Granado Espada review: A case of amazing artwork coupled with poor gameplay

Granado Espada is an MMORPG released in 2006 in South Korea by IMC Games. It earned both the Best Graphics award and the Game of The Year award from the Korean Presidential Awards. It also boasted unique features never seen in MMORPGs even today, such as the ability to control multiple characters at the same time. It even features a theme that’s pretty unique for an MMORPG: the Baroque period in Europe. Despite the good critical reception, the game itself hasn’t done too well in the market. We were curious as to why, so we took it for a spin.

Exciting gameplay mechanics that fail to deliver

As I said before, Granado Espada features many unique systems. For starters, instead of just creating a character, you will have to create a family name at the start of the game. As you play further into the game, you will have the chance to recruit more members to your family. Family members who are not participating in battle will be hanging around in your barracks. The latest version of the game allows you to have a total of 108 family members, which is obviously quite crazy.

Almost all of the time you will be handling three characters at once

Each family member has stances, which in turn affects their weapons, movement, and combat styles. For example, musketeer-like characters have a stance that enables them to move freely when fighting, and another stance that restricts movement during combat but causes more damage.

The game also features a guild system called factions; a faction can host a total of 100 players. After reaching a certain level, the faction will be able to join either the Royalist or Republican party, and participate in a weekly massive war.

There are also more unique features in the game, and each of them sounds very promising and fun. Sadly they are executed poorly, and made the game extremely grindy. The first time I played it, I envisioned my characters having specializations. My first three characters would be a farming-oriented party, the next group being PVE-oriented, PVP-oriented, and so on. But as I progressed in the game I realized how tiring it is to level your characters, mainly because the most common way of leveling is by grinding your way to the max level. There is an auto-combat system present in the game so you can input conditions such as using potion when a family member’s health reaches a certain threshold and just let your guys fight it out on their own. That makes the grinding easier, but what fun is a game that plays itself for you?

She’s sitting in the middle of the stairs. Well, She’s the queen.

Then there’s the fact that quests are very limited, and you pretty much can only finish those quests with one set of characters, means that leveling your other characters is extremely tedious. The very slow experience progression definitely doesn’t help, and getting nine of my characters to full level and nice gear took me three weeks, not counting the time I took to learn about the game. So how long will it take to have a very powerful family with max leveled members? You guessed it: forever.

It should also be noted that raiding dungeons with party feels awkward, at least for me. With a four player party, there are a total of 12 in-game characters involved, and each human player is controlling three characters at once. It is extremely confusing at times, especially in battles where there are a lot of enemies involved.

Beautiful graphics that stand the test of time

Graphics are definitely the aspect of games that is quickest to wear down over time, yet Granado Espada looks good despite its age. Obviously, it definitely doesn’t deserve a Best Graphics award anymore, but it is still quite gorgeous. I still remember when the game was first released in Indonesia; I was quickly amazed by the graphics in the game, and it definitely is still the MMORPG with the best graphics in Indonesia, or at least was until its server in Indonesia closed down.