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A New Look at Grandia 2
New
in-game images, and some comparisons to part 1 grace our latest
update.
January 24, 2000
It
has begun. The year of the Dreamcast RPG, that is. Sega has already
revealed loads of details on its own Eternal Arcadia, and we
expect full details on Phantasy Star Online to appear either
at the upcoming Tokyo Game Show, or at E3 two months later. With the
original Grandia having sold its (unfortunately short) course
both in Japan and America, Gamearts has joined in on the party, and
we're now seeing the first set of details and images of Grandia
2 since the company first revealed the teaser shots back before
the Dreamcast even launched in Japan.
The recent issue of Famitsu, Japan's most popular gaming
magazine, contains a four page spread on the game. We shared with
you the details from the article, and a few pictures, but today, we
have even more pictures. In addition to being some brilliant in-game
shots, these show off some of the things we can expect now that the
master developers at Gamearts have a powerful next generation system
in their creative hands.
Check out the viewing distance in this shot! The towns
in part 2, at least this town, are far more expansive than what we
saw of part 1. In part 1, when the game was forced to show too much
of a town, the framerate suffered a noticable drop into the sub-20
range. Will Grandia 2 suffer a similar fate? We're going to
guess NO! This is what the DC was made for, afterall!
This interior bar shot (which we shared with you over
the weekend) shows the action from a low angle, something that works
far better now that the characters are polygonal. In part 1,
Gamearts occasionally tried to do strange things to the camera, but
the sprites ended up becoming arrays of giant pixels, resulting in a
somewhat ugly effect (although, when in the heat of an incredible
gaming moment, few complained).
A dungeon scene from the game. The dungeons in
Grandia 2 were massive, multi-floored monsters. Other shots,
shown below, reveal that, once again, you can see the enemies ahead
of time again, so the battles aren't random in the Final Fantasy
VII sense of the word.
A battle scene from the game. The battles in
Grandia 2 featured a camera that stayed fixed above the
combatants, zooming in and out, and scrolling to and fro where
appropriate. Now that everything is fully polygonal, we expect some
dramatic camera angles for magic.
Of the two shots below, one is conceptual artwork, the
other is an actual in-game scene. It's pretty obvious which one is
which, but boy are the two close!
Of course, one of the advantages of using
real-time CG for in-game imagery as opposed to hand-drawn or
pre-rendered backdrops is that the developers, and the player, can
manipulate the camera. Here, the camera swoops around for another
view of Granas Church, one of the central areas in the game, and
workplace of Elena.
Be sure and check out the below links for larger, more expansive
versions of the above shots, and more!
-- Anoop Gantayat,
IGNDC
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