickly disappointed by Grandia 3. Maybe I should give it another shot.
It's an okay game, overall. I remember it not clicking with me off the bat either, mainly because it felt like more of a slice of life type of story. A lot of talk of dreams (like becoming a pilot!) and not a lot of actual story. But the Grandia battle system is so good that I ended up overlooking all that (just like Grandia Xtreme, which is basically just a dungeon crawler with zero plot, but I played the heck out of it) . It's actually on the shorter side, too, in comparison to 1 & 2, I think I finished 3 in like 25-30 hours, even despite it being a 2-disc game.
I wish more people talked about Grandia Xtreme because it has some of the best voice acting in video games. It's one of Mark Hamill's early gigs, and also features Lisa Loeb and Dean Cain. Hamill is passable, but the rest are all fucking terrible. It's great.
There's one line reading that's been stuck in my head forever where the character says, "eek" and doesn't add any inflection or emotion to it at all. Just reads the word eek like any other word.
I don't mind tailing missions at all. If they're done well, they're super fun, like Thief 2 where you're following that lady and you need to make creative use of moss arrows to cover up metal walkways to keep noise down.
I knew Dragooned was from the same "developer" as the legendary game The Demon Rush, but I didn't know Cherry Venus was in it. Is Brooks Cracktackle there, too?
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