Grandia 1 in Japanese is on my to-do list. One of my favorite RPGs!
Congrats on the completion, you caught up fast.
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Week 47
105 hours and 2318 screenshots later… it’s done.
What the hell was that twist… 
Honestly devastated and not on my lane at all. I am now so happy I managed to avoid spoilers and kept playing until reaching this point (almost an all-nighter yesterday). My Japanese reading endurance is now fully tapped…
Honestly my stomach turned and heart sank right here. Did NOT see this coming, even though I had some early suspicions about a hapless researcher dilly-dallying around the towers.
It turns out, regrettably, that I was right about the child soldier background for ヨシュア. But it was MUCH worse than I thought. Holy shit. And he seems to have been carrying that around for all these years – the professor only wiped some parts, it seems. Not wiping ロランス now suddenly makes some past scenes make sense.
(Small moment of levity sandwiched between two scenes of disaster. 蕾 is a cool kanji.)
I wish ヨシュア wasn’t so 中二 here, but of course he is… エステル has been there for him every step of the way, yet he can’t see it.
エステル honestly had an amazing reaction here. By now she truly knows him, and she always knew he was carrying some dark passenger around – she is completely ready to accept the murdering past and leave it at that.
I guess I was a supporter of this pairing from very early on, but NOT LIKE THIS. Feels so damn wrong…
ヨシュア is incredibly selfish and dumb here, going on his journey alone. エステル would have earnestly joined him in his quest for revenge. He really doesn’t deserve her. (カシウス is likewise a distrusting grade S moron, but I guess I have an easier time understanding that due to being a protective father who still hasn’t realized his girl is grown up now.)
Very early on I had the feeling that both of them are just hiding things from エステル and that she would eventually get hurt… yeah, that was pretty spot on, to a much greater degree than I ever thought.
That empty home in the ending scene really hurt.
Yeah, not a chance in hell that I’ll be able to wait until next September for the second remake… I guess I’ll have to figure out a way to create a PS Vita save for the first game with the choices I’d have made.
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I am seriously impressed with how much you managed to read in one sitting! Looking forward to seeing your thoughts in SC as well (no rush though)
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Thanks! 俺の絶対限界だったので… まあ、なんとかね。
I want to express a big THANK YOU to everyone else who played this game as part of the club. It was really pleasant to read your thoughts “live” as I was progressing through the game myself. Lots of very good analysis, lots of fun theories, just a lot of fun in general. I will surely join you in the SC club once I get my save situation sorted out!
After calming down a bit and collecting my overall thoughts, yeah, this game was extremely my thing. I wrote a brief review over at Backlogged, but I’m not sure it does this whole experience justice at all. Perhaps I’ll rewrite it after getting more sleep.
Already by the end of the prologue, I was certain I’d want to keep playing and bought all the PS Vita versions I could get my hands on… by the ending of this game, I’m more than sure. If this game is at all representative of the rest of the series, I’m going to have an extremely blessed 2026 ahead of me – although my sense of hurry only extends to SC right now.
We’ve been talking about remakes and remasters on these forums for a bit. I am a bit hesitant to comment on this, having only played some of the prologue on my PS Vita so far (just to test that the cart works), but I can already tell that this game has been an extremely faithful and lovingly made scene-for-scene remake – I’d set it as the golden standard for what a remake like this can do. The additions appear to be a couple of quests, omnipresent banter between the party while traveling from one place to another as the plot progresses, and some battle dialogue without corresponding text boxes.
I’m reasonably sure that these combined with the the expressive 3D graphics and the overall deep sense of familiarity in these scenes would work well for most fans, perhaps once the remake series is a bit further along. My screenshots are just light teasers for the complete package and do not convey fully how great it felt to play this game.
(The one big possible stumbling point is the almost completely changed voice cast. In my opinion the new cast works really well. It’s early yet but I’m sure I’ll grow to love the original voice cast as well.)
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I will say, I’ve only paid the briefest attention to 1st – I’m willing to believe it could be a nice remake and despite a few QoL reservations I expressed nothing has made me, like, write it off, I just care more about seeing the whole original series first. Given that, I want to ask you, how much is the real time combat used? I’m sure the turn based aspects have been tweaked in all kinds of ways so it’s not the same anyway, but since they added a whole separate type of gameplay which to my understanding can kind of flow into turn based combat, I’m curious how much in your experience the real time stuff was used for. For the record this is just idle curiosity, I’m not really attaching a value judgment at this stage to its presence. Often I feel like a lot of these RPGs struggle to integrate that kind of thing well or it just doesn’t play in a super engaging way I suppose, but I have no idea how this game does.
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It’s there purely for the mob fights. Every meaningful boss / quest fight is 100% turn-based. Even for mobs, I barely used it in the end — just enough to get advantage and then switch to turn-based (you can’t go back).
I think it’s there to speed up some parts of the game, when you’ve basically hit the limits of rubberband XP gains for your area and just want to move on. Avoiding mobs works as well.
Oh, I did use it for grinding my cooking ingredients.
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Yeah. That’s why when I read this from you below last week, I was like 
So, yeah, this applies even more now, and I felt the same.
Yes, I believe I said roughly the same 
not sure about the revenge part, I’m not sure she would be ok with killing people just for revenge, but definitely she would go with him and help him, and Yoshua is too blind and guilt-ridden to respect that.
That sounds almost impossible, technically, unless there’s a save manager for the Vita version, which I doubt.
But I think the decisions don’t have that much impact, maybe a few added lines of dialogue from NPCs for side quests you did. I might be wrong though. But I think you can just start SC from scratch without a big loss.
I just hope you’ll get used to the slow pace of one week per… week, haha.
I think I adapted to it fine though as I was also lagging behind playing FC when the club was already on SC.
Very glad to hear that, I also really enjoyed it, especially if it’s also setting up more good story things, as I repeatedly compared with Fellowship of the Ring.
I always find it heartwarming to see when people genuinely enjoy things (even if they have flaws), there is enough cynicism and critique in the world.
Also nice to see the remake does seem very well made, I definitely want to play it some time.
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