Grandia 2 Hard Mode: Played this sporadically over less than a week, following along with the superb LP. Holy crap, it had been 13 years since I played this game. I had forgotten entire swaths of it. Like, if it hadn't been for Tide bringing it up every now and then, I might have entirely forgotten Ryudo's village even existed.
Plus side: The first disc of this game is really good. Like, really high quality writing and character interactions. It really surprised me since I had this lingering impression that it was really ham-handed. As it turns out, that impression wasn't entirely wrong, since the second half of the game is really fucking dumb, save for a few awesome parts (like Selene). It was a lot less tolerable than it was when I was a kid... But my overall impression of the game's plot, characters, and world is still pretty positive. There are some weird-ass plot twists at the -very- end, and WAAAAAAY too much overreliance on The Power of Friendship to fix things rather than making the characters work/be clever. But there's also some genuinely good character work going on, and I certainly can't fault it for being -boring-, which is far worse than being balls-to-the-wall batshit. (Seriously, I had completely forgotten that Granas and Valmar were apparently aliens? Or space-faring magical humans? Or... whatever the fuck?)
Voice-acting was still hit-or-miss, the graphics are -old-, but definitely hold up better than some of its contemporaries, and the music is amazing. I hesitate to say it, but I suspect that the really incredible music helped sell some of the cornier bits where it otherwise might have been too much to handle.
Gameplay-wise... it hasn't changed much! Due to the DL, I was much more familiar with how Grandia battle system works this time around, and the Hard Mode hack is really more like a "Normal Mode" for any other game. I'm perfectly okay with this, I like my games short and cutting down on challenge tends to make fights more about winning -efficiently- than merely -winning-. Still, it was a whole lot more fun fighting the bosses than I remembered from the Dreamcast days.
So yeah, here's my glowing review of an old game that I already had a good impression of. The reason it gets such a good review is because I've been playing and finishing a LOT of games recently, but despite having already beaten Grandia 2 in my lifetime, this is the first game this year where I beat the final boss and felt... sad it was over. It's been a while since that's happened, normally I'm all excited to start something new, so apparently Grandia 2 is doing something right, even if I can't point to any single thing that would elicit this reaction. I would guess nostalgia, but I've replayed quite a few games that I had much more fond memories of, like KH, Grandia 1, and FF7 that didn't give the same impression. They are still favorites, but not games that left me wanting more. Grandia 2 may actually improve its ratings score with me on replay, despite its objective flaws towards endgame (the Hard Mode hack objectively improves its gameplay flaws, at least!).
