When Grand Kingdom was first revealed last summer, the strangest inkling swept over me as if I knew about this exact game years prior to the announcement. A quick Google search of the developer Monochrome yielded an almost identically named American studio known for their PC survival-horror titles, which didn’t seem right given Grand Kingdom’s distinctly Japanese look and weekly exposure in Famitsu magazine. The remaining search results weren’t promising either, so under the radar Grand Kingdom flew for several months before it finally hit me: I had never seen this game before.
What I had seen all those years ago was a suspiciously similar-looking game called Grand Knights History from the folks at VanillaWare. It was a game I had long coveted in those waning days of the PSP, and you could imagine my excitement when Xseed announced plans to bring it westward in 2011. But by the time 2012 rolled around, the localization was dropped due to VanillaWare’s commitment to Dragon’s Crown which was eating up all the resources that would have otherwise gone towards the English conversion. Of course, western PSP owners were already all too familiar with the sharp sting of disappointment by 2012 given the portable’s anemic support outside of Japan, but the omission of Grand Knights History hit harder than most. Between Odin Sphere and Grim Grimoire, VanillaWare had a sterling reputation on Sony platforms, and a beautiful, new IP to take on the go sounded more and more tantalizing by the day. But alas, it wasn’t meant to be, and while the story of Grand Knights History ends there (an almost complete fan-translation exists, though!), it wasn’t the final chapter for the game’s director Tomohiko Deguchi.
As fate would have it, Grand Kingdom is the work of Deguchi and his new studio, and its uncanny resemblance to his VanillaWare swan song is no coincidence. Ostensibly, Deguchi felt the concepts laid out in Grand Knights History were still ripe with potential to build off of for another project. And so Grand Kingdom was conceived: A unique tactics RPG set against a world of watercolored fantasy that would closely resemble, but not imitate his directorial debut.
“Resemble” is the key word here. Grand Kingdom very much looks the part of its spiritual predecessor and the two are nearly indiscernible from one another at a passing glance. Artist Chizu Hashii lends her talents to character designs, doing her best to channel her inner George Kamitani while imbuing the cast with her own stylings and sensibilities. I can’t imagine anyone mistaking Deguchi’s latest for a VanillaWare product, though: the animation of characters and scenes are nowhere near on-par with a Dragon’s Crown or even the original PS2 Odin Sphere, and the designs themselves mostly feel derivative of other works. Medieval fantasy has been done a thousand times over, and it has certainly looked more inspired than it does here, but Grand Kingdom is no doubt easy on the eyes, even if there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about its aesthetic.
Beyond the visual themes and a returning Basiscape score, that’s about where the similarities between this game and its predecessor end. It may come as a surprise that Grand Kingdom doesn’t really play much like Grand Knights History, even though their gameplay is linked on an intrinsic level. The latter employed a classic turn-based system in which actions were sequentially queued up to be performed once each party member had committed to them. The catch was that the battlefield took place on a rectangular grid, upon which each action had a specified range of a few grid spaces, and units were more or less locked to formation. Functional, for sure, and there was plenty of strategizing involved to determine the right party members best equipped to handle each encounter, but its conventional design didn’t carry enough appeal to sustain an RPG that reduced its overworld and story elements to their barest essentials.
With Grand Kingdom, Deguchi and team went back to the drawing board in a big way. The combat has been reworked in its entirety, and owes a huge debt to the innovations pioneered by the BLiTZ battle system of Valkryia Chronicles fame. Each unit can freely move around the battlefield (which now consists of three long two-dimensional planes) until their stamina gauge depletes, and once positioned can choose to attack or defend. A unit’s actions are mapped to the four face buttons, each with their own unique conditions and properties. For example, an archer’s primary attack only fires at a tall arc that spans across three-quarters of the screen, but his Long Snipe ability allows him to shoot straight ahead, able to pierce through a target to cause residual damage to the unsuspecting goons that lie behind. Each and every action, across all 17 classes, feels thoughtfully designed to leverage a unit’s strengths in the heat of battle. Better yet, some actions even require a quick button input to land each hit, which adds an extra level of interactivity to an already kinetic battle system.
Arguably the neatest thing about Grand Kingdom is its online multiplayer component that pits players against one another in full-out war. By purchasing a war contract, players swear allegiance to one of four nations and represent them in battle against the other three until said contract expires. The other nations comprise of parties dispatched by other players, which must be defeated to seize territory for your employer. These missions, much like the campaign mode, are fashioned after board games where your party (fittingly represented by a game piece) must traverse an isometric grid of fortresses, ballistas, and other traps all while outsmarting adversaries in and out of combat. Surviving an onslaught of encounters while defending your strongholds is no small task and requires players to outfit their units for the long haul. Unsurprisingly, wars tend to be time sinks, often taking upwards of 45 minutes to over an hour to complete. And with no option to manually save your progress, this mode can prove trying for even the most resolute tacticians out there. Personally, more often than not, I preferred to dabble in the campaign missions with their tighter map designs, especially since they felt more respectful of my time clocking in around 20 to 30 minute per mission.
Here’s the thing about Grand Kingdom: I’m already well over a thousand words into this review and I still feel like there’s so much to say about the game. I’ve barely touched on classes, or talked about the whole team-building aspect where units can be customized from head to toe, or the story that, while wholly pedestrian, commendably provides a narrative reason and context for the game’s multiplayer mode. And yet, after all the time I’ve spent playing the game, I’m not sure I’ve wrapped my head around all the content Grand Kingdom has to offer, either. It’s the sort of RPG that, even with tutorials, is perfectly opaque when it comes to explaining where things are tucked in its sea of menus, or conveying that individual unit skills have effects inside AND outside of battle.
That said, Grand Kingdom, despite its obvious flaws, just might be a sleeper candidate for best SRPG in a year filled with Fire Emblems and XCOM sequels, simply because it attempts to take the genre somewhere new. Between its action-y take on tactics and its commitment to online multiplayer, I can’t help but appreciate Tomohiko Deguchi’s ambition to create a different kind of SRPG, and I would love to see his vision elaborated upon in a sequel, should one ever be made. Grand Kingdom is far from perfect, though, especially with its multitude of compromises; be it a paper-thin plot or character designs that are clearly just riding on the coattails of VanillaWare, rather attempting anything fresh or unique. In that sense, Grand Kingdom is a game that’s constantly at odds with itself: a dichotomy of inventive and recycled ideas that make up a perfectly enjoyable, albeit never quite engrossing experience that may have been great if it were only more well-rounded.
