Worst MMO Ever? - Granado Espada

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There isn't even a Pomegranate Sword.

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[mystman]

*Here are all the Josh nicknames for the game*
- Granada Babado
- Granespa Abespa
- Grandiose Pomegranate
- Pomegranate Land
- Grand Cabbage
- Grindibli Adibli
- Grand Vegetable
- Granabado Ababado
- Grandedada Abedada
- Granado Encanto
- Grandada Spandex
- Grandi Espandi

[MyAwfulUsername]

I remember this game. Tried it for a while as a kid. It went a little like this: Play game > Pretty boring > Exit game > Game music still keeps playing on desktop for some reason > Uninstall

[Xaen]

"A man so aggressively french just being near him makes me wana protest something" XD

[sutorippuwebmaster]

Fun fact: This game was released as "Sword of the New World" on CD-ROM back in the early 2000s, complete with an exclusive version of a character card of another recruitable NPC. It had English voices and everything. But the translation, if you'll believe it, was even worse than it is now. They were slowly updating it, one step at a time, but in some places it was complete nonsense. Also, a hacker invaded the servers and for a day, every player was treated to the female characters all appearing fully nude. Fun times. I sort of miss this game but it was one big gimmick anyway.

[That_Guy]

"Two hours in there's a quest where you beat a child into adoption."
There are strong openings, then there are Josh Strife Hayes' openings.

[manaquinn]

This has always been the issue with end of life MMOs. I started this game back when it first came out, The quests were more theme park. That first quest where he gets teleported into a fight? That was not how it was originally. They tell you to do essentially all the stuff he does -after- until you reach that area through quests. It wasn't even a fight with a random demon, it was a fight with a very important NPC boss that you find out things about inside that big building on the other side of the bridge.

Crescemento equipment was not in the game. Random equips were all you could use back then and they would change the look of basic units like the Warlock (Use to be called Elementalist), Scout, etc.

The last thing, the translations were always bad. This is because this game was thrown around multiple publishers and the first one had so many issues with even getting updates from the main publisher from Korea. There was a whole year of no updates and worries it would die over here before publishers were changed. As a player, I don't know the specifics of what happened, but if you guys remember K2 and GamersFirst and when this game was called "Sword of the New World".

There is clearly a way the game was meant to be played and the streamlined choices to push people to end game as quickly as possible just ruins that "learning" that helps you take the systems this game has in bite size bits. So it became overwhelming and 'boring'. A game of its time in every sense of the word. I miss it, but hate what it became.

[ElkiLG]

10:10 Fun fact, in french we call this game "exquisite corpse". The original game is played with words instead of a drawing, and the very first instance of that game gave the sentence "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine."

[Lorddraigo]

For anyone wondering at 22:45, 27, 887 hours is 1, 162 days or 3.2 years. And after all that time, he got banned...

[jonathonphillips]

I remember this waaay back in 2007, my friend and I got to level 100 and got to the end-game land. I left out the part where about 70% of the game was stocking up on ammo and healing items, going into a field and afk grinding while I was at college. My wife still has a mix CD we made from the music from this game.

[XCal]

I used to love Granado Espada. I usually play strategy or tactical games, and when it was announced and first opened, the 3-character system lured me in. What actually got me hooked the most were NPC soldiers sometimes fighting alongside you, which was a rare atmospheric detail that made it feel like there was a world out there caring about the problems and not just you doing all the things. But... it all went wrong in the end. Here's some things Josh didn't figure out because of the bad new player experience and the fundamental design flaws:

The weapons type and stances system was amazing at the start, let's say you have Sword and Shield of a fighter class, that will give him Back Guard and High Guard stances, which aside of being real life historical fighting methods, each switch to a completely different set of bonuses and skills. In Back Guard, you do more damage while in High Guard, the fighter is a tank who has a high chance to block out damage completely, so Sword and Board type fighters are tanks, but can switch to damage - it's not as good as say, greatword or polearm DPS, but it's what you have on Sword + Shield config as an option. This meant aside of having 3 characters, each character contained several classes within themselves depending on your equipment configuration. Musketeer stances make them dual wield pistols or kneel down with rifles and snipe at a distance.

The character cards you earn were also amazing, because those were often specific NPCs you met who had their own specific fighting style and equipment configurations. Take Panfilo de Narvaez for example, he is a battle cook, he is uniquely able to access a stance that involves Saber + Fire Elemental Bracelet where he combines melee attacks with fire spells. Sometimes, they had better stats than the stock characters you could always create or very focused fighting styles, like that boy Josh recruited, Ramiro, is capable of the highest movement speed in the game and I had hilarious fun making him be the Flash.

While its true recruited characters outperform stock characters in most cases as a result, Stock characters always had versatility going for them, there's going to be recruited characters who are tankier than the base fighter, but they have equipment limitations while the fighter will take almost everything and goes as far as combining Sword + Pistol into a stance called Heaven & Hell that I was obsessed with getting.

But recruited characters sometimes had completely out there fighting styles, such as Jack the Engineer and Yeganeh who just outright craft buildings and turrets onto the field or Catherine, who puppeteers dolls as AI summons to fight for her. Creating a unique team was a big thing for me, and I remember my combo of H&H Stock Fighter + Puppeteer Catherine + Soho of the Wind (does healing and martial arts) fondly.

