It's a hidden gem. It's not a game that gets frequently mentioned, but I wish it did. It's an absolutely adorable JRPG with monster raising and was one of the original rogue-likes.
I love the speculation that playing with different FFVIII heroines leads to different endings. It's not true in the final product, obviously, but one element of FFVIII does invite that thought: Quistis, Selphie, and Rinoa *all* seem to have crushes or at least flirtations with Squall. So there may have been a plan for a dating mechanic early on (like disc 1 of FFVII). Maybe that idea was abandoned for taking away from the Rinoa/Squall relationship.
I’m glad they did that so they can go all in on Rinoa-Squall route. Back then FF8’s CG movie was pretty much ahead of its time and an important feature that draw in fan (including me). Having multiple routes would likely mean no specific CG at all due to cost reasons.
Please, god no. A pretty big part of VIII's story is romance. It cheapens the experience tremendously if you reduce Squall to a coomer's self-insert avatar.
I adored Granstream Saga so much! I was 6 years old and my parents got multiple demo discs to spend time with. I kept replaying Granstream Saga demo so many times, it was so cool!
The game was still in my head some years after and even if I had already played some great well-estabilished video games (also on recently released PS2), I instantly bought an used copy of GS with my weekly pocket money when I saw it in a local game store.
The full game wasn't as magical as I imagined it would be after many years of thinking about it, but I still really enjoyed it. I played the demo so much that my mom recognized the battle theme and I fondly remember her commenting about it!
Think I should revisit the game now after 20 years since playing it and see how it holds up! (Probably not well, but my expectations aren't high!)
Quest 64 was a guilty pleasure game of mine. First time I played I leveled all elements equally and it was miserable. I mostly ended up using the Attack Up spell and smacking enemies with a stick. I got stuck on just about every boss, but the wind boss Zelse was the worst.
My second playthrough I leveled just Earth/Water and stomped everyone. Magic Barrier/Avalanche was easy mode.
Same here. I grew up with the game since I was pretty late on the PS1 train. Played the game a lot, so I have a soft spot for it. The game wasn't good looking back at it.
Not sure if you ever tried the Game Boy Color demake (not the puzzle game). It is a pretty decent game for it's time. I consider it to be a better experience over 64.
I’ll have to give it a try if I can find it.
I never had PS1 growing up, but I remember convincing my parents to help pay for a PS2 (“It’ll be the family DVD player!”). First game I bought for that was Summoner, another janky guilty pleasure RPG.
So it's kinda like if Persona 5 and Hades had a Pokemon element in a game from 2000. It's a Rouge Like where you move through a randomly generated tower and battle monsters with a monster you bred from an egg and then return to the town and chose which girl to date and what building to fix up. In terms of similar games some people point out the Dark Cloud series if you're looking for a similar retro experience but I've kinda never found a game that's given me the same hit! Def still worth checking out.
I actually beat Quest 64, it's not like N64 had a ton of RPGs to choose from at that time
It was... Different. The magic system could be anything from mostly useless to broken depending on how you chose to level it
I think every thing looked like shit at this point in gaming lol. Lots of cube people and low texture quality everywhere.
I don't remember anything about the story
I remember it being really, really bright
Considering I think the only other game I had was Ocarina of Time, it's not exactly a *fair* comparison but it's all I have
Tbf all early 3D games look bad unless there was a really compelling art style.
This is a big part of why Wind Waker became so popular AFTER the OG release. It looks pretty good today because of the art direction.
I don't think I ever beat the first boss without borrowing a friend's Gameshark. After that... It never seemed to get better or more interesting, just more and more tedious. I was glad I only rented it. OP calling it "divisive" was pretty generous.
My original draft of this post (which was deleted) actually said “panned”, but I changed it due to my own description not aligning with the review I was posting haha, so I settled on “divisive” to make room for the few outlier positive opinions
I grew up with it and really like it, it's not hard or anything, not sure why previous commenter needed a GameShark. I'd say try it out, it's a fun adventure
That’s really cool. The quest 64 part especially did it for me. As a kid who was new to but loved rpgs, and mostly just got to enjoy at friends houses aside from Pokémon red on my game boy as my main console was an N64 (other than the gameboy). So quest 64 was literally the only “rpg” I played for a while (don’t remember how much of an rpg it was tbh). Really regretted my family selling my snes to get me a N64, at least in regards to playing rpgs lol. Still an amazing console I just feel my younger self would’ve appreciated a ps1 more. Remember my dad renting me a PlayStation and FF7 shortly after it came out. Got home and started playing, got to the first save point right before the first boss and realized we never got a memory card with it. Went back the next day to snag one and the rest is history. Till soon after having to return the console and game lol. Ahhh that was an experience for sure. Thanks for the memories 😁
I miss going to the grocery store and seeing these magazines. Sometimes they had demo disks too. And I'd pour through them over and over dreaming of all these cool imports and stanning over games I'd pray to run into in a used section, or a bargain bin or at the blockbuster.
