Analysis of Grandia HD Collection, another remaster for the drawer

Grandia HD Collection arrives on Xbox ONE and PS4 consoles five years after its release on Switch and PC.

Grandia HD Collection has finally appeared on Xbox One and Ps4. The title launched in 2019 on Nintendo Switch and PC only took 5 years to arrive on other platforms, but has it evolved during all that time?

To start Grandia HD Collection fails in his name. Firstly because the title “collection” is too broad for a game which only includes Grandia 1 and 2, when we are dealing with a saga which has up to 7 titles between RPG games, spin-offs and online experiences . We are missing at least Grandia 3, which would be a complete collection with all the “mother” RPGs of the saga, as well as the rotation–offs: Great: Digital Museum, Parallel trippers o Xtreme.

We are short of equipment

Leaving aside the parsimony of this collector’s edition, we’re facing another issue shared between Grandia HD Collection and many of the latest remasters we’ve tested. And these titles are good, they have good graphics for their time, engaging stories, good music and fun turn-based gameplay, if you like JRPG Since old school, clear. But of course, it’s 2024 and what worked well before may not work well now.

So if you liked the originals, you’ll probably enjoy these Grandi, however, Is this the best way to update them? Clearly not for several reasons. Firstly because this Grandia HD Collection It does not bring anything new compared to the basic titles, they are simple ports to current consoles, which hundreds of pirate emulators circulating on the Internet do in a more optimized, better way… and of course a lot less expensive.

Furthermore, it is a shame that this title which has translations to hundreds of fan-made languages, still include the same core languages ​​as the game from 30 years ago. Spanish is therefore still lacking. This, coupled with the fact that games keep crashing randomly, left us deeply disappointed.

History

As for the story, Grandia 1 and 2 remain faithful to the original story, colorful and less dark stories than the other contemporaries, with Justin as the protagonist in Grandia 1 and Ryudo in Grandia 2. Stories that do not need of retouching or anything similar because they Already in their time, they worked well and were very complete.

Visual section

Let’s get to the real problems with this version. And unfortunately, when a port is done without love, attention to detail is minimal. It is true that certain bugs have been corrected concerning the edition of 2019 of To changebut there are still some visual errors.

To begin with, in some areas the game doesn’t hold fps well and this can be seen in the screenshots. Neither does the blur filter

It doesn’t look good at all and although the game has increased its resolution, it looks quite blurry. In Grandia 2the characters have been sharpened so much that they almost seem to be made of a different material than the backgrounds and they clash visually a lot, it looks like a pretty crude copy and paste.

In some areas, half the screen is blurry and the other half is sharp, making the overall image look horrible. The colors seem overly saturated, which doesn’t help either. The new shadows added to Grandia 2 would be awesome if they had bothered to reprogram the game to take advantage of them, so they crash a lot during gameplay. In general, the combat lighting effects are a disaster.

Music and sound

There are some pretty noticeable sound issues, the audio, voices and music are sometimes out of sync with the visual effects, resulting in a horrible experience. This error is often repeated, especially in Grandia 2. The music stops abruptly during scenes and other music immediately starts playing, with no fade in/out or smoothness. The music doesn’t even loop when exploring towns, dungeons, or combat, but rather turns off and starts again in an unnatural way.

The bone sounds and the music They raise or lower the volume randomly while you play, the voices are still only in English and Japanese… as we pointed out there is no work on this aspect and they have not taken the It’s hard to subtitle all the Japanese voices, so you still don’t know what the characters are saying (unless you speak Japanese) in certain phases of the story.

Gameplay

Grandia’s gameplay is and was good. Even back then, the mix of classic turn-based RPG moments with real-time actions, so as not to be monotonous, had the effect of a bomb. However, this is something we’ve seen a lot of already and if you don’t like these types of titles, this remaster is not for you.

Compared to the originals, some loading times of Grandia HD Collection are faster, but others are slower. Hard mode is a nice addition (even if it’s only available in Grandia 2). There are almost no configuration options to change the way you play or improve the experience, which for a modern port only shows negligence in its adaptation.

conclusion

Grandia HD Collection This could have been a great compilation of a legendary saga in the world of video games. However, this remaster carried everything good and bad about the original title. Many bugs from the original game are still not fixed, like in the Switch version.

This is a remaster based on the PlayStation version, itself based on a Sega Saturn port which already posed technical problems at the time. 1999. So, if we count correctly, we’re looking at a port to Xbox, which comes from a Switch port, which comes from a port of PSXwhich was already bad door from Sega Saturn. So few things could go right.

We can only think that Grandia HD Collection It’s a way to squeeze the player and raise money using the user’s nostalgia as the main argument. Even if you’ve never played it and like classic RPGs, Grandia HD Collection This would be a very good option, yes, at half its original price.