On a theoretical level, Granado Espada had the chance to be an amazingly tactical game, you could use your fighter to taunt and turtle, your scout could swap from healing to pouring in DPS if you tech it correctly, you cast CC spells to deal with the mobs and stunlock bosses into long animation of ultimate attacks.

IN THEORY

The reality was different and sad via several fundamental problems the game started with and never fixed.

The first problem was the spawning patterns and enemy stats, namely en masse and all over the place with an HP to damage ratio that encouraged 1-2 shotting. If you were punching above your weight with a technical fighting style around teamwork and tactics, that wasn't going to work because the game never lets you 'solve' singular encounters, it's an endless horde all day, all the time, and if you wanted to stay sane, you just played it as an AFK autobattler where a scout autoheals and 2 people continuously kill the hapless spawns quickly. Sometimes, you might even cast an AoE spell if you're really pushing it, and sometimes a boss spawns and you actually get to use one of the cool single-target moves, but that was it. The game just insists on being an AFK-battler despite all the cool design around characters.

The second problem was the diminishment of stock characters. It all started with there being no real reason to use a Stock musketeer over Grace Bernelli with rifles, who just had better stats period, that was fine at first, stock musks could run pistols, but over time more and more NPCs took away what roles the certain stock units had left.

This flowed into the last problem, premium characters. They were only available for real money, and they were oftentimes superior versions of their existing free counterparts. A friend gifted me Soho of the Wind, the premium version of Soho and frankly, there was little reason for the original to exist. This meant that in a game about building cool teams, you just had some locked behind cash walls, unobtainable other than through the auction house for tons of ingame currency if the whales decided to sell them.

I can get through bad new player experiences myself, because I'm a high research/engagement player, but knowing the game was never going to get better in the ways that counted, and every improvement usually involved interesting characters that half the time were gated behind real currency killed the fascination I once had.

[rusticgiraffe]

I got an ad for Dream World with this video. I’m amazed they’re still trying to make something of that.

[kaidestinyz]

I played this game as a teenager and it was glorious. The game has one of the best PvP systems in "Colony wars". It was a global PvP mode between guilds and you could engage multiple guilds at once. Members of the opposing guild will appear "red" and you can attack them at any location. Guilds can declare wars on each other which would be announced on the top of the screen. This led to many interesting twists. Like the 2nd and 3rd guild teaming up to take on the top guild. The 3 characters that you control also made PvP very different from other games. RTS players actually have an advantage because of this.

The OST is also unrivaled back in the day and probably even now. "Esa Promesa", "Main theme", "Al Quelt Moreza", "The G appears", "Forget me not" and plenty more.

I sank so many hours and even years into this game back in 2007 and it was worth it. The game has since evolved into a pay2win mess so I wouldn't recommend it anymore.

[Scarheart]

I like how you have to have maps for the maps: the general map, the tourist map, and the map drunk Google gives you.

[backwatz]

"Like a vegtarian barbecue, there's no steaks"😂😂😂😂

[Remianen]

What I remember most about this game is its soundtrack. There was a song on it (Rosa Rosado) led by a Spanish guitar with what I thought were maracas in the background but turned out to be the Cabasa sound from a Roland keyboard. I never really paid much attention to the mashup of cultural aesthetics in the game though I do remember how AFK-friendly it was (like many Eastern games).

[InvadeNormandy]

This was one of my most anticipated games ever, the in game style, the over the top class outfits and texture art for the time was gorgeous, (Hell the actual assets inside the game folders were hard password protected! One of the rarest things to do as a asian MMO at the time IMO which was funny given I wanted to peek and see some of the class armors ahead of time) but the actual gameplay was such a drag and the amount of "Pick a spot, that's where you're going to live for a day" that cropped up later was heinous.

And when it practically had an in game botting system and you were absolutely expected to just park yourself somewhere at that point and not even play the game and I just blurted out "No." and had to drop it. It was a shame because some IDEAS were solid - Which is a how a lot of these dead games go.

You had character class progression where some things could wildly diverge even if the role and purpose was identical (IE: you are damage rogue person, but instead you can go a knife juggler/thrower path) or instead of melee being boring fightman with the usual paths of BURST TREE, DUAL WIELD TREE and TANK TREE it's simply expanding upon how you fight. Like a stance based (Literally changing the animation btw - and your attacks full stop. Not just a bland modifier like WOW) 2H sword style, then having a bizarre hill guard version where you do a lot of fanciful leaps and if you have the high ground you punish enemies with counters, etc etc. Or just I THINK sword and pistol style.

That and you could recruit NPCs after questlines to be playable characters in your roster, like I had a old man engineer with me who had a few neat abilities.

It was however like all these things are, undercooked to hell in the gameplay. The actual amount of active abilities you had per advancement was thin, it would often feel like a crippled and bare bones ARPG where you simply don't get to progress in the world for days at a time with the amount of active abilities available to you and the sheer grind cliffs it had.

[jazzytunester]

I like how Josh starts to generate lalafell names the further he is into the video

[brunitop]

"Granado" actually refers to the tree that gives pomegranates, not the fruit itself. That would be "granada", which also means "grenade" in spanish.
"Espada" means sword.

[xxyoboigxx]

just gotta say, i love the different names you say throughout some of these videos. definitely gives me a good chuckle when i notice it

[rozegunn]

I kinda want to see you do a video on Grand Fantasia. Hit my childhood where it hurts and make me remember the time I bonded with a stranger over Fullmetal Alchemist in a game that had absolutely nothing to do with FMA. Miss you, RedElric. Hope you're making it out there.