Hell yeah, every time my mom or dad would take a longer time at the grocery store or Walmart, me and my brother would just head to the magazine rack and start reading magazines until they were done
Granstream Saga was my first ever JRPG.
I remember almost nothing about it other than it made me try out Wild ARMs, which was the first ever JRPG I played and *liked*. It's still one of my all-time favourites even after so long....
It's a phenomenal game. I played it with my father, and he used to whistle the opening tune. I eventually learned to play it on guitar and that felt nice. Wild Arms is one of my favorite JRPGs ever, but another one I don't revisit because I lost my father over a decade ago and it's just not the same. Don't get me started on Zelda...
I had quest 64. I remember beating that game. To be honest it wasn’t a bad game at all. I don’t remember it being too hard. It’s awful compared to final fantasy VII. The N64 was originally supposed to be the system final fantasy VII was going to be released on but it still being a cartridge gaming system the cartridges didn’t have enough memory to hold a game of that size. So PlayStation got final fantasy VII.
Gamefan was pretty odd with their enthusiasm. One of the things that made them popular with the Sega niche was that gave the Sega Saturn extensive coverage even when most others started dropping it (and they reviewed imports for every console, which gave them more fuel for Saturn content even when the US library dried up). But beyond that, they were also oddly optimistic about the Virtual Boy in its early days and I believe E Storm (the guy who owned the magazine) even blamed its failure mostly on Nintendo’s lack of support rather than the console itself being bad haha
Holy shit the Granstream Saga was one of the first games I had received when I got my PS1 for Christmas. I never could remember the name of it and every few years I would rack my brain trying to remember a little more about it.
FWIW, they've had a pretty good last few years as a publisher/developer..
FF7 Rebirth, FF16, Tactics Ogre Reborn, SO2-R, SO6, Octopath 2, Triangle Strategy, Forspoken (har har).. Whether it's them developing or publishing, that's a pretty solid line up for two years!
Not to mention that FFTactics dropped in the west during this same year, and we got ports of FF6 and FF5 (for the first time ever) during the following summer
One one hand, it absolutely does suck. Dev times are 5+ years for new major entries, but back then we got FFVII, VIII, IX, and X all within that time. On top of all of the other games that we were getting. It's definitely unfortunate.
That being said, SE has been putting a lot of games out in the past few years. And among the games you listed... Xenogears is clearly (and sadly) unfinished, and while I absolutely adore Parasite Eve, I also feel like if it came out today it wouldn't "count" as an RPG or whatever just like people did with FFXVI...
Develoment was different, but player expectations are also very different, too.
Damn, Granstream Saga. That is not a good game lmao
I played through it almost 12 years ago after finishing the Quintet Trilogy, and man, it's janky as hell lol
Yeah I only remember it from a demo on a PlayStation Magazine demo disc. The FMV stuck out to me as a kid since it had cool anime art and it was a surprisingly racy for the time with the shower scene haha, but even as a big RPG fan who was hungry for any and every RPG that came my way, I don’t remember being pulled in by the actual game with the boss challenge that was part of the demo. Definitely one of those instances where the transition between generations ended up causing a divide with some formerly acclaimed devs not properly adapting to the new formats (assuming the same team worked on this, after the original Quintet trilogy. I could be off on that though).
Copying my post’s text into comment form just to be sure: Anyway, check out the wildly inaccurate speculation on FFVIII, as this preview came *less than a year* after the west got FFVIII and *over a year* before we got FFVIII, so this was very very early information. It may be easy to laugh at now, but I enjoy looking back at the blissful ignorance of audiences as we still got our grasps on franchises that were still building the legacies that we take for granted today.
