Grim Fandango
So, after all these years, I finally completed Grim Fandango.
I love the characters and the setting. I even think some of the puzzles are pretty good. Certainly it’s a very good game. I love adventure games, and I would even say that it’s a relatively good adventure game. But Grim Fandango is not the best adventure game ever. Lots of people seem to think so. It even tops a lot of best-of lists.
Apparently, Lucasarts was in a transitional period when this game was made. It ended up being their second-to-last adventure game, which is a shame, because they made some really fun adventure games over the years. Most of this is due to the writing and game design of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. Ron Gilbert left the company before Grim Fandango was made, and this game served as Tim Schafer’s last hurrah. It seems that Lucasarts used Grim Fandango’s performance as a way to test the market waters. If it didn’t make a boatload of money, then they would stop focusing on adventure games. And, well, it didn’t make a boatload of money, so they stopped focusing on adventure games. I assume that some of the differences between Grim Fandango and other Lucasarts adventures, then, were because they knew that the genre was close to death, and they were trying like hell to attract new players. So they debuted some new experimental features.
The trademark Lucasarts writing remained excellent. The puzzles remained excellent. But the graphics were converted to 3d. I know this was 1998, just into the Playstation era, but holy hell, these graphics are terrible. They did the best with what they had, I guess, but the characters are blocky, and the pre-rendered backgrounds are, well, I guess they’re fine for pre-rendered backgrounds, but even the art from Myst looked better, and that was 5 years before. I admit that the idea of using traditional Mexican art is quite inspired. I can only imagine what the initial concept art looked like.
Even though I generally dislike 3d graphics, that’s not the game’s biggest downfall. That dubious honor is reserved for the horrendous fucking controls. There were so many times playing the game that I would attempt to walk somewhere, but couldn’t, because the Resident-Evil-style-rotating-point-of-view movement is so incredibly broken it makes Resident Evil seem like Super Mario Galaxy. Once, I accidentally went up and down the elevator by the Blue Casket in Rubacava four times just trying to walk past the god damned thing.
So, with the graphics kind of sucking and the control really sucking, I couldn’t help but think that this game should have been made in the style of Lucasart’s other graphic adventure games, like Full Throttle or Day of the Tentacle. The art in those games is far superior because it’s based on actual drawings instead of polygons. It has character and warmth.
Just try to imagine a Grim Fandango that looked like this:
Calavera Drawing
instead of this.
Manny Calavera (aka ol’ blockhead) from Grim Fandango
I think maybe I will always prefer pens to polygons. I believe that the transition to 3d did more harm than good. I guess it’s just hard for me to shake the idea of Grim Fandango looking as good, as, say, Sam & Max Hit the Road.
And the control was so much easier in those games. You just clicked on things instead of moving your character around with the arrow keys.
In most types of games, I prefer a direct approach to game control. For example, in role playing games, I prefer games like The Legend of Zelda where you push a button to swing your sword, to command-driven RPGs, where you push a button to confirm that you want to swing your sword. It’s more visceral and it feels like you’re actually doing something instead of just triggering cutscenes.
Maybe if they had spent more time working on the controls, I wouldn’t be complaining so much. I played Escape from Monkey Island, which was a later game built on the same engine, and I didn’t have nearly as many problems.
In this article, Tim Schafer talks about their intent with the controls. They wanted to minimize menu screens so it looked less like a computer game, making it more immersive. And they changed the control scheme from mouse based to keyboard based for the same reasons, I guess. If you see a big crosshair cursor in the middle of your screen, that makes it harder to suspend your disbelief. Their intentions were good, but they fell short. Moving around is frustrating, manipulating your inventory is annoying, and, for me, this made it nearly impossible immerse myself in the story.
I do want to reiterate, though, after all this criticism, that I really liked the game. If it had been made maybe 3 or 4 years previously, or maybe 10 years after, I think it would have been one of the best games ever made. But, I guess it’s better that it was released than being shelved, like Full Throttle 2.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
If you hated the transition to 3-d, you’re gonna tear your eyes out when you see this: http://www.telltalegames.com/monkeyisland
September 12th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
While I agree with your legitimate complaints, and do feel that it would have looked and controlled better as a hand drawn, pointer driven game, I still feel that this is the greatest Adventure game ever made. You didn’t even comment on the puzzles or the story, which, to me at least, are the most important aspects of an adventure game, by far. The story is a beautiful tale of loss and struggle with some of the best written dialogue ever in a game. It manages to be hilarious and heart breaking at the same time. It also has some of the most clever and logical puzzles ever found in the genre.
So, while it definitely has flaws, and is by no means perfect, and is even beaten by earlier games in graphics and controls, the actual meat of the game is what makes it so great. I think this description is extremely limited and superficial.
September 12th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Obviously you didn’t read what I had to say. I said the story is great. The puzzles are great. The graphic and controls aside, the game is very good.
My main argument is that these two choices that Lucasarts made (3d graphics and a new control scheme) hindered it instead of helping it.
I like the game. I’m not saying that I don’t. I just don’t know why exactly fanboys love it as much as they do. It’s certainly not a better game than Day of the Tentacle.
If I were going to fanatically support a graphic adventure game, it would probably be that and not Grim Fandango. Maybe Monkey Island 2. But not Grim Fandango.