Grandia / YMMV - TV Tropes

Anti-Climax Boss: After the tough fights against Baal's last form and the Gaia Core, Gaia's second form is a total pushover as it only attacks the party with low-level spells like Snooze and can be easily bested with normal attacks. Of course, given the hell that the previous two boss fights feel like, it's like a breather after the real challenge, so it isn't that big a deal.
Awesome Music:
- The soundtrack of the game is full of great music, but especially Theme of Grandia. Just listen to this.
- The Edge of the World easily rivals the Theme of Grandia in awesomeness.
- "Duel With Gadwin", which plays when Gadwin tests out Justin's strength for real.
- Approaching Crisis, the theme mainly associated with Gaia. The first half is used in events associated with it such as the invasion at Zil Padon and when fighting the Gaia Battlers, and the second half is used as part of the Final Boss theme.
- Farewell to Sue is Tear Jerker in music form, which is played when Sue has to part ways with Justin as she can't continue with him.
- Any of the standard battle themes, but especially the third one, which replaces the first two in Disc 2.
- Four Volley Rounds of Tension is a mixture of four separate tracks, the first one being an event theme, the second being the battle theme for the Garlyle Forces, the third one being the game's main boss battle theme and the fourth one being used when Justin and Feena are about to get launched in a catapult.
- The Final Boss theme is unique in that it's not its own track, but a mixture of several existing tracks in the game, including Gaia's theme Approaching Crisis, which serves as the main basis for the track.
Game-Breaker:
- The ultimate attacks of Justin, Feena, and Rapp (Heaven and Earth Cut, End of the World, and Neo Demon Ball, respectively), ESPECIALLY when used all at once.
- Justin is a one-man army full of incredibly powerful special moves, has access to the best equipment, can make himself invincible, amazing stats, and a wide variety of magic only surpassed by Feena and Liete. All for the small price of using axes (which grant strength and HP boosts) and maces (which grant HP and defense boosts). His Dragon Cut is also not only a very powerful attack that hits all enemies, but it makes training his weapons, Fire and Earth magic a breeze.
- Although Sue doesn't remain in your group for long, you can have some fun with her! Give her Fire and Earth ASAP, and learn her "Fight!" Cheer (it is the only Fire+Earth+Mace skill she has). Spam this over and over and over again (since the skill is used on allies and not enemies, it always skills up the same amount, and isn't subject to diminishing returns like offensive skills are) to end up with a Sue that can one-shot nearly anything. Since "Fight!" Cheer levels Fire, Earth, and Mace skills, she gets all of the stat bonuses from that, plus the added attack power of having a ridiculously high weapon skill. Also, her Defense and HP will be so high, that nothing will actually be capable of KOing her until she leaves your party.^note
Narm: Plenty of the attack shouts, especially Justin's "Alright you guys, this is it! WAUAUGH!" In fact, most of the English voice acting counts due to its generally poor quality, especially when compared to the Japanese voice acting. This might be the reason why the next games had much better English acting.
Nightmare Fuel: Abandoned Laine Village. We get a taste of what Gaia can do with the Petrified Forest and the Tower of Doom, but once the party walks into the Abandoned Laine Village, they learn what Gaia is really capable of. The entire place no longer resembles a something that should even exist. The space of the area itself has become warped, with doors leading to different locations in the area entirely through what are essentially portals. The petrified bodies of those who weren't able to escape before Gaia arrived are encased in floating, spinning crystals that are eternally suspended above a dark void.
- And Gaia itself.
Once Original, Now Common: Before Grandia, most RPGs were mainly text-focused with very few having voice acting and a notable presentation. This alongside Game Art's prior work on Lunar: The Silver Star both thoroughly recreated the anime style and vibe that many games of the era had attempted to produce, and had a variety of voice acted scenes (fully dubbed, albeit cheesy, to boot) all throughout. For 1997, this was super novel, which is a major point of the game's legacy. By today's standards, the turn of the millennium had everyone following suit in the genre, and now you can't go five feet without tripping over yet another anime RPG title.
Porting Disaster: The Switch (and presumably PC) version. Most sprites (except for the ones they missed) are put through a Super Eagle-esque filter, backgrounds are filtered with bilinear, and Nearest Neighbor is used for shadows. Because these assets are filtered individually and at the source, not only are some of them untouched (creating inconsistency) but there is also no option to disable the filter. The port boasts widescreen support, but it's simply forced by cutting off the bottom and the top of the original 4:3 resolution, meaning there's less of an image present. Despite claiming to use the Saturn version as a base, the backgrounds, lack of extras, and the fact the Japanese audio option is based on an incomplete and broken fan patch for the Playstation version (as indicated by containing the same errors, switching back to English in battle, and the last third of the game having almost entirely English voice acting) strongly suggest this is not the case. Numerous sound effects during gameplay (e.g. battle) and on the UI are missing, as well.
Sampled Up: "Wrapped in Black" from Sonic Rush's soundtrack is better known than the Laine Village music. Try to find a video upload of Laine Village's music that doesn't have mentions of Sonic Rush or Malcolm X (who is also sampled in that track).
Suspiciously Similar Song: The third battle theme has some similarities with "Rupert's Travels", an instrumental track by the British rock band Gun.
That One Boss:
- Pakon’s bodyguard Chang, especially if you’ve been relying on Feena up to that point.
- Nana, Saki, and Mio are easy when alone, but when together they're quite a challenge.
- The Ruin Guard, who has three parts: a boomerang, whose IP fills up extremely quickly (as in, it can sometimes attack twice in a row before anyone else can act) and pushes back one of your characters back on the IP gauge, delaying their next turn; an ax that deals heavy damage in an area; and the body, which can either cast ZAP! (the least of your worries) or Vanish, wasting any buffs you might have cast to protect yourself from the ax's attacks. Even if you were sailing through the game easily, this boss might stop you for a while.
- The first fight with General Baal if Justin is underleveled and underprepared. Since there’s no way to go back and grind, either, it can be incredibly frustrating to watch Justin die over and over as you try and get some hits in.
Values Dissonance: Lily hitting Justin on the head with a tray is treated like a slapstick-y moment in-game. Most modern audiences would definitely consider this abuse. It doesn't help that Sue jokes about the possibility of Justin sustaining brain damage from said abuse when now even most contact sports from wrestling to football view concussions very seriously.
Viewer Gender Confusion: Justin in the promotional art can be easily mistaken for a girl.

YMMV / Grandia

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