Your name is Slayn. Or that is what you are called. You have woken up in a strange house and can't seem to remember you anything. It seems that a young princess named Annette found you on a beach. You suddenly find out that you are stuck in the middle of a war between 2 other federations. You learn that the sun is disappearing and the land is slowly being consumed by darkness, no crops will grow and that the land is being struck with starvation and must find a new place to live. You have been assigned by the King to help her daughter Annette to save the land, but in doing so you will uncover whom you really are.
Graphics/Voice Over/ Sound
GrowLanser isn't graphically astounding; you are a cross between a 2-d character and a 3-D character. Although it sounds bad it works out really good on how the plays out. All the characters are 3-D in battle along with all the scenery, but when you're wandering the map you are rather 2-Dish and everything else around you. The voice over work is good and has some of the most intelligent dialogue I have ever heard. Cut scenes though don't offer more than an image of the character that is talking slapped on the screen with the lips moving to the words. I mean there are some little CG clips here and there, but they just look funny when all of sudden a face thrown out at you in the direct middle of the screen during the middle of a cut scene. GrowLanser also sound good. The voices are crystal clear and some of the battle effects and sounds sound and look cool.
Ability/ Battle System
The ability system in GrowLanser is not like any other I have seen in many RPGs before. The leveling up part of the game works the same like all RPGs (if you don't know how it works now than you haven't played many RPGs). But when you level up get ability points, which you then use to learn from a nice little array of abilities. You fill up each ability with the right amount of ability point blocks and you now have learned that ability. As you level up to the higher levels more ability point blocks are rewarded to you, making the ability to learn abilities much easier and quicker. Now lets talk about the battle system, the battle system is rather easy to learn. In the beginning of a battle you tell your party which enemies to attack, then your character attacks that enemy until its dead.
Then you tell him to attack another enemy until its dead. You don't do it alone you can have a good amount of your friends on the battle field to help you out (I had about 5), making the battles a little quicker. Another thing you can do is move your character. When you select the move option in the battle window you place cursors where that character will stop and proceed to the next location that you placed. The only problem is when your moving around is your vulnerable to attacks, you walk by an enemy and they attack you until your dead. Your character may attack back but will just move on until his destination is reached. Finally the magic that can be cast takes a little bit of time. When you want to cast a magic attack you have to wait, while you wait, you are more vulnerable to attacks making you a lot weaker. Allowing enemies to take advantage of this situation and dismantling you in a matter of seconds. This applies a good hint of strategy to the battle.
Game play
This game is very fun and addictive. You move your character Slayn and his party across the large map of the country your trying to save. As you move across the map you are forced into random battles to level up. Oh boy do you level up you level up fast. In fact you are encouraged to level up, because if you don't the game will repeatedly kick your ass at some points. Actually I do have to say that it is fun to level up, battling is just fun and if you don't your kind of screwed.
Well the mission starts of simple enough there are about 5 or 6 enemies and you quickly dispose of about 2 of them before another 4 come out of the fort. Now confused by how fast you are outnumbered, and suddenly realize that you cant protect that one guy and the endless stream of bad guys is well endless. I had to kill about 40 bad guys before I could actually complete the mission, and by then I had triggered an aneurysm. But the missions are arranged nicely into different scenarios making the game nor boring or repetitive. In between missions later in the game, when you work with the king you can rest at your apartment. This is very cool because you can talk with your party members, take them out to eat and build a relationship with them. But depending on the order you talk to them they can begin to not like you. Another cool thing is that your character really has no dialogue; it's more like dots. So you the player are given phrases to choose from depending on the situation what to say. This is cool because you can say mean things to your party members when they ask you questions affecting their relationship with you later in the game. Also when the dialogue box comes up and you choose what you want to say you'll notice some of the options of what to say cant be chosen because they are gray and faded. So when you replay the game you are given those options of words making some replay value and for some different reactions.
Finally the final two things, one is the map. Your character moves very fast across the map in fact he sprints and it looks funny. But it takes very little time to get to one place so it's not tedious to back track. But this game probably has the worst dungeon lay out ever. Not saying there are a lot of them, they are just random and stupid. Yes you are given a map of the dungeon on the screen but that is as useless as steroids for crochet players, it just plain stupid. You will get lost and will wander around until a random set of stairs appears to bring to the next level of the dungeon or cave where you will do the same. But there are little dungeons and caves so this wont be that much of an issue. Now finally the story, I have to talk about the story really quick (because this review is so long, Im sorry) the story is incredible I think. The story has very many twists and turns that will keep the story interesting. It is very deep and requires you to listen or read the dialogue to realize whats going on.
screwed. There are missions you go on that progress the story and the missions are hard. Some will make your mind ache with frustration and will make you say words that dont even exist. Like one mission that requires you to set a fort on fire so a wagon of supplies can get through with no harm, all in the while protecting one member form your party so he can cast a wind spell to spread the fire.
Overall
This is a great RPG, that probably no one has heard of. This game has gat dialogue and has swears and is rather intelligent. You are given a decent amount of freedom, like start relationships with your party members. But the graphics in this game are a little dated and people may not like it. Also the random dungeons are stupid and will frustrate you quickly in hope of finding a way out or waiting for that random sat of stairs out. But overall this game is fun and has a very good story that will keep the game interesting to the end.
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