Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time was released in 2003 for the PS2 exclusively in Japan, in 2011 it received a PSP port, and in 2012 this game finally received a western release, and this is the version that I am played.
The game was made by Career Soft and published by Atlus, it's as you can imagine the 4th game in the Growlancer series, while I did play the EXTREMLY long 6 hour prologue of Growlanser 5, this is the first Growlanser game that I actually maneged to beat due to my stubbornness, while I don't think this is a bad game, I was left very disappointed with this game, many people said that this was one of the greatest SRPG of all time, and that it has an amazing story, but sadly I couldn't see it. on the in game clock time it says I spend 74 hours playing this game , tho a lot of the game I was using emulation speed up so it's probably much less.
As I said above the game is an SRPG, but it plays very different from your tipical Fire emblem or Final Fantasy tatics, the game has RTS, the game instead of having a tradinal moviment system, the game runs on real time and will pause everytime an charater does an action that isn't walking.
Outise of moving during battle you can Attack, it works like most JRPG, you attack with the character weapon to an enemy with no aditinal coast, in this game if you select an attack to a enemy, the character will walk to this enemy until the charter is in their range at which point that character will attack it until they die or until you give them another command.
Spell in which you can use magic, such as attack , healing or buff spells, magic in this game is very interesting because they have levels, most spells have levels 1 to 5 which affect how powerful it's going to be, they cost the same MP ammount to, so the draw back of using higher level magic is the ammount of time that takes to cast them, a level one 1 spell only takes 10 seconds to cast it, meanwhile a level 2 would take 22 seconds to cast it, because it would need to charge the spell to level 1 for 10 seconds and then charge it from level 1 to 2, which would take an adicinal 12 seconds, because of that as you imagine, using anything but level one spells is a waste of time , the increase in the ammount of damage delt isn't enought to justify the increase in the ammount of time to cast them, the only advantage in using them is when you want to use less MP, but MP isn't a issue on most maps anyway, another very usefull interesting thing about magic in this game is that you can use buff spell before battle, and because of that you can start most battle with your charters already buff, which is some battle can be life saving (Specially ones where enemies deal a lot of magic damage so using resitance buff before battle can be crutial.
Skill or as this game call them Knacks, they don't comsume MP but rather have a limted number of uses and will only replanish once you rest at an inn or at your own room, they can do a varity of thing, from attacking the enemy with a stronger attack or to making the character walking around the map faster (Dash my MVP in this game), they can make the difference in battle and in some battle can be essetial to win.
Items, as you can imagine is just to use items you found around the world or buy in stores, in my case I barely use it until the end of the game.
Defend is when you want your character to do nothing,
Lastly Equip , where you change equipament mid battle which I never did.
This battle system has some flaw that while aren't anything major, it gets me from time to time, like how character will sometimes get stuck in level Geomery wating precious time doing nothing, or how in some battle specially those with a lot of enemies mages and arches, will take foverever because of battle animations, thank god I played this game on an emulator because without it playing this game would be tedious.
Most infamous example of this is a battle where you have to cross this bridge in which there's about 8 enemy mages and the battle feels like a eternity because of the magic spam, with melee enemies this is less of a issue because they can only attack your characters at close range and their attack animations are much shorter.
Some misssion in this game are really annoying to deal with, as I will repeat later the majority of mission in this game are enjoyble if you have the right strategy, however there's a small minority of mission that pisses me off because of how annoying they can be, outside of the already mentioned bridge with mages, there's on mission where you have to make sure 2 character don't die and kill all enemies, sound simple enought right ?