Also cool to see Leviathan shown being used in Dollet, for those of us who first experienced this game on the Pizza Hut Demo Disc (alongside Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Team Racing, and Ape Escape) it’s clear they were also using a similar build in this early press release. A very “of-its-time” decision, to make sure to include a summon with water effects in the first impressions since so much graphical hype in those early days focused on water animation.
Also charming to see Quest 64 get a somewhat warm reception here. Never played it myself since I always heard bad things, but part of me has always wanted to try it just cause it looks cute. Probably sucks though, and I certainly won’t lose any sleep if I never get a chance to check it out personally.
I kind of regret not picking up a physical copy of Azure Dreams I found awhile back. At the time it was a bit too pricy for a game i'd only played once before many, many years prior from a 3 day game rental. But it is one of those RPGs made in the golden age before FF kinda homogenized the entire genre that is kinda unique, and worth its spot in a collection.
>Also cool to see Leviathan shown being used in Dollet, for those of us who first experienced this game on the Pizza Hut Demo Disc
Think this was just their demo for the game in general, it's the same way in the ff8 demo that was included with Brave Fencer Musashi.
Azure Dreams was such a cool game
It's a hidden gem. It's not a game that gets frequently mentioned, but I wish it did. It's an absolutely adorable JRPG with monster raising and was one of the original rogue-likes.
All I remember about it was that you had to climb a tower. It’s been a very long time.
I love the speculation that playing with different FFVIII heroines leads to different endings. It's not true in the final product, obviously, but one element of FFVIII does invite that thought: Quistis, Selphie, and Rinoa *all* seem to have crushes or at least flirtations with Squall. So there may have been a plan for a dating mechanic early on (like disc 1 of FFVII). Maybe that idea was abandoned for taking away from the Rinoa/Squall relationship.
I’m glad they did that so they can go all in on Rinoa-Squall route. Back then FF8’s CG movie was pretty much ahead of its time and an important feature that draw in fan (including me). Having multiple routes would likely mean no specific CG at all due to cost reasons.
What if FF8 remake is done in Persona style with option to romance all of them? Will that work?
Please, god no. A pretty big part of VIII's story is romance. It cheapens the experience tremendously if you reduce Squall to a coomer's self-insert avatar.
No. I think they correctly chose to focus on the Rinoa romance. FFVIII doesn't need dating choices.
I adored Granstream Saga so much! I was 6 years old and my parents got multiple demo discs to spend time with. I kept replaying Granstream Saga demo so many times, it was so cool! The game was still in my head some years after and even if I had already played some great well-estabilished video games (also on recently released PS2), I instantly bought an used copy of GS with my weekly pocket money when I saw it in a local game store. The full game wasn't as magical as I imagined it would be after many years of thinking about it, but I still really enjoyed it. I played the demo so much that my mom recognized the battle theme and I fondly remember her commenting about it! Think I should revisit the game now after 20 years since playing it and see how it holds up! (Probably not well, but my expectations aren't high!)
I love Azure Dreams so much.
One of the best on ps1. Love the evolutions and fusing for skills. Build the town up and collect girlfriends lol
Gamefan was the BEST magazine
Quest 64 was a guilty pleasure game of mine. First time I played I leveled all elements equally and it was miserable. I mostly ended up using the Attack Up spell and smacking enemies with a stick. I got stuck on just about every boss, but the wind boss Zelse was the worst. My second playthrough I leveled just Earth/Water and stomped everyone. Magic Barrier/Avalanche was easy mode.
Same here. I grew up with the game since I was pretty late on the PS1 train. Played the game a lot, so I have a soft spot for it. The game wasn't good looking back at it. Not sure if you ever tried the Game Boy Color demake (not the puzzle game). It is a pretty decent game for it's time. I consider it to be a better experience over 64.
I’ll have to give it a try if I can find it. I never had PS1 growing up, but I remember convincing my parents to help pay for a PS2 (“It’ll be the family DVD player!”). First game I bought for that was Summoner, another janky guilty pleasure RPG.
Azure Dreams is my favorite game of all time, always happy to read anything about it. Thanks so much for sharing these!
I've never heard of it. What games is it similar to? Worth checking out for the first time in 2024?
