Granado Espada
The Enhance Approves: Worth Trying.
note: Rating Scale-
- Better to Read a Book (Disapprove. eg. MapleStory)
- Only if you have Lots of Free Time (Disapprove.)
- It’s OK
- Worth Trying
- Must Try
- Worth Playing/Buying
- Definitely Worth Buying (eg. Guild Wars)
Quick Review:
Granado Espada’s unique system gives you control over 3 characters at once. The result is, as a friend puts it, a very RTS-like experience where you are controlling customizable hero characters. To help you in controlling 3 characters at a time, there are a few commands that will be your good friends throughout the game:
- patrol mode: your characters attack whatever comes close
- hold mode: similar to patrol except your characters do not move to engage in combat
- assault mode: your classic RTS attack-move command
- harvest mode: your characters get greedy and pick up everything along the way
These make controlling your 3 characters at once a lot easier, but one thing that still bothers me is that if you don’t tell them to do anything or are in harvest mode, they’ll gladly take a beating until they are dead. Also, you can opt to either control them individually or entirely as a team. Separate hotkeys and shortcut icons for each of the character’s skills makes executing skills and spells a breeze, without you having to select a character before you can use his skills.
GE isn’t all about killing stuff and leveling up, which is a big factor for me. It features a rather clever quest system, where quests aren’t just simply “kill 128367 of Blah”, and in addition each has a reasonable back-story plus sometimes tie-up with other quests. A minimum level requirement also gives you a sense of order as to which quests to do first. Finally, at the start of each area “Hunt Quests” are issued, where you get rewarded for killing x number of certain monsters in the area, giving you some sense of a target while you are doing your grinding.
GE also features an extensive world with beautifully crafted maps, and each map has a general guideline telling you what level range the map is suited for. This helps you know where you should go next, and when it is time to move on, so that you don’t waste time trying to find a suitable place to level up or staying in the same old boring place for too long.
Instead of just buffing all your characters to the max, GE’s skill system is broken up into different “stances”, where which stance you use is determined by what you have equipped. Stances are, simply put, a subset of your character’s class – each stance can be leveled up separately and give access to different skills. This adds to the tactical side of Grando Espada, making things slightly more interesting.
With the new “trinity” concept, good quest system and a beautiful world to play through, GE is definitely a game worth trying. Let’s just hope you make it through the 3+ gb download.
Note: there is still a lot more to the game (eg. forming factions, having colony wars or something) that I have yet to experience, as I just started a few days ago.
