Collection essentials #304: Grandia (Saturn)

Developer Game Arts had already seen success with their two Lunar games, JRPGs on the Sega CD, which both received remakes on the Sega Saturn in Japan (which I won’t be covering here). But not content to just have one successful JRPG series, they sought to start another this console generation with Grandia. And what a game they made.

Grandia is one of my favorite video games of all-time, not just one of my favorites of the genre. However, this post here is going to be pretty brief, because this isn’t the version that I played through. This release of Grandia on the Sega Saturn is the original version of the game that launched first, but when it came out at the end of 1997 in Japan, the Saturn was almost completely dead overseas by that point, and would have been even more so by the time they could have finished an English localization. So this original version of Grandia stayed exclusive to Japan, but thankfully a port of it to a competing console got a worldwide release which I will be covering in a future post.

Why pay any mind to the original Japanese Saturn release of Grandia? There is actually a reason which I’ll talk about more in my next post (stay tuned!). And, actually, this version received a fan translation patch not very long ago, so it can be played in English, and I may do so at some point. There are some (admittedly minor) compromises in the port that most English-speaking gamers were familiar with. You could argue it’s the best way to experience the game in modern times.

You may also notice there’s two discs here, as this is the first game I’ve covered where this is the case. Discs were fairly limited in how much space they could hold back then, and for big games like RPGs, they developer often had to include multiple discs to fit everything; typically, in a multi-disc game, once you progress to the end of one disc, you are asked to save and then prompted to insert the next disc, which you’ll be using from that point forward. This isn’t something you really see anymore since discs can hold far more space than they used to, and developers can just have gamers download additional data from the internet onto their console hard drive if required.

I look forward to gushing about how great Grandia is in the future, but this small post is going to have to be it for now. All that’s really important to know is that if you have any affinity for JRPGs at all, you have to play it, period. Take my word for it.