Game:

The Granstream Saga (1997)

Duration: 0:00

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Originally recorded: March 3, 2022
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In this session, I tackled the game's second dungeon. Seems kind of fitting, after all. Second stream, second dungeon. At this rate, it'll probably just take me three weeks to finish the game... and that's on my regular schedule. So that's pretty good. I had a gut feeling that this would the longest game I streamed out of my main assortment this year, but that might've been a miscalculation on my part. Either way, it's been a blast so far.

I managed to get my hands on the third (and final) weapon type at the end of my last stream, so I decided to test it out. The battleaxe deals some pretty significant damage, but its slow start-up and the lack of combo potential made it clear that it wasn't worth relying on when I came face-to-...eyes? with a Mimic. Fortunately, it didn't take me too long to get my hands on an even better sword. The way this game handles power-ups is interesting though. It's almost like the game doesn't want you to engage in unnecessary combat. You find items lying around to extend your "life points", your level (and by extension, HP) goes up upon completing various story beats in-game, new spells and melee attacks are found by collecting new weapons. It just strikes me as weird that the game would disincentivize combat so much... when it's so fun.

The traditional subject matter that was present in Quintet's other action-RPGs finally began to "rear its ugly head" at this point in the game. Likewise, while the cult narrative in Aquas was a bit cliche, the fact that they positioned it as a conflict between mother and son was a nice twist. But my favorite story beat in this entire section was the return of Gandor, complete with a wall crush that would make Dogi proud. We joke about how Soul Blazer was essentially Quintet's efforts to make a worthwhile Ys game on the Super Nintendo, but the fact that Falcom seemed to go throughout the entirety of the fifth console generation without making a new Ys game makes me wonder if The Granstream Saga was supposed to be an attempt to fill that niche. Granstream Saga has way too much in common with Ys for this to be a coincidence...

One last fun fact before I part: did you know that The Granstream Saga was apparently one of the first "fully-3D" RPGs ever made? No pre-rendered backgrounds like the Final Fantasy games or nothing. It kind of feels like the fact that the shops and churches generally being rendered as menu-based 2D setpieces should take away from that designation... but I'm still digging this game's vibe regardless.