Collection essentials #436: Grandia: Parallel Trippers (GBC)

Grandia on the PlayStation is one of my favorite RPGs all-time, as I explained in its own post.

Game Arts saw fit to make a handheld spinoff RPG for fans of the original, releasing three years later. In this game, you play as a Japanese kid named Yuuhi, who gets whisked away with a couple of his friends to the world of Grandia. Naturally he wants to find his way home, and various characters from the original Grandia help him out on his quest.

This game very much feels like something made specifically for fans of the original game. This is evident by the fact that you can recruit a large number of characters from that game, including many that were not among the playable characters at all. There’s sort of a “catch ‘em all” appeal here, as players are encouraged to try and find a way to get every possible party member to join. This isn’t too surprising since Pokémon games were all the rage at this time. Most of the music consists of remixed tunes from the original game’s soundtrack, and obviously they don’t sound anywhere near as good, but you couldn’t expect any different from a Game Boy Color game.

Outside of battle, the game features dungeons, and your character has the ability to jump and manipulate certain objects. When coming face-to-face with an enemy, turn-based battles ensue, which are somewhat reminiscent of the original Grandia but a little different. The developers opted not to try and reproduce the original battle system exactly, which likely would have been challenging given the weak hardware. Fights are now done with a first-person view, with an action gauge and character sprites that indicate who gets a turn to act next. It’s possible to cancel enemy attacks like in the previous game if you’re able to figure out the timing of when actions will be carried out and choose your attacks accordingly. Cards are now thrown into the mix and are the main way you execute actions, as characters can use a variety of cards which represent a certain weapon, attack, spell, item, and so forth. And some cards can be combo’d together to execute special moves, which sometimes depict pixel art of characters from the original game. Figuring out each enemy’s weakness is a major key to victory.

I first took interest in Grandia: Parallel Trippers when I was playing through the original, around the start of the year 2005. I found out about it by seeing it in the search results when searching for Grandia on gamefaqs.com. It was a bit of a mysterious game, as there wasn’t a lot of info about it at the time on the English parts of the internet. Thanks to the game’s Gamefaqs message board, I met my now-longtime friend Mr. Fwibbles who is a huge Grandia fan and therefore had an interest in Parallel Trippers. Chatting with him about it got me more interested in trying the game for myself. I wanted to own it, but it was elusive, as back then obscure Japanese games like that very rarely turned up on eBay. After a couple months of searching, though, a listing for the game did pop up, and I happily snagged it, and thus I obtained the copy of the game you see in the photo. I played through the game in Japanese and enjoyed it despite not understanding all the dialogue. And, actually, my friend Mr. Fwibbles several years later let a team to produce an English translation patch for it which is now available. And…I actually haven’t tried it out yet!

Parallel Trippers isn’t a game that’s going to set the world on fire, but it’s definitely amusing for fans of the original like me. I think I’ll probably revisit it the next time I replay Grandia at some point. For being a spinoff of one of my all-time favorites, as well as being a game that literally started an enduring friendship of mine, Granda: Parallel Trippers qualifies as a collection essential.