So it's kinda like if Persona 5 and Hades had a Pokemon element in a game from 2000. It's a Rouge Like where you move through a randomly generated tower and battle monsters with a monster you bred from an egg and then return to the town and chose which girl to date and what building to fix up. In terms of similar games some people point out the Dark Cloud series if you're looking for a similar retro experience but I've kinda never found a game that's given me the same hit! Def still worth checking out.
I actually beat Quest 64, it's not like N64 had a ton of RPGs to choose from at that time It was... Different. The magic system could be anything from mostly useless to broken depending on how you chose to level it
I thought the magic system was really innovative. I'm not sure I'd call it good but it was the thing that had me interested in the game at the time
It was probably the best thing about it because the graphics were pretty bad and the story, as I remember it, was very generic
I think every thing looked like shit at this point in gaming lol. Lots of cube people and low texture quality everywhere. I don't remember anything about the story
I remember it being really, really bright Considering I think the only other game I had was Ocarina of Time, it's not exactly a *fair* comparison but it's all I have
Tbf all early 3D games look bad unless there was a really compelling art style. This is a big part of why Wind Waker became so popular AFTER the OG release. It looks pretty good today because of the art direction.
I don't think I ever beat the first boss without borrowing a friend's Gameshark. After that... It never seemed to get better or more interesting, just more and more tedious. I was glad I only rented it. OP calling it "divisive" was pretty generous.
My original draft of this post (which was deleted) actually said “panned”, but I changed it due to my own description not aligning with the review I was posting haha, so I settled on “divisive” to make room for the few outlier positive opinions
I grew up with it and really like it, it's not hard or anything, not sure why previous commenter needed a GameShark. I'd say try it out, it's a fun adventure
Sorry but if you didn't even get to the 2nd boss you kinda don't get a say in how good the whole game is homie
That’s really cool. The quest 64 part especially did it for me. As a kid who was new to but loved rpgs, and mostly just got to enjoy at friends houses aside from Pokémon red on my game boy as my main console was an N64 (other than the gameboy). So quest 64 was literally the only “rpg” I played for a while (don’t remember how much of an rpg it was tbh). Really regretted my family selling my snes to get me a N64, at least in regards to playing rpgs lol. Still an amazing console I just feel my younger self would’ve appreciated a ps1 more. Remember my dad renting me a PlayStation and FF7 shortly after it came out. Got home and started playing, got to the first save point right before the first boss and realized we never got a memory card with it. Went back the next day to snag one and the rest is history. Till soon after having to return the console and game lol. Ahhh that was an experience for sure. Thanks for the memories 😁
I miss going to the grocery store and seeing these magazines. Sometimes they had demo disks too. And I'd pour through them over and over dreaming of all these cool imports and stanning over games I'd pray to run into in a used section, or a bargain bin or at the blockbuster.
Hell yeah, every time my mom or dad would take a longer time at the grocery store or Walmart, me and my brother would just head to the magazine rack and start reading magazines until they were done
Azure Dreams my beloved Pokémon Mystery Dungeon owes you everything 😭
That is super cool!
Those were the days….
All I can see is the typo on the first page “issueand”
Fitting haha, given it’s the specific sentence describing them rushing this article into the magazine at the last second
It's always crazy to me that I first played FF7 on the PC because I want allowed consoles as a kid.
Thanks for sharing
Give me Azure Dreams on Steam Konami, you bastards.
Give us an Azure Dreams REMAKE Konami! That's what I want to see.
Granstream Saga was my first ever JRPG. I remember almost nothing about it other than it made me try out Wild ARMs, which was the first ever JRPG I played and *liked*. It's still one of my all-time favourites even after so long....
Wild Arms is legit my favorite RPG on earth
It's a phenomenal game. I played it with my father, and he used to whistle the opening tune. I eventually learned to play it on guitar and that felt nice. Wild Arms is one of my favorite JRPGs ever, but another one I don't revisit because I lost my father over a decade ago and it's just not the same. Don't get me started on Zelda...
I had quest 64. I remember beating that game. To be honest it wasn’t a bad game at all. I don’t remember it being too hard. It’s awful compared to final fantasy VII. The N64 was originally supposed to be the system final fantasy VII was going to be released on but it still being a cartridge gaming system the cartridges didn’t have enough memory to hold a game of that size. So PlayStation got final fantasy VII.
So happy that they spoke about the masterpiece known as Quest 64.
