Review #535: Grandia Xtreme

 Finally done with this sucker.

Never trust a game with 'Xtreme', or variations thereof, in its title.

 Alright, so you're Working Arts and Grandia II was well received... on the Dreamcast, since the PS2 port was horrible. You also notice that people praised the combat mode. Thus, they had a brilliant idea: To redeem the Grandia franchise on the PS2 by making an entire game built around the combat system. It was a bad idea, but at least the framerate issues that plagued Grandia II are gone.

 In this JRPG you play as Evan, this guy that has the ability to open up portals, who gets roped into helping the army into stopping the Elemental Disturbance. He is placed as the leader of a unit featuring men and elves, albeit named with in-game terminology since 'human' and 'elf' is too mundane, and gets bossed around into collecting all four elemental slabs and stopping the disturbance. The story is generic, filled to the brim with anime-cliches and bland characters... well, what little story there is. To add insult to injury, cutscenes are very slow-paced, so they turn from uninteresting to downright boring. All party members feature diverse, colorful designs but... their personality is as flat as a wall and ZERO character development, you barely get a feel of their personalities since they get so little time to showcase it. In short: It's bad.

 The combat system is the game's highlight, but it's not perfect.

 Whatever, the story was bound to suck and the developers didn't mind it since what they promised was a game based on the combat system that made the series so famous. And it's true, the combat is great, sans a few issues. It plays just like Grandia 2, in case you forgot, there's a round gauge at the bottom-right of the screen, about 3/4ths are blue and the remaining 1/4th is red. Icons for enemies and your own characters move through this gauge, and once they get to the red area you get your turn and can issue commands. Things like 'Attack' or 'Defend' take effect almost immediately, but spells and special moves have a bit of delay, which means that the character moves through the red part of the gauge at a reduced speed until it hits the blue part of the gauge again and finally executes the special command. The beauty of the game lies on the fact that you can cancel enemies' actions if you hit them with 'Critical attacks'(They are another type of attack you can choose, don't worry) or a few special moves that have the property of 'Cancel', however, only if you hit them while they are on the red part of the gauge..... and enemies can do the same thing to you.

 Characters are constantly on the move, since battles take place on large areas, which is something to be mindful of. Actually, they stay still while their icon is on the blue part of the gauge, but when executing an attack, and shortly thereafter, they will move around, which is something to keep in mind when using area-of-effect spells or super moves. Spells depend on which 'Mana Egg' you equip on your party members, each member has a different amount of Mana Egg slots and you can only equip this at the hub-town. You'll also need to fuse different eggs in order to create newer, more powerful mana eggs. Each mana egg has its own MP, so you can use equip both offensive and healing eggs and not worry about running out of healing magic by using offensive spells. Super Moves run on a SP gauge, which is earned by getting hit or hitting enemies, and you learn new ones by leveling up your older ones. Each character has about 7 unique super moves, and they're a great way to mow-down enemies and bosses, so don't stock on that SP. Lastly, also at town, each character can equip various passive skills found on dungeons. These can be anything from restoring some HP when blocking to dealing more damage to specific types of enemies

Bosses can take quite a while to defeat.

 The combat sounds great, and it kinda is, when it isn't being a total prick. Y'see, characters get tired if they run too far when chasing a target, and if it happens... they lost a turn. This rarely happens, unless you choose to attack a fast, mobile enemy, that during its turn manages to avoid you. Enemies can get tired of chasing you too. Regardless, normally, your character won't get tired. Unless... your character gets stuck running against another running character. This is not an uncommon occurrence, for whatever reason, your party members love getting stuck against each other and thus wasting each others' turn. It can also happen after one of your character finishes their attack, and runs to reposition himself, but proceed to act as a wall for another party member that meant to attack someone. Maybe you were trying to cancel an enemy's powerful spell, but now you'll waste a turn and get wrecked with magic. Fun. This is so common it ain't even funny. Another big issue is that you can't rotate the camera during combat, which can be annoying when trying to set-up area-of-effect attacks. The game highlights which enemies will get hit on the circular gauge, but that's not good enough at times.

 Well, enough of the combat, how is the game itself? A drag. There're two different towns in the game, one which is used to progress the story a couple of times and another one that acts as a hub: The only place where you can save your game, buy equipment, fuse egg, equip skills and proceed to a dungeon. The game flows as follows: 'Evann, get the earth slab' and then you go to the Earth dungeon and defeat the boss. 'Evann, get the fire slab', 'Evann, get the water slab', etc. After you get all four slabs you'd think that you're done... but you're not, a new, randomly generated 30-floor dungeon opens up, which houses 3 dungeons on floor 10, 20 and 30 respectively. If you go right away... you might notice that enemies have powered up a lot. That's because you should go back and replay all four dungeons, which has you solving the same dang puzzles you already did, but fighting souped up versions of enemies and the same bosses. But whatever, you finish these 7 dungeons and a new one pops up. And you might notice that enemies are stronger.... BECAUSE ALL SEVEN PREVIOUS DUNGEONS HAVE POWERED UP. AGAIN. And finishing the game unlocks a new 100-floor, randomly generated dungeon... and power-ups the previous dungeons. Again. Now, you don't 'need' to redo previous dungeons... but you're encouraged to, since even if you decide that you don't need the experience points, you will need the mana-eggs unless you want your magic to get outdated. It's a horrible, grindy game design that's anything but fun.

Try to bring Titto along every time, the Steal ability is too good.

 Dungeon design is uninspired, puzzles are easy to the point of being laughable. Although it's kinda annoying that you have to redo them when you replay the powered-up versions of the dungeons. While inside these dungeons you can find a few gateways that take you back to the Hub town, you can't save while inside a dungeon and inventory space is limited, so you might want to take a trip back in order to assess the new skills you found and maybe heal-up. I never died while playing the game, but it must blow to lose all your progress, so you might want to take the trip back to town.

 Grandia Xtreme is not a good game. It's the opposite of one. They overestimated how good their combat system was, so they thought it wouldn't hurt to coerce players into replaying the same dungeons a few times. It did. They also thought that they could do away with a plot, just contrast how atypical Ryudo was to how generic-walking-anime Evann is, if the entire game focused on fighting. They couldn't. As it stands, even while Grandia II is such a bad port... it's much easier to recommend over this misguided game.
 4.0 out of 10