*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

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

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.

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.

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

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...

SoundTemp did a fantastic job! To this day I still have some of the songs on a playlist. "IRIS" & "FORGET-ME-NOT" are amazing tracks.

At 12:30 you mention how the enemies look different but act the same. I thought it was quite the funny coincidence that the enemies happened to be spiders and a small flying creature. Im very new to game development but in one of the games i worked on we had a boss that spawned small flying bats and spiders. We artists communicated well with the programmers and planned so the creatures would act different from eachother. This game feel alot like the artists and programmers never really spoke to eachother.

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.

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."

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.

Dude I loved this game back when it was known as “Sword of the New World”. It was so weird and janky, but the music really hooked me. So glad you’re covering this!

"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.

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

Omg I remember this! Greatest experience of my childhood. And the most broken thing is a spin slash move of the scout that u unlock down the line that just rips apart everything in existence for some reason as the healer class. Loved it so goddamn much!

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

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

Ran a DnD campaign a few years ago, couldn't think of a good name for the starting village, until it hit me. DeFalt. Everything was named DeFalt, the DeFalt Tavern and Inn, DeFalt Smithy and Armory Apothecary the whole shebang.

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

This review hurts my soul cos I used to play this game non-stop when I was younger. I had so much fun that I was willing to ignore and embrace its flaws. I still thank you for an honest review of the game I loved.

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.

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

Oh god do I feel old now. I remember playing this game at launch and played it a ton. SoundTemp being the composer was a massive selling point for me because of their work on Ragnarok Online.

at around 25:23 when the lyrics started up i had a full-body twitch and felt Panic start rising in my brain. What kind of dark curse was cast over me...? (always glad to see a new MMO video come out... bonus for being one I actually haven't heard of before! lol)

Banger OsT, played for like 3-4 years until a few patches past the whole Armonia episodes. Loved the vibes and art, but 90% of the gameplay was afk grinding, literally. You find a good spot for the your main 3 to farm (or just get a good undead weapon and farm those giant golems) and leave it there for hours and hours. Nowadays the game is on life support, where the devs are slowly releasing new upcs and cashing in on the gacha (yes, they implemented gacha around Armonia, it was dumb).

The game supposedly translates to "Distinguished Sword", or "Royal Sword" if one uses synonyms.

"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.

Oh my goodness this takes me back. I played this game nearing 17 years ago when I was around 15 or 16, and mostly tried it because it was made by the same creators of Ragnarok Online and I had a major obsession for that game. My cousin managed to get myself and my siblings into the beta a short time before it fully released, and I remember playing it that there was a specific tree that had a texture error, and I thought it was absolutely hilarious seeing these trees that just had a big ERROR pasted all over them. When the game went live not long after I didn't play it at first because I think it started as subscription based, if I recall correctly. I remember money being a factor as to why I didn't immediately play. Being the kid with zero income I couldn't afford to just throw money at it, but it eventually went f2p and I remade my characters(which, hilariously enough, the male character I had looks a lot like your spiky grey haired guy) and had the last name of Crumpkins. I didn't play the game for especially long since the gameplay itself dragged and was basically just a grind fest, and I spent whatever income I had buying emote books and taking funny screenshots with my characters(Which I still have some of them!) I absolutely adore the soundtrack, though, and I still listen to it to this day.

Fun Fact, Granado Espada have an SEA version for SEA region it actually one of the better translation version and quite popular until it was closed to make way for Global release Yes, a better version had to be closed to make way for Global English version.

Imagine playing your favorite MMO. Kinda niche but you enjoy it. Then you see a small horde of alts named "Strife Hayes" run down the street. Oh no.

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.

I played this game in college (a good decade and a half ago). I'm kind of surprised it's still around. I never got super far because I'm not really an MMO person, but it was interesting to see it again after all these years. I always liked the music in the game. It doesn't fit at all thematically speaking, but I did listen to the soundtrack a lot back in the day. The song at 24:58 was always one of my favorites. I think it was the first time I ever heard a song with lyrics used as a BGM in a video game.