Expect that those character are at the other side of a long map close to a lot of powerful enemies as if that wasn't bad enough, they can die really easily, specially because some enemies there have instant death spell, so sometimes you will die because of bad luck, and during the middle of the mission some enemies will apear in the worst place possible just to mess with you, I used save states during that mission , and I have no shame in saying that, I will say the same thing about the final boss where it spam a bunch of powerfulll and spongy enemies at me while you have to quickly kill part of monster before they regenerete, Still a miracle I manege to defeat it without rage quiting, or a mission where you have to stop a certain enemy from leaving the map expect that sometimes if you get close to it, it will do an attack that will push alway anything close to it, to make things worse, you can only deal significant demage to it for a short period of time after a slow moving character get close to and attack it.
before ending this segments of things I don't like about this game battle's system, I would like to mention that after every action a character takes , outside of using spells, the character will have a draw back time indicated by a yellow bar in the bottom of the screen where they won't be able to do anything , until the par is empty once more, there's nothing wrong with it of course without it character would be attacking infintly , my issue is that every time an charcter gets attacked by the enemy the bar will fill a little bit making the charcter unable to do anything for a short time after getting attack, the fight before the final boss will make your character unable to attack it, because they enemie won't let that bar get empty, but even during other missions this is annoying.
It's not all bad however as I said the majority of mission are fun to play, and make you create fun strategies on how to overcome them, this game has a reputation of being one of the hardest JRPG ever made, and while the mission I mention above makes me undertand that, I also know that a lot of the toughfer challanges of this game can be dealt with , using either simple solution like using a spell that make you temporaly immunie to other spells so that some enemies won't 2 shoot you in the begging of the battle or using the right equipment of the right map, or just making a good strategy overall, I love how this game give you bonus if you complet the map fast , it adds another layer of steategy and makes winning on time even more rewarding, overcoming the hard mission in this game can be rewarding if they are well made, but sadly not all missions on this game are like that.
Character progression on this game is pretty straight forward specially if you have played FF9, though the game makes a poor job of explaing it, so I will do it myself, every charter has a ring, this ring has a 3 different slot from gems, each slot has a colour , Green , red or yellow and a level, each slot can be equiped with a Gem , this gem has a level and colour that correspond with the slot, each gem has ability unique to it, like degresing the coast of MP, making a chacter immune to certain elemtal attack or increasing a certai stat on level up,they also have Spell, Knacks and Passive skils that will be learn when you equipe them in the right ring slot of a character.
This isn't a bad system expect that on the late game when you have to manege gazilion Gems and Rings, what makes the hassle worse that you don't even have a sort option to sort between gems, so if you are tying to equipe a red gem in a red Slot you still have to look at alll the gems of other colours with no option of only looking at red colour gems.
Outside of this system you can equpe different armor but that is a liner process where every amor is a slight improviment from the last.
The actual main plot line involving angles is also not very interesting, and I hate how the game made the angle these super powerfull beings, just to have underwelllming pay off, I also hate in how doing the character plot line of my favourite character in this game, I accidently dated his sister, instead of knowing more about him, it not all bad however but the cool moments are far and fewer between and I am not sure why I keep playing this game after the good moments, where long gone.
Maybe this would had fitted beter under the gameplay sections but that part is already too long as it's , but I hate how obtuse going to the next plot point in this game can be, sometimes I completed an mission and had no clue as to where I was supposed to go, only to find out that the next event was somewhere the game had gave me no clue about, or to unlock the next story flag I had to do a bunch of other stuff the game gave no clear indication that I was supposed to do, one time I spend 1 hour stuck because I didn't do a bunch of small stuff the game didn't told me about, but worse of all is when you have to stop whatever you are doing in the plot and rest in your HQ and hangout with your party members, only after hanging out with your party memebers for around 20 minutes you were allowed to progress the story.
On the PS2 era 2D games where very rarer to see, maybe that's even why this game didn't came out for the PS2 in the west instead being only released for the PSP where 2D game where more common, the pixel art of this game is pretty but nothing exptional , I would say even the PS1 Sukoden games had more expressional Sprits, The presentesion is here feels washed , Desaturated and muted the color pallet , specially when the art work of this game is much more colerfull, a lot of scenary that you visited is generic medival stuff not a very intersting game visually, I don't think it's all bad it not a eyesore, quite the opposive seeing 2D sprites like this on mid 2000's game is always cool, and it still pretty to look at, but when you analise it and compared to other games you will realize it's just too bland and has a hard time standing out when put side by side with other 2D JRPGs, being weaker compared to even some PS1 game like the aformention suikoden 2 but also Breath of Fire 4 and Final Fantasy tatics, the positve here is the animation, I am not anime reviewer so I can't rate their quality precisly but they were always a treat to see , outside of the ending cutcene that felt lifeless.
