Lunar Threads

Price for the collection is going to be $39.99 and digital only. I’m hoping that if sales go well for this collection they might actually give the Lunar games the same treatment. <3 One can hope anyway!

Anyone remember Grandia? If so is this a title you think you will pick up?

I picked the collection up. It has been a long time since I played Grandia, so I figured that having it on portable was worth the price of admission.

So far, it has been a giddy experience. I forgot how much I liked the writing and humor in this game.

I was pretty excited until I heard that the ports weren't good. Have you noticed anything?

After about 12 hours, I've noticed a few things in Grandia that may give pause if you have high expectations.

1. Occasionally music or sounds will glitch when transitioning to a battle or (especially) a boss. It self-corrects after a moment, and isn't an issue afterward.
2. Widescreen is mostly very convenient, especially for dungeon navigation. During a few cutscenes, the widescreen allows me to see little heads or sprites peeking out where they would have been completely out of sight in the original. I find it more fascinating than anything.
3. Widescreen with the anime cutscenes is cheated with a border that reproduces a certain amount of the cutscene and makes it fuzzy. If I don't pay attention to it, it looks widescreen, and for landscape panoramas (which Grandia is full of) it looks good. Otherwise, I can imagine it being distracting.
4. The filtering seems basic. Characters look smoothed out and less grainy; backgrounds look mostly sharp. It looks about the equivalent of playing Phantasy Star IV with the built-in filters in the Sega Genesis Collection - better in most ways, with a couple of quirks here or there. (There was a poster in a military base that looked anatomically odd.)
5. Once I froze on the loading screen and had to reset. It has never frozen while playing.

As a player who is fairly forgiving of technical details, none of this has harmed my enjoyment of the game. The most vocal complaints I've encountered have been from people who regularly emulate and have very high standards of both what goes into a remaster and what price said remaster is sold at. Personally, I wanted it to (a) work, (b) have language options, (c) look at least a bit better, and (d) have fast forward. I got (a), (b), and (c), so I'm pretty happy.

I picked it up the day it came out and have been obsessively playing since. XD I finished Grandia last week, and am now working on II. Forgot how awesome the games were.

I hope this leads to them making a nice HD version of both LUNARS for the PSX.

ShugoHanasaki wrote:I hope this leads to them making a nice HD version of both LUNARS for the PSX.

YES PLEASE.

It wouldn't be that difficult either. They already kind of HD'd a bunch of things for the Touch version.