Great video! It captures very well how confusing and strange Granado Espada is to a new player. I played this game for a long time and (sorry for the ad), I did write a series of blog post about it on user blog in Giantbomb, so I can maybe clarify a couple of things: - Fun fact: This game was made by the same guy behind Ragnarok online. - The reason why total play time is so huge on those reviews is because the idea is that you would left the game running while in autoplay. Later on, you do get a pet which can even auto collect stuff from the ground (but requires food) - The game itself would change hands a couple of times, which added to the confusion, as ideas, concepts and stuff would be added or removed. - This game is old, so it features a ton of systems, areas and stuff, which they tried to streamline but with little success, so that why all of those skips and rushed explanations. - Crescemento weapons and armor are meant to scale with the player level, until a fix point where they stop. But the game never explains this. - That rifle is meant to be used by the Musketeer class (and some unique recruitable npcs), but again the game never explain this. - The idea behind the Family aspect is that you would change between "stock" character (the ones which you made) or "unique" npcs which can get form quest (like the kid) or by cash shop.

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.

Hey Josh, great Video once again! I still miss a review of 4Story. The Game of my childhood (sadly) :D

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).

Gotta admit, making the crocs hop around and jab targets makes them really terrifying I know what to homebrew for my next campaign

I loved this game as a kid. Especially the music. This was conceived by the creator of Ragnarok Online and later Tree of Savior, which i think you can tell because it's so full of unique ideas. Seriously it's crazy enough you control a family of characters, but the fact that you can beat up some NPCs and then make them playable in your family is... what? I love it. I played the oldest version of granado espada when it first released in english. I don't remember there being anti-autoing mechanics back then, and i assumed that the fact that you could effectively bot for levels was a feature. That being said i also remember the dungeon having multiple music tracks in a playlist, not just that one with the chorus. As well, i remember a playlist part of the UI that told you what song was playing and who composed it. This game, like Ragnarok and ToS had lots of music by the legendary korea game music group soundtemp. It's been over a decade and a half since this released so I'm sure it's aged, but it was so fresh when i was a kid. Especially for an f2p MMO of the time.

9:50 You've earned a subscriber for that reference to End of Ze World. No not the rest of the well written and made video, just that reference.

This series has reminded me of Shaiya. An MMO i played around 15 years ago. I would love to see a video on it. See how much nostalgia hits :)

Played it under the name "Sword of the New World" (Guess now I know why I could not find it again) when that server was opened. Best thing about the game was the feeling of how big the battle were when just a few player fought. 3 Player are already 9 Characters. Really wish another MMO would pick up this Gimmick.

I wanna give props to Josh's script writing. All the different ways to mock Gazebo Estrada's name with no repetition. Very good.

I played it in the Eu version and the SEA version , music was great and the weapon system was really neat to see and learn. Recruitable NPC was really nice too as they all had their unique mechanics + paid versions , Dr torsche mansion was a really nice quest line for example , you crafted a RNPC . Most of the time it was a afk grind fest - pop your squad on a farm zone after taking some farm quest , buy a pet to pick items up etc and you leave em there for a day The newest global version is weird though , a scalable weapon which just outright wastes some of the named rare weapons you could get , 2-3currencies , and no more farm quests that I could remember from those statues weirded me out

I used to play it around its relase and it was great. I recall there were 2 versions of this game. In the other one the starting town was called Reboldoeux and the tutorial was on a ship, not in the city.

Granado Espada! What a wonderful phrase Granado Espada! Ain't no passing craze…

Holy shit Granado Espada. Hope you highlight the music, some of it is dope.

Would love to see you do a video on this series on Red Stone! (Edit: Also FlyFF)

That intro had me hooked faster than id like to admit, instant like for you sir.

Woah, I'd never expect to see Granado Espada here. I used to play it when it was ported as Sword of the New World and it was great. The enemies offered a decent challenge, you had none of that "new played 30-day boost" nonsense, cinematic events were a new thing, and the OST was a banger. The active skills and evolved jobs/classes were great, and it's the only MMO I know which features the Unique Playable Character concept, having you recruit people to you "family". My best memory was farming a new area, listening to the OST, spending a "Megaphone" to note how good that OST was, and then being invited to a clan full of positive people who enjoyed the game. The game has some cool skills, scenery, songs and quest lines, but isn't impressive or mindblown, and it's certainly nothing compared to more modern titles. It could feel similar to Genshin Impact in the sense that you collect UPCs and have them be in your party, but GI is way more fluid and enjoyable nowadays, even with the monetization aspect and gacha.