When I tried to look this game's OS on YT I coudln't find a playlist of it on youtube , at least the PSP version, there's a playlist with the PS2 OST but it's different from the PSP version, I am saying that because I belive that this is a indicator that not many people actually care about the music of this game outise of To the End of Sorrow, no doubts that this is the best music of this game OST, but the rest is generic JRPG medival music, it fits the game , but you won't remeber it after playing it.
Tecnially it's not a music but I genunily enjoy the sound effects that this game plays when you level up, recruit a new character to your party and Complet a mission, I wish there was a way to litsen to them outside of the game itself, but I coundl't find those sound on YT.
The game has mutiple endings depend on which characters likes you more and if you maneged to save certain character from death, there's some side quest here too , and stuff involving the small town you are responsible off, the game has even a New game plus option, it's clear to me that if you like this game, you will certainly have pleanty of insentive to go back to it in the future.
The game was made by Career Soft and published by Atlus, it's as you can imagine the 4th game in the Growlancer series, while I did play the EXTREMLY long 6 hour prologue of Growlanser 5, this is the first Growlanser game that I actually maneged to beat due to my stubbornness, while I don't think this is a bad game, I was left very disappointed with this game, many people said that this was one of the greatest SRPG of all time, and that it has an amazing story, but sadly I couldn't see it. on the in game clock time it says I spend 74 hours playing this game , tho a lot of the game I was using emulation speed up so it's probably much less.
Gameplay
As I said above the game is an SRPG, but it plays very different from your tipical Fire emblem or Final Fantasy tatics, the game has RTS, the game instead of having a tradinal moviment system, the game runs on real time and will pause everytime an charater does an action that isn't walking.
Outise of moving during battle you can Attack, it works like most JRPG, you attack with the character weapon to an enemy with no aditinal coast, in this game if you select an attack to a enemy, the character will walk to this enemy until the charter is in their range at which point that character will attack it until they die or until you give them another command.
Spell in which you can use magic, such as attack , healing or buff spells, magic in this game is very interesting because they have levels, most spells have levels 1 to 5 which affect how powerful it's going to be, they cost the same MP ammount to, so the draw back of using higher level magic is the ammount of time that takes to cast them, a level one 1 spell only takes 10 seconds to cast it, meanwhile a level 2 would take 22 seconds to cast it, because it would need to charge the spell to level 1 for 10 seconds and then charge it from level 1 to 2, which would take an adicinal 12 seconds, because of that as you imagine, using anything but level one spells is a waste of time , the increase in the ammount of damage delt isn't enought to justify the increase in the ammount of time to cast them, the only advantage in using them is when you want to use less MP, but MP isn't a issue on most maps anyway, another very usefull interesting thing about magic in this game is that you can use buff spell before battle, and because of that you can start most battle with your charters already buff, which is some battle can be life saving (Specially ones where enemies deal a lot of magic damage so using resitance buff before battle can be crutial.
Skill or as this game call them Knacks, they don't comsume MP but rather have a limted number of uses and will only replanish once you rest at an inn or at your own room, they can do a varity of thing, from attacking the enemy with a stronger attack or to making the character walking around the map faster (Dash my MVP in this game), they can make the difference in battle and in some battle can be essetial to win.
Items, as you can imagine is just to use items you found around the world or buy in stores, in my case I barely use it until the end of the game.
Defend is when you want your character to do nothing,
Lastly Equip , where you change equipament mid battle which I never did.
This battle system has some flaw that while aren't anything major, it gets me from time to time, like how character will sometimes get stuck in level Geomery wating precious time doing nothing, or how in some battle specially those with a lot of enemies mages and arches, will take foverever because of battle animations, thank god I played this game on an emulator because without it playing this game would be tedious.
Most infamous example of this is a battle where you have to cross this bridge in which there's about 8 enemy mages and the battle feels like a eternity because of the magic spam, with melee enemies this is less of a issue because they can only attack your characters at close range and their attack animations are much shorter.
