The series staple theme of death and resurrection is also very present, especially toward the end of the game. Granstream takes after Illusion of Gaia in this sense, and also in the fact that many of the characters die over the course of the game. There’s a lot of emotional events that make you care about the characters much more than in your average RPG. While Granstream Saga‘s story is rooted in conventional RPG cliches, it takes a lot of atypical twists and turns and the relationships between the characters is very advanced and interesting to watch. He plays the exact same role as Chester from Ys III. Slayzer betrayed the Desbats under mysterious circumstances and joined the remnants of the Imperial Wizardry in search of the orbs. Laramee’s brother, once the captain of the Desbats. After hitching a ride with some sky pirates, Eon’s adventure to save the continents begins. He sends him on a mission to rescue a captive girl named Arcia, who is solely capable of restoring power to the orbs which control the floating mechanisms of the continents. Eon’s father sees this power and feels that he may be the key to saving the sinking continents. One day, Eon and his father explore an ancient ruin, and Eon’s latent powers are suddenly activated via the use of an artifact called The Orb, which was found with Eon when he was a baby. Without them, the mechanisms keeping the continents airborne is weakening, and they’re slowly sinking toward the ocean.Įnter Eon, a young man living on the continent of Shilf with his foster father. But now, 100 years later, the wise men’s descendants have disappeared. The wise men left this mechanism in the care of their descendants. This caused the polar ice caps to melt and flood the entire world.īefore the world could be swallowed by the sea, four wise men created a mechanism that would allow four of the planet’s continents to float, evading the calamity below. However, there was a severe miscalculation, and the weapon caused the planet’s axis to shift. Then, the Imperial Wizardry employed a special weapon that could be fired into the core of the planet, causing geological disasters in enemy territory and destroying them from the very core of their infrastructure. The battle was at a stalemate that lasted for quite some time, with neither side gaining the advantage. 100 years or so before the story begins, a great war was waged between the Allied Spirit Army (the good guys) and the Imperial Wizardry (the bad guys). Granstream, much like its ancestors, begins with a world that’s been mostly destroyed. Surprisingly, GamePro, of all publications, seems to have been the only publication that actually spent a significant amount of time with the game, and gave it a 5/5 score, praising its cinematics, its highly entertaining combat system, and its well developed story and characters.
Even all time classics like Final Fantasy Tactics and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, while generally reviewing well, still got marked down for “old” looking visuals. Any game that looked pretty generally got higher scores, and ugly ones didn’t.
At the time, critics were most prominently concerned with graphics. Between the lack of Quintet’s brand and the label of a company that was becoming synonymous with crap, Granstream Saga didn’t fare well at all and is not considered part of the Soul Blazer series by most fans despite its obvious spiritual links to the previous three games.Īside from coming to the plate with two strikes against it already, The Granstream Saga is a very good game that wasn’t accepted very well by critics because of its weak presentation. In America, Granstream was published by Toy Headquarters (THQ), which was more known for N64 wrestling games and the much-loathed Quest 64. In Japan, it was a highly anticipated title that debuted at #1, successfully bumping Final Fantasy VII off the top spot where it had been for months.
In essence, Shade is the successor to Quintet. Shade was Kouji Yokota’s own development studio, consisting of some of the same staff who made ActRaiser, Robotrek and the Soul Blazer games. No longer under Enix’s reign, the game was published in Japan by Sony and developed by a house known as Shade. In hindsight, this was a wise decision for most developers, but it didn’t really make much of a difference for Quintet, who would soon be dropping off the face of the planet and Enix merging with Square to become one of the largest Japanese publishers ever known.īefore Quintet finally kicked the bucket, they squeezed out a very much ignored final chapter to their loosely knit Soul Blazer franchise. A new dawn for gaming was looming overhead and certain developers foresaw that Nintendo might not be the king for much longer, and saw the massive amount of potential in Sony’s new console. This was a quite common occurrence during this transitional period from the 16-bit era to the 32-bit era. Shortly after Terranigma, Quintet and Enix went their separate ways.
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