I used to play this game back when it first came out in english and it was so cool. Don't get me wrong, it was always p2w, you even had to buy cash shop itens with real money to finish NPC quests and get them in your party. But the game was new, well made and had a decent challenge if you wanted to advance instead of AFK grind forever. Also you could recruit basically every NPC with a name to your party, which was pretty crazy at the time. I still listen to the OST for this game to this day. It's fucking awesome.

I literally bought this game at GameStop when it released a box copy. It was originally published by K2 networks in the US. It actually had really good support, active moderators, and a phenomenal community. I was part of one of the top five clans on my realm back then, and enjoyed the game for hundreds of hours. It was genuinely lively, active, people were excited to play. There were still several issues ... Few months after release the cash shop got pretty bad. When they added pets they went full board into the AFK leveling. Translations for things were always mediocre at best, and the music has always been some of the best in any MMO. Grinding starts to get really bad ... Getting to veteran levels is pretty easy. But once you start getting into Grandmaster level grinds You're gaining like 2 to 3% the level per 24 hours of AFK grinding unless you spend aggressively in the cash shop. You definitely wants to level as much as possible because it makes better stances available. Back to the music, it only gets better as you keep playing. Some of the later zones have some really awesome tracks as well. The art design of the zones is also quite good. You can easily "imagine" a phenomenal story that can be told in this world. It just never ends up happening. This is the kind of game that I wish would get a private server with great support and translations, and zero cash shop. It used to be fantastic to play In the background when you have a busy life and you just have a few minutes to pop in and check on your characters.

27,887 hours is 1,161 days incase anyone was wondering

When Granado Espada introduced to me as a kid (local server version not the Steam one) it was very good. More players grinding and leveling, AFK system was cool coz you can take a break eating lunch or play LAN games like CS 1.6 or WC3 Dota with someone at your local computer shop while this game is on the background. Yeah the keybindings is weird but back then Korean MMORPGs' keybinding is just like they expect you to be a StarCraft player and interesting fact. The gaming company that created this game created Tree of Saviour and once developed Ragnarok Online

0:13 Coimbra's in Portugal, which makes it even better.

I played that game a LONG time ago. Like, when it was still in the south-east-asian beta. I'm not from that area at all, but it was the first client with english language in there, so that's what it took. A few fun tidbits then: -Back then, the five base classes could be picked freely (instead of making a scout mandatory) meaning if you felt brave you could just try to outdamage the spawn rates. -Each of those base classes had a very strong accented voiceline. Scout's italian, wizard's french, fighter's british, musketeer's spanish, and I don't remember what elementalist's accent was. They toned down the accent for further releases, and I have never felt joy since that fated day. -Even as someone familiar with the game's early gamm, some of the elements covered in the video confused and baffled me. New systems, am I right? -Weapons are classes-locked, with fighter having the most numerous choices. Once you have a weapon, you can also switch stances for different ways of fighting, and skills. For instance, the fighter can go from an aggressive sword/mace and shield stance, to a more tanky one with an actual taunt. The musketeer can get crazy long range with a kneeling stance, but can't move. The elementalist can dual wield bracelets for bigger firepower, but can nonly walk instead of run, as for wizards, they have a levitating stance t hat immunizes them from melee damage, but constantly drains their MP. One more on the pile of good ideas that synergize little unfortunately. -Questlines sometimes reward characters that can join in like a character class. You can -play- the orphan you beat into adoption. You can unlock characters like incredibly french tailor, each with their own more restricted selection of equipable weapons and stances. -Once you reach level 100, you can attain prestige, which is "real endgame start" with new stances and access to new features, and a lot of stuff opens up. -This is where finally some of the systems synergize! I don't mean that in a positive way. Did the ability to unlock NPCs you've met and bring tons of characters to endgame entice you? Does having different parties for solo and group play just make sense to you? Great! Now pay up, because prestige needs items, and once you've used the three free ones, pay up buddy, because it's cash shop time! -A weirdness over the game's lifetime is that it had a variety of names. Starting as Granado Espada, it also had other names on its various publications and regions, including Sword of the New World, or Sword 2. Just sword 2. Like the sequel to sword. Cool. -I think this game came to be thanks to people linked with Ragnarok Online, and that after Granado Espada, they moved on to make Tree of Savior.

I believe the line “Strap in” was a bit late into the experience. What a verbal vomit roller coster! Would love to see the blooper reel! That had to either taken a lot of time or unscripted chaos..

