Grandia

System: PS1 (also on PSN’s PSOne classics)
Language: English
Developer: Game Arts
Year: 1999

Despite complaining about it beforehand, I actually ended up enjoying the game after all. For the record I first reached the final dungeon at around 40 hours in, and while it was not a particularly long or difficult dungeon, I had so much fun grinding up the weapon and magic levels for each character. Once I realized what the game truly had to offer was right in front of me all this time, I came to like it quite a bit. Grinding up your magic levels to see what new skills you’d learn is fun, probably the same type of enjoyment I get out of catching and levelling Pokemon.

Tales of the Abyss needs a Moderate difficulty level

I’m doing normal encounters on hard and boss fights on normal because hard mode boss fights are really hard. I only managed Liger Queen on hard and that was because it’s the first boss. Hard mode bosses have a lot of HP and too much defense, not to mention dealing more damage to you. For most of the bosses on hard, I did 1 – 20 damage per hit, out of their 20K+ HP in total. I would be managing fine, until ally AI started dying left and right because they can’t back up/dodge for shit and healers run out of TP. Life bottles are expensive, and money is harder to come by.

The battles usually go like this: Do well at first, then after depleting 5-10k of boss HP, Guy/Jade/Anise (whoever I’m using at the time) dies. I attempt to revive, but they die again. Then either Tear or Natalia dies (I usually use both in one party), and I try to revive but they die again, repeat until I’m out of life bottles, and then either the other healer dies and I die soon after, or I die and I have to watch the healer heal herself while dealing 1 damage to the boss for a few minutes.

After switching to normal for bosses, they suddenly become piss easy and I can pretty much button mash all the way through and never use a life bottle. Talk about switching extremes. A moderate mode would have been really good, since normal is really easy so far. Might as well call the difficulties Easy and Hard instead of Normal and Hard.

I have no idea what titles do in this game since I don’t see any skills or stats associated with them, but maybe I’m just stupid and blind. And despite my complaints (because I can’t help but compare the battle system to Graces), I’m actually enjoying the game. At least my healers no longer run out of TP during normal battles. I’m liking action RPGs more and more with each one I play…

(On a side note, I’m also 30 hours into Grandia. I’m playing it when my 3DS runs out of batteries, and it hasn’t hooked me so far. It’s like the slowness of Trails in the Sky FC, minus the interesting character interactions, awesome dialogue, detailed world and NPCs, and the plot that eventually picks up and becomes interesting. In other words, not very good. I can’t help but think that if it received a localization close to the quality of XSeed it’d actually be interesting. Unfortunately the dialogue is really boring.)

Oh yeah, and I got 2 streetpasses on my 3DS in America–I mean, Strahta in the not-desert. Neat.