Review: Grand Guilds

Grand Guilds (2020)

Developer: Drix Studios

Platform: Nintendo Switch, Personal Computer (Reviewed)

Induction Date: 03/20/2020

Let's just get it out of the way. Grand Guilds is a grand failure. It's a promising game that combines card battle mechanics on top of turn-based strategy role playing game with graphics that reminded me of the golden years of PlayStation 2 RPGs. It is unfortunate that I couldn't even complete this game because it's utterly broken in more ways than one. The harder I pushed myself through the game, the worse things got so I had no choice but to stop playing it.

These cool looking characters deserve a better game.

The game takes place on the continent of Irin, a land ravaged by war until Emperor Triton, with the help of the many guilds in the land, was able to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. You start off the adventure with the members of the Lux Deus guild who are looking for the culprit responsible for attacking their home base. Despite the grammatical errors and character stereotypes, I didn't mind the story at all. The protagonists are likable enough and it's a shame because even though the story is serviceable, the gameplay is certainly not.

The first boss was easier than all of the regular enemies you encounter later.

Each character can carry 15 cards with them into battle and you get a maximum of 3 team members in your party. There are not that many cards that you can unlock per character and this leads to a very slow character progression. Cards are unlocked using the "Trils" currency and you get a minuscule amount after every battle. You are given 2 optional battles in between the story quests and this is not enough to give you an advantage in the battles you participate in. If you think that was bad, the game also pits you mostly against an overwhelming force. I play the game on the default difficulty, and there are usually 5 enemies on the battlefield against my 3 party members and these enemies possess cards that deal very high damage with such consistency - more than any of your team members would ever dream of inflicting. The game started off on the easy side but about 5 hours in, the enemy balance got really out of wack. If your damage dealers ever got exposed to the enemies, it would only take on average two attacks to kill them. I had to turn one character into a dedicated healer and he just couldn't out-heal the damage these enemies are outputting. Since you cannot grind levels nor Trils because of the limited number of optional battles offered, the game becomes very frustrating to play at this point. The best example of the game's horrible balance involves an enemy that eventually becomes your ally. As an enemy, this character could kill you in one turn. Once in your party, the damage this character can output is not even close to the enemy version of that character. Yeah, stupid. Some of the story event battles include sequential battles and if you quit mid-way in, you have to repeat the whole thing without maintaining the level you accumulated from the previously won battles within that sequence. Just nasty.

Some of the special attacks look really fancy.

The enemy design is also all over the place. They actually managed to make a group of long range gun-wielding bandits where some of them carry a shield thus making them very tanky. That's right, a tanky, high damage dealing regular enemy. It doesn't make any sense. Then, the enemies also cheat. Even though your character actions are sometimes invalidated by objects obscuring your vision, the enemies can bypass this rule quite often. One of your team members has an ice wall spell that can create obstacles on the map but apparently, this highly strategic, super creative spell breaks the game consistently for me, causing blocked paths and stuck enemies that can't be targeted long after the walls are gone. Apparently, the people who tested this game didn't believe in this strategy because how could they miss a game-breaking bug?

You will look like this after spending too much time with the game.

Grand Guilds is a wasted potential. Buried under all that mess is a pretty decent game. Creating new decks and strategies was fun. Your early damage dealer, Rei, has some unique mobility mechanics but even her ability to blink around the map can't help her once the game takes a turn for the worse. Unplayable, misguided, and technically broken, the game has no redeeming value. Grand Guild is available for $19.99 on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. But there is no reason for you to get the game.

RATING: 1 out of 5

Update Note: 03/29/2020 - Today, the developer has updated the enemy stats for the easy and normal difficulties. I will attempt to go through the game again to see if things are manageable now. Let's hope I won't be stuck unable to target enemies when I use those ice walls though. The original review above will remain intact and unchanged but I will be adding update notes as necessary.

03/31/2020 - Played for another 2+ hours. The enemy stats reduction did make the game manageable to actually play. I am going to keep at it to see it through to the end. Though not mentioned in the patch notes, I haven't experienced any blocked paths nor enemies that can't be targeted anymore so things are looking better.
- Ice walls are still broken. Though they don't lead to what I mentioned above, enemies sometimes ignore them completely as they cast spell through them and even walked through them like nothing is there.

Steam key provided by developer.