The OST had Soundtemp and Tiesto as well as artists from Black Hole Recordings, a well renown trance label. I was already a fan.

My childhood memories is overflowing me thanks to this.. AAAAAAAHH. Also, the system where you could use the NPC as your Playable Family member was one of my favorite system. I remembered I had to farm Catherine Torsche body part hours after hours. Gods, bring back memories.

I remember getting hyped after seeing some sort of trailer or news on it. Time passed and i forgot about it. Its really odd to remember it existed and to see how it exists.

ah I miss this game. best BGM hands down. Esa Promesa look it up the charm of this game was actually the ability to "recruit" the NPCs once you're done with their questline. also the appeal of the ability to just AFK play back then was much appreciated before the age of smartphones.

The bit-by-bit monster drawing is an example of 'exquisite corpse" art. From Wikipedia: Exquisite corpse (from the original French term cadavre exquis, literally exquisite cadaver) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.

I suspect, given context, that the main character's class wasn't supposed to be "Scout", but rather "Pioneer". Just a guess, but given how common mistranslations are, it's a pretty solid guess.

Hey Josh you inspired me to start with yt. You have the perfect structure of a video and the talent to get people hooked and watch games that they would never play. Keep up the Great Work!

Good lord, that intro was the longest breath ever.

Those hopping bipedal crocodiles chasing you are so funny. It’s just too good

I remember way back in the 2000s anticipating the western release of this game. Originally from Asia and later got a western release. Granado Espada was the original game name. The western release was under the name Sword of the New World. I didn't play as long as I wanted because it was out during an extremely busy time in my life. Lots of travel and all that. I still recall in that old 2000s version there were a lot of gold sellers. There were zones to rent time to play in that gave higher rewards, better drops. I also remember that you had to AFK grind like mad, too.

I was hoping you'd highlight the music in Al Quelt Moreza, that song is the one part of this game that I remember the most about it LOL

I remember having played this "back in the day". Not for the longest time mind you, but i did and i remember having to actually engage with combat to a degree. Also... i feel like scout wasn't mandatory as your first class, which is maybe why it is now as people tend to ignore heal as something to be ignored in many games (in my experience at least).

Wow they really changed this game for the worse. The starting segments are almost completely unrecognizable. I remember playing it when it first came out and the experience was *completely* different. They didn't force you to make a Scout, the camera angles for NPCs matched their height, the starting area slowly taught you things and stacked mechanics on top of each other as you progressed, the quest dialogue was coherent and the story made sense. (I don't even recognize that starting "dungeon" or the random demon you fight, that was never in the game.) There was a good sense of progression both character and gear wise, the gear actually changed how you look and you wanted to keep your things up to date. Enemies were dangerous with attacks that could interrupt, CC, knock down your characters etc that you had to react to, your trio of characters actually mattered since Musketeers and Magic classes died very easily without a Fighter tanking and CCing using their melee abilities that knocked enemies down or stun locked them. Speaking of which, those abilities were so cool because they actually interacted with the enemies, blowing them away / tossing them into the dirt / hard stunning them / locking them into a cool canned combo animation / etc. There were segments where you had to actually micromanage your team to split up and tackle multiple enemies at once like an RTS which made your team comp matter even more like having the Fighter take one side on his own while the Mage and Musketeer went to another side to keep enemies at bay. Keeping a Dagger handy on the Scout was important because you want to toggle between healing and using the Dagger to dish out some nasty melee damage. The translation wasn't garbage, the theming was very tight to the New World / Renaissance era style. The list goes on. I guess the sign that it was going to be handed off a bunch and turned into garbage was right at the start. When the game first launched it was only playable on an eastern client and it was called Granado Espada, it was still fully translated for English IIRC. Then later on they released the official western version and it was titled "Sword of the New World". The versions were separate and each server was treated differently. You were basically a second class citizen if you played Sword of the New World as it had a lot of skip mechanics and it didn't receive some QoL things or even events that Granado Espada did. They didn't even have any protections against gold sellers and such which flooded SotNW like crazy. Now that I think about it, SotNW was heading towards the same direction that the current experience is like. Then I believe one or both of the servers shut down and the game was handed off to another group and it looks like whatever mess of a game that's in this video is the result. This was a game I looked forward to playing when I got back home from school back then cause the combat was cool and impactful, the 3 character system was engaging, and the music was a treat. Now even just seeing the state it's in is like watching a hollowed corpse being puppeteered for money. It honestly feels like you just played through a bad private server of the game with NPC's placed haphazardly everywhere and a massive mechanic dump at the start that expected you to already have played the real game for 100+ hours, boosted rates, free gear that scales with you till end game, and all of the game outside of the endgame basically trimmed out. The original vision and version of the game is just... gone. That's really sad honestly.

