HD ed.
saturn:
Man they have to fix that camera...sprites are jumping all over the place when it moves. And no shadows. Why is this so hard, GungHo?
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Grandia HD Collection coming soon UPDATE: RPGSite Hands on impressions and interview with GungHo, $39.99
- Thread starter Xavi
- Start date
Man they have to fix that camera...sprites are jumping all over the place when it moves. And no shadows. Why is this so hard, GungHo?
The shadow are per pixel vs blob shadows. It looks fine to me *shrug*.
HD ed.
saturn:
Is so sad how trash the "HD" version looks. I wish they only cared a little about this game to make a decent port .
Not sure if someone mentioned this already but the guy patching the English translation for Grandia on the Saturn, succeeded with the first beta. He made amazing progress, very very fast, and fixed lots of details on a daily basis. Impressive:
Translating Grandia
So I thought I'd snoop around in Grandia's files and do some comparing and contrasting with the US and JP PS1 releases to see how different they are. The thought process was to see if it would be possible to extract the English script out of the PS1 version, and possibly use that as a base to...
segaxtreme.net
Yep. Given the wet fart the HD ver's E3 showing turned out to be, this may end up being the best way to play the game unless HD changes significantly.
No option to disable smoothing In 1 kills the whole thing, you'd be better off just emulating it and that's a shame
Hmm. It really looks like just a resolution increase with a XBR filter on top...
Beta: Yes, best news in years.
Smoothing: I wouldn't count on it.
That smoothing looks......really bad. I say this as someone who doesn't know shit about smoothing and filtering. It just looks really really bad.
With an XBR texture filter? Pretty much 1:1 this.
Without it, much cleaner but still pixelated.
My only current excitement is that it probably will have far superior framerate.
Grandia 2 HD was at least a decent effort post a few patches. This though looks iffy. I will remain hopeful but considering current quality shown that hope will be in vein. :(
I will probably still buy it on sale just because but meh, this is disappointing.
I will probably still buy it on sale just because but meh, this is disappointing.
Yep or at least have an option not to. This is disappointing, not sure why they didn't use the Saturm version.
I'm in for Grandia 2 though so hopefully that's better
It'd probably be impossible to access the Saturn source code at this point.
Honestly if you are going to the effort and time to remaster a 2d game the sprites should be redone, especially here as the backgrounds are 3D so there isn't even that much work to do
Am I wrong to think these devs really need to figure out Saturn emulation 100% at some point? To much good stuff is there that it shouldn't be ignored, for preservation sake, as well as find a wider audience. I'm willing to bet there could be a market for really well emulated Sega Saturn games on console. (Common M2)
I dunno-- I like it. The updgraded framerate is a HUGE upgrade and I don't mind the sprite work as much as everybody else.
It's kind of weird, frame rate looks better walking around the map in the HD ver. but when the battles start and you're transported to the field it kind of looks choppy. Maybe it's a camera scroll issue?
The voice acting is laughably bad at times, but the translation is honestly one of the better RPG translations of that era. It blows anything released by Squaresoft on the PS1 out of the water.
I would have loved to see what Working Designs would have done with it though. People make fun of them for the anachronistic jokes, but they did fewer of those as time progressed and they always did solid work (and long before most everyone else was viewing localizations as a priority).
I think my biggest gripe with this whole endeavor is that they had the opportunity to do something great. Yet, what they are making is mediocre garbage. Is very sad to watch tbh.
No one needs to figure it out. SSF and Mednafen are great. Mednafen is open source so it should be easy to create one with that as a guide. Even if they don't want to, Ryphecha has already licensed it to Polymega, so I'm sure she would do it again.
SSF is closed source (and less cpu intensive), but it's again all the work of one person so could probably license that too unless Shima is just not interested.
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Unfortunately they almost never released their games in EU so I'm actually glad they didn't translate Grandia. This way I could play it.
As to this port, I think it looks fine, probably will check it out when it releases.
The camera was always a little choppy when entering and in the very beginning of battles (at least on the Ps1 version). That would be a nice bonus if they could smooth it out
I agree they could have done better. I would love a hard mode. The digital museum would be a cool add-on. Obviously as much of the Saturn effects/translation as possible. I guess overall I am just happy to be able to play it on a modern console that will look decent on a big screen.
Honestly this port is just a mistake.
The textures were originally clearly done on a pixel per pixel basis, they shouldn't be smudged out like that. Or at least they should offer graphical options.
But really the most disappointing thing is that they're using the PS1 version. Look at the difference in detail in the battle backdrops.
This port is nothing but a missed opportunity.
Sega of Europe had originally announced a localization of the Saturn version in early 1998 btw. It ended up getting canceled along with a few other releases they were planning (X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, Resident Evil 2, Dead or Alive, the rest of Shining Force III, etc) due to Bernie Stolar convincing Japanese management to prematurely sunset Saturn in the west. Sad to think what could've been, SOE only ended up squeezing out Deep Fear and Wipeout 2097 since they were far enough along (while SOA passed on both).
PS1 Square had some amazing localization like Chrono Cross where they absolutely nailed a different personality for all the characters.
I'll admit I'm not much of a Chrono Cross fan so I don't remember much about its localization quality. But most of the Squaresoft PS1 RPGs I remember range from adequate (Xenogears, FF9) to poor (FF7, the Parasite Eve games).
In any case, although I'd love a new, higher quality localization, the current Grandia 1 localization is above average.
Not sure what Square you are talking about. At best their localization was mediocre during the PS1 era. Some of their localizations led to some hilariously bad dialogue. It was part of their charm. :P
Legend of Mana and Threads of Fate were pretty up there too for the time.
This port is nothing but a missed opportunity.
I know beggars can't be choosers...but...
I love pixels as much as anyone, but the smoothing looks pretty good here. On the characters, at least. The environments don't transition quite as well -- low-fidelity 3D done right has infinite charm -- but that font and the battle backgrounds are the biggest snags to me. I couldn't tell you if the missing environmental shadows and overly harsh contrast are native Playstation aspects of the game this far out from originally playing it, but it would've been nice if they could get those things over from the Saturn version being compared.
But really the most disappointing thing is that they're using the PS1 version. Look at the difference in detail in the battle backdrops.
This port is nothing but a missed opportunity.
The characters don't fit the background properly, Justin almost looks like he's floating in mid-air.
