Grand Kingdom is a JRPG for the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4. It has a wonderful graphical style, focusing on 2D with gorgeous colors and animation. It looks great and sucks you in right from the get go. The game is about a band of mercenaries participating in a war within the kingdom, and it’s basically just an excuse for all the battles. The story is told in a visual novel style with portraits of the characters speaking. Surprisingly, the whole game has English voiceovers, so it doesn’t feel like a quick and cheap localisation. There is still the option of Japanese voiceovers if you prefer those.
The gameplay is tough. The game has a sort of tactical style to it when exploring the map, as you move around in a simplified grid-based layout where you can sight and avoid or engage enemies, environmental traps and treasures lying around. When you engage an enemy, it transitions to the separate battle screen and the battle system is actually quite unique. Unfortunately, there are some questionable choices with the controls that makes it harder to grasp than it should be, and it doesn’t help that the tutorial is not that great.
Each battle has three lines that characters and enemies stand on. It is turn based and when it is your characters turn, you can move in a certain range depending on that character. Once you are close enough to an enemy, you can then attack by pressing one of the face buttons, which each correspond to a different skill. Depending on the skill that you chose, you can then attack as many times as the character’s gauge allows. Sounds simple enough, but what makes this annoying is that the attacks are mapped to the Square, Triangle and Circle button. The X button is used to cancel and end the character’s turn, so when you have been using X to confirm for everything else in the game, and you’ll accidentally end a character’s turn more than a few times.
The other flaw in the tutorial for the combat system is how you’re just thrown into a battle to try and make sense of it. So the range of each character is different, and each attack they have are different. Some attacks have unlimited uses while other can only be used a certain number of times in each level. Perhaps most painful is that it is possible for friendly fire. Yes, you now have to contend your attacks accidentally hitting your own party, and this isn’t fun when you cannot gauge the range of your attacks until you have used it a few times and get used to it. Even worse is that throwing items can be blocked by someone too close to you, so it hits them instead of the actual target, which isn’t helped when the arc of the line previewing where it hits does not make this obvious.
The flow of battles feels jittery and that you’re forced to put up with the slow pacing. Since it’s not fully turn-based or action, you have this weird moment of waiting for all the enemies’ turns and watching their attack animations, which can be frustrating. You can speed things up, only the enemy’s movement speed (and you have to do this for every battle since it defaults to off, which is annoying). It’s not game-breaking but it can be a major annoyance especially when everything else has loading screens as well, so you’d just want to move to the destination. It doesn’t help that the game forces you to fight many many battles, so it all feels really repetitive.
And finally to round out the clunky feel of the game are the loading screens. There is a loading screen every time you go in and out of battle, which is… okay to a degree. More unforgivable are the loading screens when you go into the party menu to adjust, when you go into the shop menu to buy things or just going in and backing out of what you thought was a simple menu. These loading screens are each a few seconds long and they do add up and ruins the flow of the game.
On the more positive side, the game allows a decent amount of customization. There are numerous classes to select from. Leaning into the mercenaries theme, you hire to recruit your own four-character party, determining their classes yourself. Every time they level up, you decide which of their stats you pour additional points into. You decide on their appearances, and what skills to equip. It can be overwhelming at the start when you’re not sure of what everything is and what they do.
The story is weak. You play as the leader of a mercenary group who joins the war efforts within the Guild. There are a few named characters that will cover the bulk of the story since the player is basically a silent protagonist that doesn’t even have an avatar. It’s a slow story that doesn’t have a good build up and doesn’t have a good climax. It’s forgettable and the only good thing are the character designs, thanks to the nice aesthetics of the game. The story can be summed up as mercenary group battles their way through the war, gaining prestige, eventually facing off against the big bad who had summoned beasts. The four beasts are ultimate killed and the world is saved.
To be honest, the story itself doesn’t take too long, there are only 12 quests. What makes it take around 15 hours to complete is that you are forced to grind up levels in the optional quests, otherwise you’ll run the real risk of reaching the story quest’s final boss, only for a difficulty spike to hit and you fail the quest, resulting in repeating the whole thing again. There is no instant retry of the final battle so it wastes a lot of time. It’s yet another frustrating element of the game, and feels like a really cheap design element.
One thing the game doesn’t lack is the amount of content. Since the English release included all the DLC that the Japanese version had to pay extra for, there are an additional four stories, leading to another 36 story missions. Unfortunately, there is nothing new in terms of gameplay. Perhaps the salt in the wound is that you finish the story at around level 30, and these additional stories range from 30 to 60 for their very first quest, so it’s off to extra grinding if you want to see them through. No thanks, neither the gameplay or the story is good enough to be worth spending that much time on mindless grinding and sitting through the tedious animations.
If you do decide to play through the DLC, it will really start to grate on you and show off how shallow the gameplay is. The stories for the DLCs are actually better than the main game’s but you get so little for the number of battles you have to do. Battles become a massive chore, you cannot avoid some battles, and then in others, they’ll have annoying aspects like traps or fast enemies or long animations or other frustrating gimmicks that add nothing to the game but wasting more of the player’s time. The quests start to drag and get longer for no reason, maps are bigger and there are more enemies and traps on the map. It gets to the point of being fairly disrespectful and makes you dislike the game.
Overall, Grand Kingdom had a really strong start but soon plateaus and becomes a mediocre game. One thing to note is that the online element has since been retired and this is actually a fairly substantial component of the game. You’re locked out of several things, which may make the grind a bit less. So on a purely offline single player experience, the game is way too grindy to be fun. Grinding is not inherently bad, but when the game is so one-dimensional that you have seen everything the game has to offer within the first few hours, but has content that forces you to play for over 60 hours, that’s when it crosses the line and is just too tedious to fully complete.
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