Grand Kingdom (PS4 SRPG) - I want this to be good, but it's probably garbage

[Ebonsword]

I don't own a PS4 yet, but if there's one thing that would get me to buy one, it would be a good SRPG.

Grand Kingdom is an upcoming title I stumbled upon recently. It claims to be a SRPG, but I dunno about that. It looks more like someone took Guardian Heroes and made a turn-based game out of it.




What does the Codex think?

 

[vonAchdorf]

Lol, a Fedora wearing hero.

The "arenas" look a bit small for an SRPG, it's more like a standard turn based battle system.

 

[Siveon]

The game is basically a clone of Japan-only (but Fan translated) SRPG Grand Knights for the PSP, but without the Vanilliaware flair. If you want to see how the game might play out, I suggest trying it out. The battles do play more like a regular JRPG, but it does have western strategy elements like an odd board game styled map and a focus on multiplayer (referring to the PSP game).

I haven't heard much about this game itself, but I suspect it won't be that different. Also it's for Vita but who cares amirite.

Spoiler

 

[Courtier]

It's as Siveon says. I played Grand Knights History a while ago until around level 50, and going by the vid this seems to have expanded on the gameplay. I'm down for getting this one on the Vita.

GKH was basically a defunct online (servers dead) turn-based game with a basic singleplayer story mode. Its good points were good character creation, map events, fantastic music/art and tactical combat based on positioning and action points, the bad part was that everything roughly scaled to your level and while there was a story with cutscenes, it was not fleshed out very well at all and served as a tutorial for the online war game. This might be a story-oriented campaign that adds what GKH lacked. I'll miss the VW art though

 

[Siveon]

They have a decent environment art, but oof, the character designer just can't compete with the glory of Vanillaware. I do like that America can experience a similar kind of experience that Grand Knights History provided. I would play it, but I'm not much of a pvp guy and my Vita is rarely connected to the internet.

Hope the single player is better.

 

[Abu Antar]

I have played a little bit more of the beta and I generally enjoy it. I haven't dabbled in the online part whatsoever. I also hope that the SP campaign is meaty enough.

 

[duanth123]

Released. Load times are a bit long on the Vita.

 

[Siveon]

After playing the demo, I'm still worried the single player may be lacking. Not a fan of MP on a portable console.

 

[Ebonsword]

Destructoid has a review up. Sounds a little bit better than I thought it might be, but not good enough to seduce me into getting a PS4 just to play it.

It really didn't take that long for everything to start wearing a bit thin. The shallow pool of enemies became too repetitive before I had finished the first campaign. This lack of variety had me zoning out, simply completing play sessions on muscle memory and not any sort of strategy. I admit I could use a break from the game and its frequent load screens, but I do see myself coming back to it from time to time to contribute to the war effort.

https://www.destructoid.com/review-grand-kingdom-377582.phtml

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

Released. Load times are a bit long on the Vita.

The guy playing that doesn't seem very bright.

 

[e-mailio estevez]

Load times are a serious problem on the Vita. Load times and redundant battle animations. They don't seem too bad at first, but the little delays at the beginning of every turn start to add up. There's even a load screen when you go into the party menu. It starts to make the game really unenjoyable after awhile.

The entire game's meta revolves around going into wars with high mobility / high DPS groups and facerolling encounters as quickly as possible. If everything's not dead by the first turn then waiting through siege armament animations and enemy turns can double or triple the amount of time an encounter. That's not to say that there's no strategy at all, because the encounters you face in the War mode are teams other players have setup and assigned AI routines to. I really like the concept of setting up encounters for other people to fight, but most teams you'll encounter are just thrown together in seconds or are using their underlevelled troops. The game is really a faceroll with long load times and gets stale p. quickly.

 

[Ebonsword]

...the encounters you face in the War mode are teams other players have setup and assigned AI routines to. I really like the concept of setting up encounters for other people to fight, but most teams you'll encounter are just thrown together in seconds or are using their underlevelled troops. The game is really a faceroll with long load times and gets stale p. quickly.

That does sound like a pretty cool concept. Although I suspect, even if it had been implemented better, people would just end up looking online to see what the best setup for their units is and soon most folks would be using the same thing.

 

[Hyperion]

I think this game would actually be better if it weren't turn-based. I've been dying for something to fill the void since Guardian Heroes. Even Dragon's Crown couldn't do it.

 

[Higher Animal]

PS4 SRPG:

 

[Ebonsword]

PS4 SRPG:

Have you played it? I seem to recall that it didn't exactly get glowing reviews.

Not that bad reviews actually mean a game is bad. Critics panned Operation: Darkness, but I thought it was fantastic.

 

[Hyperion]

The game's difficulty was punishing, with poor tutorials. That's -3 / 10 from most major reviewers right there. Personally, I just found it very bland in all aspects. I also got bored and stopped after like 7 or 8 missions or so, maybe it picks up sometime after that. It didn't seem terribly difficult either if you thought about your moves ahead of time and properly used the mechanics the game teaches you.

Certainly enemies, even early in the game, will force you to restart by one-shotting someone simply through RNG. Modern gamers despise RNG, because it prevents their OCD brain from being able to negate all challenging aspects from their experience before it begins.

Graphically, the game certainly looks like it was made for the PSVita. Animations are pretty shitty and sluggish, as to be expected from a budget title. Voice acting is on par with your average Star Ocean release. Character customization is there, don't recall it being too extensive, or pitifully bad.

Most places rated the game 3 - 4 / 10. It's not great, but 5.5 - 6 / 10 is probably more realistic and fair.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Didn't like the shit "board game" aesthetics of the maps you travel through. Maybe I'm a vapid cunt but that put me off from the game, not that the gameplay looked that much better either. Modern board games have better aesthetics than this game does.

 

[Ebonsword]

I bought a PS4 earlier this year, and bought Grand Kingdom shortly thereafter.

I had a lot of trouble getting into it, for some reason. I'd play it for an hour or so at a time, but it didn't really grab my attention so I moved on to other things.

This weekend, though, I was in the mood for a SRPG so I thought I'd give it another try. Unfortunately, same thing--I'd play it for an hour here and there, but it I kept putting it down to do other things.

But, this time, I kept at it. And now I'm really loving the game (played six hours straight after getting home from work yesterday, LOL).

I think part of the problem is that the game's systems work a bit differently from many other games, and it hits you with *all* of them in a very short period of time. So, there's a lot to get your head around. Once you start to understand how all of the pieces interact, though, it starts to get a lot more fun.

There's a good variety of classes, and since all units are randomly generated, it gives you a lot of incentive to keep going back to the recruitment office and look for that perfect unit to add to your team.

There's a not a huge variety of enemies (seemingly), but the game does do a good job of at least mixing them up in different ways (fighting a team of all blacksmiths is *very* different from fighting a team composed of a blacksmith, a fighter, a couple of witches, and a dragon mage). The game also keeps tossing in different environmental effects (like disabling blocking, speeding up enemy actions, putting in various traps and barricades between your team and your opponents) that contribute to combat variety.

I wasn't sure I would like the partly turn-based, partly real-time combat, but it's definitely fun. I've seen some folks claim that it keeps you more engaged than a purely turn-based would, and there may be some merit to that.

 

[Villagkouras]

This one is free this month, for those who are subscribed to PS+. Definitely gonna try it.

 

[Hobo Elf]

This one is free this month, for those who are subscribed to PS+. Definitely gonna try it.

Nice. I subbed to PS+ for MonHun World and grabbed Dude Sex. This is a game I always wanted to play so getting it for free now is pretty cool.