Some misssion in this game are really annoying to deal with, as I will repeat later the majority of mission in this game are enjoyble if you have the right strategy, however there's a small minority of mission that pisses me off because of how annoying they can be, outside of the already mentioned bridge with mages, there's on mission where you have to make sure 2 character don't die and kill all enemies, sound simple enought right ?
Expect that those character are at the other side of a long map close to a lot of powerful enemies as if that wasn't bad enough, they can die really easily, specially because some enemies there have instant death spell, so sometimes you will die because of bad luck, and during the middle of the mission some enemies will apear in the worst place possible just to mess with you, I used save states during that mission , and I have no shame in saying that, I will say the same thing about the final boss where it spam a bunch of powerfulll and spongy enemies at me while you have to quickly kill part of monster before they regenerete, Still a miracle I manege to defeat it without rage quiting, or a mission where you have to stop a certain enemy from leaving the map expect that sometimes if you get close to it, it will do an attack that will push alway anything close to it, to make things worse, you can only deal significant demage to it for a short period of time after a slow moving character get close to and attack it.
before ending this segments of things I don't like about this game battle's system, I would like to mention that after every action a character takes , outside of using spells, the character will have a draw back time indicated by a yellow bar in the bottom of the screen where they won't be able to do anything , until the par is empty once more, there's nothing wrong with it of course without it character would be attacking infintly , my issue is that every time an charcter gets attacked by the enemy the bar will fill a little bit making the charcter unable to do anything for a short time after getting attack, the fight before the final boss will make your character unable to attack it, because they enemie won't let that bar get empty, but even during other missions this is annoying.
It's not all bad however as I said the majority of mission are fun to play, and make you create fun strategies on how to overcome them, this game has a reputation of being one of the hardest JRPG ever made, and while the mission I mention above makes me undertand that, I also know that a lot of the toughfer challanges of this game can be dealt with , using either simple solution like using a spell that make you temporaly immunie to other spells so that some enemies won't 2 shoot you in the begging of the battle or using the right equipment of the right map, or just making a good strategy overall, I love how this game give you bonus if you complet the map fast , it adds another layer of steategy and makes winning on time even more rewarding, overcoming the hard mission in this game can be rewarding if they are well made, but sadly not all missions on this game are like that.
Character progression on this game is pretty straight forward specially if you have played FF9, though the game makes a poor job of explaing it, so I will do it myself, every charter has a ring, this ring has a 3 different slot from gems, each slot has a colour , Green , red or yellow and a level, each slot can be equiped with a Gem , this gem has a level and colour that correspond with the slot, each gem has ability unique to it, like degresing the coast of MP, making a chacter immune to certain elemtal attack or increasing a certai stat on level up,they also have Spell, Knacks and Passive skils that will be learn when you equipe them in the right ring slot of a character.
This isn't a bad system expect that on the late game when you have to manege gazilion Gems and Rings, what makes the hassle worse that you don't even have a sort option to sort between gems, so if you are tying to equipe a red gem in a red Slot you still have to look at alll the gems of other colours with no option of only looking at red colour gems.
Outside of this system you can equpe different armor but that is a liner process where every amor is a slight improviment from the last.
Story
For year many years people in the JRPG comunity tried to convince me to play this game, saying that it had a great story, when I played it I belived them in the first few hours of this game, those moments where genuinely great, in a moment of it , almost made me emotinal , but after you gained your own plot of land the story goes down hill, the strong character moments from the begging , disapper from the middle and late game, most of them are behind side quest of locked behind the mutiple chacter endigns that you have to follow a guide to get, the mid to late game is just exploring the world to find some ruins, and sometimes fight in battle that are tangeciatial to a war that's happening in the background, the plot line involving the war are not very interesting in my opinion , it's just shady politcal/Military figure doing shady stuff to get more powerfull.The actual main plot line involving angles is also not very interesting, and I hate how the game made the angle these super powerfull beings, just to have underwelllming pay off, I also hate in how doing the character plot line of my favourite character in this game, I accidently dated his sister, instead of knowing more about him, it not all bad however but the cool moments are far and fewer between and I am not sure why I keep playing this game after the good moments, where long gone.
