Saga of Tears Granstream Saga review for ToastyFrog Zine #6 (uncut version) Kirin There I stood, surveying the game box. "Hmm," I thought, "anime cut-scenes." That's when the Babbage's store clerk walked by. "You don't really want to buy that game," he remarked, and continued on his way. I thought he was just a clerk-monkey. I thought he didn't know what he was talking about. I thought maybe (horror of horrors) he just didn't like anime. I bought the game. Flash back to THQ headquarters a year earlier. "All right," the section chief decalred, "we need an RPG that will sell, and we need it now. Anyone got a brilliant idea?" An uncomfortable silence fell across the room. At last, a young employee from the marketing department spoke up. "Well, sir, It's come to my attention that there's a segment of the American video-game buying demographic known as 'otaku' who love all things related to Japanese animation. Since very little of it is released in the US right now, they're desperate for product and will buy almost anything. Have we got anything with animation from Japan?" "That'll never work," said a more senior pencil-pusher, "all anime games are done with 2D sprites, and Sony's US headquarters isn't approving anything that's not 3D for PlayStation right now." Another uncomfortable silence descended. "Hmm," another employee finally chimed in, "I did recently come across something Sony published in Japan that hasn't been published in the US yet. It was called Grand Stream Story or something like that. It had animated cut-scenes, but 3D in-game graphics. However..." The employee trailed off as the section chief raised an eyebrow, "Yes...?" "Well, sir, it's just not a very good game." "Ha!" the chief hissed, "didn't you hear what marketing just said? These... 'otaku'... will buy anything with Japanese animation, this game has it, and Sony should let us publish it. Grab it! Print it! Dismissed." And so it was that I, poor misguided otaku that I was, became the unfortunate owner of the wholly mediocre game known as Granstream Saga. Where to begin critiquing this travesty? Let's start with what turns almost everyone off to the game immediately: the in-game graphics. Never mind the simplistic models and dull textures on the environments, objects, and enemies - they're at least serviceable and hey, it was an early PSX game. No, the big problem is the character models. They have no faces. No, really. This feature alone has been known to scare family pets and squeamish gamers. What's more, an anime-style story-driven RPG depends heavily on conveying the emotions of the characters, and you just can't effectively emote with no face. 16-bit sprites from SNES games did much better on this front. Then there's the other graphics, the anime cut-scenes that suckered me into buying this game in the first place. The animation itself is just good enough to remind you how bad the rest of the visuals are - it gets the job done, but don't expect to see anything astonishingly beautiful or technically complex. The accompanying voice acting begins mediocre and gets progressively worse as emotions heighten towards the end of the game. But you can't entirely blame the actors, as the dialogue they're given is ludicrously stupid. Speaking of dialogue, there's some issues with the translation as well. In addition to failing to consistently edit their romanisation (Pixim/Pikshim, Ziruas/Jilluous, etc) the translators made some odd word choices. Usually, a glowing bracelet thingy is not called a "scepter", and what's clearly a humongous laser cannon is not called a "torpedo". But enough quibbling about frills and details... how's the gameplay? In essence, what we have here is a fairly uninspired traditional RPG core, with a couple potentially innovative additions that fall flat in the end. The first unusual addition is the "scepter" (i.e. glowy bracelet) you start the game with, which has the unique ability to restore and replicate items it touches. As you can probably guess, though, it's usefulness is quirkishly restricted to things that the game decides are useful and allowable[1]. A few times, it becomes useful in vaguely interesting "puzzles"; taking the sleeping guard's keys might wake him, but copying them won't. Usually, though, it's just a window-dressing gimmick. Instead of finding fantastic armor lying around, you find a lump of rusty metal which the scepter instantly restores into fantastic armor. Hooray! Next up we have the battle system: instead of turn-based party combat, we have one-on-one 3D battles. These might actually have been fun, if the control weren't so sluggish, and you ever did much besides blocking and counter-attacking. There's a magic system, but since MP doesn't recharge at inns and is obtained only by buying potions or as a rare monster drop, you'll never use it. There's a special attack system, but you hardly learn any of them until late in the game. Enemy balance is also a problem - you'll quickly tire of the constant block/counter strategy that will defeat any soldier in the game, but learn to fear the fast unblockable moves of lizardmen, or the constant long-range attacks and guarding of magicians. What's especially sad is that it seems as though the developers _sensed_ how tedious the game could become, and gave the players a built-in cheat of sorts. The game's ultimate weapon can be found by using a certain item at a certain location... and this can be done 5 minutes into the gameplay! This doesn't make combat quite instantaneous - all enemies have several life bars that can only be taken off one at a time - but it certainly helps move things along if you're so inclined. If you move things along all the way to the game's finale, you're faced with a supposedly gut-wrenching life-or-death decision. Unfortunately the increasingly horrible dialog and acting at this point makes it impossible to take seriously. But in the end, it doesn't matter much - since I'm pretty sure nobody who wasn't suckered into writing a review of this stinker will ever make it that far. [1]Hmm, I can make a copy of the "fake treasure" item, but I can't just copy this Gold Bar fifty times? What a shame.