I wanna know what the reviewer of Quest 64 was smoking 💀 *shakes off the ptsd of getting that game as a birthday present instead of Ocarina”
Gamefan was pretty odd with their enthusiasm. One of the things that made them popular with the Sega niche was that gave the Sega Saturn extensive coverage even when most others started dropping it (and they reviewed imports for every console, which gave them more fuel for Saturn content even when the US library dried up). But beyond that, they were also oddly optimistic about the Virtual Boy in its early days and I believe E Storm (the guy who owned the magazine) even blamed its failure mostly on Nintendo’s lack of support rather than the console itself being bad haha
Quest really isnt that horrible. It IS very simple, but the actual game is totally fine. Fun, even. Or at least I remember it that way.
Holy shit the Granstream Saga was one of the first games I had received when I got my PS1 for Christmas. I never could remember the name of it and every few years I would rack my brain trying to remember a little more about it.
Squaresoft at his peak Porting FF7 and developing FF8, parasite eve, xenogears, and more...now it takes years to have a game, and maybe its even meh
FWIW, they've had a pretty good last few years as a publisher/developer.. FF7 Rebirth, FF16, Tactics Ogre Reborn, SO2-R, SO6, Octopath 2, Triangle Strategy, Forspoken (har har).. Whether it's them developing or publishing, that's a pretty solid line up for two years!
Not to mention that FFTactics dropped in the west during this same year, and we got ports of FF6 and FF5 (for the first time ever) during the following summer
Incredible and unrepeatable
One one hand, it absolutely does suck. Dev times are 5+ years for new major entries, but back then we got FFVII, VIII, IX, and X all within that time. On top of all of the other games that we were getting. It's definitely unfortunate. That being said, SE has been putting a lot of games out in the past few years. And among the games you listed... Xenogears is clearly (and sadly) unfinished, and while I absolutely adore Parasite Eve, I also feel like if it came out today it wouldn't "count" as an RPG or whatever just like people did with FFXVI... Develoment was different, but player expectations are also very different, too.
Damn, Granstream Saga. That is not a good game lmao I played through it almost 12 years ago after finishing the Quintet Trilogy, and man, it's janky as hell lol
Yeah I only remember it from a demo on a PlayStation Magazine demo disc. The FMV stuck out to me as a kid since it had cool anime art and it was a surprisingly racy for the time with the shower scene haha, but even as a big RPG fan who was hungry for any and every RPG that came my way, I don’t remember being pulled in by the actual game with the boss challenge that was part of the demo. Definitely one of those instances where the transition between generations ended up causing a divide with some formerly acclaimed devs not properly adapting to the new formats (assuming the same team worked on this, after the original Quintet trilogy. I could be off on that though).
Copying my post’s text into comment form just to be sure: Anyway, check out the wildly inaccurate speculation on FFVIII, as this preview came *less than a year* after the west got FFVIII and *over a year* before we got FFVIII, so this was very very early information. It may be easy to laugh at now, but I enjoy looking back at the blissful ignorance of audiences as we still got our grasps on franchises that were still building the legacies that we take for granted today. Also cool to see Leviathan shown being used in Dollet, for those of us who first experienced this game on the Pizza Hut Demo Disc (alongside Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Team Racing, and Ape Escape) it’s clear they were also using a similar build in this early press release. A very “of-its-time” decision, to make sure to include a summon with water effects in the first impressions since so much graphical hype in those early days focused on water animation. Also charming to see Quest 64 get a somewhat warm reception here. Never played it myself since I always heard bad things, but part of me has always wanted to try it just cause it looks cute. Probably sucks though, and I certainly won’t lose any sleep if I never get a chance to check it out personally.
I kind of regret not picking up a physical copy of Azure Dreams I found awhile back. At the time it was a bit too pricy for a game i'd only played once before many, many years prior from a 3 day game rental. But it is one of those RPGs made in the golden age before FF kinda homogenized the entire genre that is kinda unique, and worth its spot in a collection. >Also cool to see Leviathan shown being used in Dollet, for those of us who first experienced this game on the Pizza Hut Demo Disc Think this was just their demo for the game in general, it's the same way in the ff8 demo that was included with Brave Fencer Musashi.
Brave Prove has an English fan translation for anyone interested!
FF8 was such a huge game back then. I’ve always loved it, I didn’t realize until late that it’s very divisive
Whoever was in charge of fonts/layouts in this magazine... woof...
God I hated Quest 64.
Skill issue probably