Maybe this would had fitted beter under the gameplay sections but that part is already too long as it's , but I hate how obtuse going to the next plot point in this game can be, sometimes I completed an mission and had no clue as to where I was supposed to go, only to find out that the next event was somewhere the game had gave me no clue about, or to unlock the next story flag I had to do a bunch of other stuff the game gave no clear indication that I was supposed to do, one time I spend 1 hour stuck because I didn't do a bunch of small stuff the game didn't told me about, but worse of all is when you have to stop whatever you are doing in the plot and rest in your HQ and hangout with your party members, only after hanging out with your party memebers for around 20 minutes you were allowed to progress the story.
Graphics
On the PS2 era 2D games where very rarer to see, maybe that's even why this game didn't came out for the PS2 in the west instead being only released for the PSP where 2D game where more common, the pixel art of this game is pretty but nothing exptional , I would say even the PS1 Sukoden games had more expressional Sprits, The presentesion is here feels washed , Desaturated and muted the color pallet , specially when the art work of this game is much more colerfull, a lot of scenary that you visited is generic medival stuff not a very intersting game visually, I don't think it's all bad it not a eyesore, quite the opposive seeing 2D sprites like this on mid 2000's game is always cool, and it still pretty to look at, but when you analise it and compared to other games you will realize it's just too bland and has a hard time standing out when put side by side with other 2D JRPGs, being weaker compared to even some PS1 game like the aformention suikoden 2 but also Breath of Fire 4 and Final Fantasy tatics, the positve here is the animation, I am not anime reviewer so I can't rate their quality precisly but they were always a treat to see , outside of the ending cutcene that felt lifeless.
Music
When I tried to look this game's OS on YT I coudln't find a playlist of it on youtube , at least the PSP version, there's a playlist with the PS2 OST but it's different from the PSP version, I am saying that because I belive that this is a indicator that not many people actually care about the music of this game outise of To the End of Sorrow, no doubts that this is the best music of this game OST, but the rest is generic JRPG medival music, it fits the game , but you won't remeber it after playing it.
Tecnially it's not a music but I genunily enjoy the sound effects that this game plays when you level up, recruit a new character to your party and Complet a mission, I wish there was a way to litsen to them outside of the game itself, but I coundl't find those sound on YT.
Replayability
The game has mutiple endings depend on which characters likes you more and if you maneged to save certain character from death, there's some side quest here too , and stuff involving the small town you are responsible off, the game has even a New game plus option, it's clear to me that if you like this game, you will certainly have pleanty of insentive to go back to it in the future.
Pros
- + Fun challenges
- + Good fundamentals
- + 2D Sprites
- + Anime Cuteness
- + Early game character focus story beats
Cons
- - Annoying Missions and slow battle animations
- - Bland graphics
- - Forgettable OST
- - Boring plot lines
- - Need a guide to see character development
8
Gameplay
I like the real time SRPG game play this game has, and sometimes that can be really fun, but it has some rough edges that really hurts to play with.
6
Graphics
While I do like 2D spirits, I have no doubts that this game is quite weak if you critically Analise it.
6
Story
If this game had maintained the level of quality it had for the first 10 hours it would be 10 but the other 30 hours of this game are a nothing burger, sadly
6
Sound
The game has 2 to 4 great songs in it's OST, the rest is just generic and not worth remembering.
I love the fan fare in this game however.
8
Replayability
If you like this game, there's plenty of good reason to comeback, even if you need a guide to access that content.
6.7
out of 10
Overall
I don't think it's a terrible game, my review was very rash but I think that's because I had much higher expectations of this game , and sadly they didn't meet with it.
. I have never been more appreciative of savestates. The real time strategy element was definitely a big part of what made the game fun and unique but as you pointed out there were also many flaws. I never quite finished the game because there were so many other games higher on my list but I would reccomend it to strategy game lovers looking for something a little different.