the real pomegranate sword is the friends you never met along the way

I just found this "Worst MMO Ever?" series. And I LOVE IT! Im gonna watch all of them. You should do Flyff and Ragnarok Online next!

24:59 that AQM BGM is such a banger

"Can you guess what opens the inventory?" Me: "Alt...E" "Josh: THat's right, Alt+E" Me: "The hell?"

As a proud French citizen, I can confirm this is a very good representation of the French experience. We are indeed all immensely rich, powerful and unkillable, we live our lives to a perpetual soundtrack of House music and we indeed believe that there is no worst crime against humanity than a stale baguette. Oh and since half my family is Italian, I'll throw in my approval from that country as well.

The intro alone is glorious. I haven't seen anything this absurdly multicultural since I watched a live performance of a Finnish traditional song performed by a Japanese band with a Swedish guest vocalist, complete with Russian-inspired choreography, all recorded in Denmark.

To equip things easier, (btw there is only 1 inventory) you can just click a character and make them your main controllable character, then double click the item. It will go into the correct slot. I played this game in all 3 versions. From sword of the new world to sword2 to now granado espada.

this one was great! cant wait for you to do Mabinogi!

8:20 i cannot be the only one who digging this music

i remember playing this game wayback for additional challenge i used the big pirate guy with a cannon (afaik he doesnt have auto attack) and also took me 1 month farming the Marionette character (the puppet who controls puppet?) im not sure

The sped up clip of the crocodile punching your avatars made laugh too hard for some reason

Oh this game was my jam back in the days, I loved the fact you had 3 characters, making your own party, me and my friends had enough ranged characters to cover large portions of a zone just for us to grind on

And just like that my entire weekend has been made! Love seeing another MMO review. If you ever do run out of content Josh (which im sure you wont) I would love to see you revist some MMOs after they have gotten some updates.

Wasn't this the other game made by the guy who created and directed Ragnarok and Tree of Savior? Kim Hakkyu? - Very cool or unique concept as the main gimmick or mechanic. - Bunch of unfinished looking systems. - Nonsensical keymaps. - Spam to win. - Early game being completely shafted by newly added "helper" rewards or extraordinary bonus exp. - Dungeons are basically just grind spots. - Being punished for not using the cash shop by having your equipment break or being gated of useful abilities. - Catchy and very well done techno music in a medieval fantasy setting (thank you soundTEMP for so many good tracks in different games over the years). - Premium cosmetics completely ruining the aesthetics and artstyle (I swear, I hate all of those stupid wings in MMOs). Never played Grandine Spindle here, but it checks every box as to why I stopped caring about Ragnarok Online. I still search for something that evolves RO's ideas and aesthetics. Tree of Savior has its goods and bads, some are reminiscent of RO, but it's overall a different genre while still carrying many of the worse aspects of Kim's previous works.

Oh man, played this game since gamersfirst, but quit around t3fun times. Wanted to start playing again, but the provider changed again and all data was deleted from the previous server if you didin't get the email about the chamge. The item equipping was actually like alt+i, double click the item to equip and chamge leader with f1-f3 keys and double click again. Also, i really loved the porto bello (if that was the name of the lv 40 area) theme. I also loved the AFK combat mechanic In t3 times, there were events that gave new platers instant level up for 3 characters straight to lv 101 (veteran lv 1) skipping all of the the struggles of learning mechanics and areas.

Darn, I played this for 3 years in the late 00s, and back then some of these places made me hug the walls trying to sneak around without too much combat, because that hurt if I was on mob level. Lots. Seems they have catered quite a bit to make things 'less painful' (but I don't remember the UI being that clunky). Also, using the three characters unleashing their individual abilities were mostly in raids when I played, but that part of the game did not really matter until around lvl 80+, if I remember somewhat right. And getting to lvl 100 with active play was doable, but tough at levels past 80, but the levels after 100 - not doable without afk'ing a lot, if you also had (the resemblance) of a RL. I loved this game, met some amazing people, had spin parties, goofing around with the pose system, gossip about the other clans and whatever drama that happened on the server. And some of the music is just epic!

jajajajajajajaj Granada Encanto. I love it when Josh twists the game name. ps: "granado" means the pomegranate tree. The fruit is "granada".

