Brigandine: Grand Edition = essentially an upgraded Forsena
Edit: EPSXE emulator, despite not being developed since 2016 performs significantly better. WTH?! Sound effects are better and music is noticeably more beautiful with P.E.Op.S. Sound Audio Driver v.10, as I already noticed many years ago with Final Fantasy PSX Rebirth.. Also Blade's excellent gpuBladeSoft 1.64 plugin also works way better than Duckstations software renderer, for example the sky is reflected in the water and Fullscreen to window switch is instant as if it would be in Borderless Fullscreen. While with Duckstation HW renderers I get an ugly white line on left/bottom window edge in fullscreen and the software renderer is uglier too.. (
Anyway, managing the game in the Organization Phase is way easier in Duckstation, so I'll do monster management there. While transferring the savegames to EPSXE I'll play the battles there as the graphics + sound + music is awesome!
WOW!! What a difference a 6 years old abandoned emulator does make!
Superb amazing Anime cutscenes with fantastic art direction drawn beautifully and sporting the best Japanese voice narration quality!!
Congratulations to the Subtitle Team!
I always wonder at how excellently the Japanese do their anime narration in lot of highest quality products. All anime and games anime-cutscenes should be done with Japanese voices and English subtitles only: I consider that the highest peak of theatrical art ever created for Asian games. (If the Chinese would do games more frequently, I would prefer sublime Cantonese voice actors with English subtitles as it sounds way-waay superior to Mandarin.. But I guess it depends on narrator theatrical voice skill)
PROS:
Nice parts of Brigandine / Forsena Grand Edition:
+ Landscape is beautiful. Cities and mountains even better looking than Runersia's hand-painted landscape! Animated castle flags lead over Runersia.
+ Summoning with 'infinite mana + Turbo Mode + Duckstation Emulator hotkeys' is fun!
+ More monsters and more colorful upgrade opportunities - by reading the Walkthrough
+ Anime cutscenes are bombastic!
+ Cursor speed can be increased from Game--Options
CONS:
Everything else..
Summoning is best fun:
The most fun I found in this game were the mass summoning of monsters. In the excellent Duckstation emulator. I put Autofire function on
left SHIFT, turned on TURBO mode and just pressed
left SHIFT for 10 seconds and I summoned ~ 110 monsters in that time, filling the max. 140 creatures combat roster in record time!
Just like in my previous
description of cheat-summoning only Mana Miracle (elite) monsters in amazing Runersia, this way I could filter from the 100+ summoned monsters the best dozen, and even from that best dozen I selected the very best one or two to be included into my army!
Actually I was disappointed how everyone is praising Forsena/Grand Edition and there is only 6 monster places in one knights army???! One Steam negative reviewer couldn't stop blasting Runersia, compared to how good and original Forsena was.. Well.. where is that exceptional gameplay goodness now? I've yet to find it in Grand Edition!
So the process is similar to the one in Runersia, except in Grand Edition the TURBO mode + AutoFire button allows me to NOT HAVE to press the summon key like 100 times at all. Very convenient and spares my keyboard!
So in the first round organization phase I summoned at least a 1000 monsters, using the 'frozen max mana'-cheat as well.
Duckstation Emulator has a sublime easy way to edit and activate cheats!! This way I built up an army filled with best elite 1st LVL monsters, leaving the high level [non-elite] veterans to be sacrificed - dramatically I hoped - later in battles.
But unfortunately here is - after only the 1st round - where the FUN - where is the FUN?? - in Forsena/Grand Edition ends...
Why?
Well.. the development team had - they were called Hearty Robin - mixed skill levels.. They had people with weak skills regards spell particle effects / explosions. Lame. Excepting the animated flags, which look amazing and they even lower / stop animating the flag, when there is no knight in the castle. The first SUMMON effect was a tell-tale sign, as it was done at a lame low level already..
Music:
Well, the music is ugly and annoying as hell.. in the Duckstation emulator and beautiful in EPSXE.
DD In Duckstation I usually turn it off in organization phase and in combat I wish it could be turned off entirely. Runersia's music on Steam is magnitudes better - if short & repetitive - and at least there - Unity Engine - I'll be able to expand the soundtrack exponentially just as I did in amazing Sanctus Reach, there I made the soundtrack 7x the size from EPIC Warhammer games!!
Combat:
1. Surprisingly low-quality, boring and lame "particle" spell effects, accompany ugly battle sounds. Creatures don't have screams??? WTH? WHY??
2. The animated sprites are just okay quality. Changing to top-down view increases clarity a bit, but looks disillusioning and weak. Runersia has excellent 3D battlefield realization compared to the mess of the "isometric" normal combat view of Grand Edition. Surprisingly confusing.. as lots of people praise Forsena/Grand Edition.. why??
Grand Edition combat is thankfully devoid of those ugly 3D trainwreck Forsena animations, which 3D models aged horribly. They say there was some death sounds to the enemy knights, but I yet have to kill an enemy knight in Grand Edition to check out if knights have nice death screams. I won't try Forsena just for that.
Quests:
Grand Edition and maybe Forsena's quest story system is surprisingly inane. I mean kindergarten level or just badly translated? Also the city 3D-->2D backgrounds have mediocre art direction, look out of place. So do not look at all like any fantasy background art of expert studio make..
I have yet to win my first battle, but in hardest = "King" mode one enemy knight already fled with his bunch of monsters.. ??! Why?.....
Edit: Finally loading the savegame in EPSXE I managed to beat one Knight before he could flee. He had no death scream..
Whatever.. In Duckstation emulator I'm surprised how bad & weak Grand Edition is combat-wise compared to amazing Runersia. EPSXE combat is better.
Just to compare the combat: the sprites and their animations and spell effects are Olympus-level Sublime in
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together.
Compared to that Forsena/Grand Edition sprites are just mediocre. Clearly the Anime movie team was entirely separate from the development team as none of their greatness shows in the 2D-sprites...
I'm thinking of going back to Runersia Steam as even
Final Fantasy Tactics PSX Rebirth was better with its way over-complicated job and idiot zodiac signs system than this drab & grey and UnFun™©℗® Forsena/Grand Edition.
But I'm holding out for a while for something fun to appear in this game combat-campaign-wise.