"There's no end to what my eyes can see / To where my feet will roam / To what my heart can embrace" - Godiego, "Sights and Sounds"

Grandia is not about telling a deep story with brooding characters and grey morality, and while it does contain a world-ending threat (what JRPG doesn't?) you get the sense that the real focus is on the journey itself. It's a game about adventure and discovery, the child-like wonder at travelling to distant lands, seeing new sights and tasting new food, making friends and getting into scrapes, always on the move and hungry for more. There's something poignant in the way that most of the locations you visit are only briefly accessible: the adventure is constantly pushing you onward - or rather, pulling you towards it.

If, like me, you enjoy talking to every single NPC you encounter, you'll enjoy Grandia. It has a cast of thousands (yet oddly, hardly any side-quests), who average three lines of dialogue apiece, and will change their lines frequently, dependent on changing events. The principal players are charming and loveable, from the naively optimistic hero Justin, to his spunky companion Sue, and the professional adventurer slash love-interest Feena. Their characterisations may be simple, but they're impossible to dislike. Even the voice-acting is bad in an endearing way.

The remaster does leave a lot to be desired, as it has covered the whole game in a visual filter you may not enjoy. I found it easy enough to remove the filter for character sprites, but removing the filter from the environment caused more problems than it solved, so I had to leave it. We all want a faithful, accessible, and definitive version of games, whether we experienced them in the original or not, and this isn't quite it. But it isn't so bad that it spoilt the experience for this first-time player.

I'll end on this thought: there is unfortunately a persistent stereotype that Japanese culture is basically insular, inward-looking and uneasy with foreign climes and concepts. What I feel from Grandia is just the opposite: a wonderful reciprocity and openness to the wide world beyond our hometowns - an unbridled love, in fact, of adventure. You can hear it in the sweeping strings and majestic horns of the opening theme, which, as they are joined by discofied bass and percussion, hint at new rhythms from afar to experience, an internationalism born of the interplay between different, yet mutually respectful cultures. Today more than ever, we need that kind of optimism.