Grand Cabbage was really fun... really.. really late into the game. There are good skills and actual active things you have to do to Survive in some places really late. But a big part of the game is definitely setting your characters up to AFK. So a big part of the game is getting gear to sit in a lower tier area for hours and hours, then coming back and fighting in a hard area to skill / exp up and earn new characters. But I 100% understand these systems are extremely poorly put together. But as a Korean MMO player I basically don't read a damn thing, Find the most efficient way to grind then go the fastest I can to cool skills and characters I want. Disagree though about the music being "misplaced" I think that's probably the MAIN CHARM of the game. You're some Dolled up aristocrat in a fancy world Blasting EDM.

This made me think of Street Fighter's "El Fuerte", a luchador chef who believes that combining one delicious thing with another delicious thing will ALWAYS make something MORE delicious, even if it's something like salmon and cake.

"Fire ze Missiles" aaaaah what a throwback

I think I played this game for maybe 10-20 hours when I was a kid, but TO THIS DAY, I listen to the soundtrack. The tracks by Kubota Osamu are absolutely killer and have this really cool mix of classical/orchestral pieces with early 2000s house beats and it just is SO sick, 10/10 recommend everyone check the soundtrack out. My personal favorite tracks: Odyssey Violin of the Death Granada Espada (title song) Beyond Hope Temptation

That dig at the French constantly striking/protesting is my favorite thing out of the entire video, thank you 😂❤

Yeah, I've enjoyed this game back in the days. The squad idea was very cool back than among other available MMO's, as well as the idea of unlocking characters to use in your squad. And the overall theme of the game with music was very appealing. I remember countless hours of standing in a spot grinding XP on auto mode. Coming from Lineage 2 as my only MMO back than it was a cool journey, especially with all the quests. And yeah, I've tried it again some time ago, and yes, it is not the same game anymore, like with any other MMO that managed to survive through all these years on life support. p.s. also, the lack of polishing is as always a typical budgeting thing, when the team of the game gets cut every year to stay somehow profitable, and there are only a core stuff members left that integrate very basic events (mostly reuse from before) and sometimes add new items to the in game shop. Usually the team shares multiple projects simultaneously, and they jump in from time to time just to activate some planned stuff in the game to keep it alive.

Still listen to the soundtrack to this ancient mmo. Some nice work music to be honest. Recommend the tracks Supercooled Girl (techno), Rosa Rosando (techno instrumental), Touch Me Not (techno), A Witch On A Diet (techno) and my fav is Ice Symphony.

The gameplay: 💤 The music: 🔥🔥🔥

I gotta say, in the intro, you had me at "mixture of French and German House techno music" I could play a lot of things if that was the soundtrack. Although I should probably just play a better game with that music on my headphones.

22:44 just for reference, this is more time than you would accumulate from working a 9-5 job for a full decade.

I remember playing this game for a while and my favourite thing about this game is you can do get npc to join you after doing their quest, allowing you to create a new character as that npc and they usually have unique abilities, but after playing for a while I realised that it doesn’t really matter in levelling because you just do 2dps and scout for auto heal anyway, and that still continue to around level 50 at which I quitted and never return Also cool thing about stance for equipment, you granting new skill and attack pattern for different weapon and there’s many choices for fighter and musketeer like holding sword and gun, twohanded weapon, dual wielding, defensive stance, aggressive stance, but it also doesn’t really matter because you can do way more than enough damage with any build, just more fancy I also remember that in the very high level quest, you can get Andre (seen at 21:04) as a playable character and at one point I saw multiple Andre running around the town, that was weirdly fabulous

the game was revolutionary in 2010 great music, great world design, controlling 3 characters makes you a micro god no other MMO have ever used the Napoleonic era theme

14:22 this analogy was so brilliant it caught me off-guard. Top notch writing.

My theory for all first-person scenes being viewed from below is that the graphics were designed for 4x3 aspect ratio, but at some point they made it work for 16x9 and didn't put in the effort to stretch or zoom properly.