It’s been eighteen years since I first entered the world of Granado Espada and that’s when I was still in college. At that time the game’s concept and design were one of a kind; set in a fictional Baroque that lets you control up to three characters you can recruit new members to your roster that would pique your interest if you’re the type of player that loves to experience new games that are out of the norm. Funny enough, this game spearheaded the launch of this website out of sheer passion initially as a fan blog for it, then re-launched as a fully fledged gaming website four years later.

 

 

The SEA server eventually shut down in 2017, ending its decade-long life, though a different publisher re-launches the game on Steam some years later, a lot of the original players have moved on with their lives as very responsible adults, which we know is big fat lie, and we eventually just moved on to different games. Fast forward to 2024 and PlayPark has revealed that they are releasing the mobile version of Granado Espada and in 2025 they hosted a closed beta last month and now preparing for the open beta shortly. We had the opportunity to try out the new Granado Espada Mobile from their focused group test last December and a couple of hours from the closed beta.

 

If you’re worried that the mobile game would be just a watered-down version of the game, worry not, as it still plays the same just like the original with some quality-of-life improvements and gameplay enhancements. But alas, as all things need to be in balance, some questionable changes and inclusions may have a huge impact on your interest in playing the mobile version if you’re a veteran player of the original. So, let’s do a rundown on the changes

 

 

Gameplay is Streamlined yet Familiar

 

 

Just like in any mobile MMORPGs nowadays, your party will have a battle power that determines your current strength. Each time you level up, upgrade your stance skills and update your gear, your battle power rises, it’s more of an indicator that you use to determine if you can handle certain dungeons and bosses. Speaking of gear, Granado Espada M has this bizarre approach where every character can equip any gear with no restrictions like your Musketeer can equip a lute or dagger and your Fighter can equip a crossbow. Though it simplifies things in terms of gear management and eliminates the need to have different equipment for specific characters, however, it kills the immersion in your game experience in terms of aesthetics, a different approach in gear management would’ve been made that could complement both.

There were also some changes in terms of combat, including the removal of utility items such as ammunition, tool boxes, and other miscellaneous consumables that made more sense and were implemented in later updates in the original game (involving ammunition for ranged characters). More quality of life adjustments were noticeable at the start, with the obvious having the Musketeer automatically stand up and move even when in a Kneeling Shot stance when you move your party to a different location, or the Scout with First Aid stance can now attack with a mid-ranged normal attack. And finally, you can now set your skills in auto, completely embracing the full mobile MMORPG experience of having everything automated, and at the same time optimizing the AFK gaming experience that was once highlighted by many as the game’s main feature, you can also set your healing and mana potion consumption in auto by adjusting the parameters on how much life and mana left before you automatically use a potion and which grade level should be prioritized first. Getting some of your party members incapacitated will stay dead until you can resurrect them in a monument or with your healer unit, monuments are now scattered throughout Granado Espada from towns to dungeons.

 

 

Questing made Easy

 

 

Quest progression is a lot easier than before, and this time completing quests will give a lot of exp points and other currencies, which lessens the need for grinding in the early parts of the game.  Same as with the original, story quest progressions are broken down per city, you start at the City of Reboldeaux, Port of Coimbra and then the City of Auch. Some quests were changed that make it easier to track but it’s still your typical objectives from your standard MMOs; from hunting x number of monsters to gathering x number of materials from monsters and interacting with random objects. There are a couple of quality-of-life improvements made for the quests, one obvious example is that you can just tap on the quest objective and your party will automatically move to the designation and then perform the objective. And after completion, they removed the part requiring you to report to the NPC quest giver, and instead, will have a popup dialogue at the corner of the screen to signify the completion. There are very few instances that you must return to the quest giver, but it only acts as a checkpoint for specific quest arcs as its way of signifying that you will be heading to a new location or expecting a boss battle.

 

 

 

There are more things you can do in Granado Espada M aside from completing quests, there are other game modes that can provide you with resources and Vis that you can use for crafting and upgrading and even specialized leveling zones if you need to level up your newly acquired characters. There are also specialized boss battles that will become available as you progress in the story quests, these are the standard boss challenges that have different difficulty levels that give out better rewards for higher difficulty.

Looking at the adjustments made for questing, the game has adapted the common features found in modern mobile MMOs and it’s a welcome change. It does not rely too much on automated gameplay despite having new additions like an auto move to the quest destination and automated skill usage, it keeps the balance that allows you to experience more of the action but at a faster pace and not just leave it to idle for hours and let it progress the journey on its own.

 

 

Characters play better but look different

 

 

The most obvious change is when you start the game, the base characters that you start with are locked in different genders the Fighter and Scout only have a male version then the Musketeer, Elementalist and Wizard with female. The reason for the gender lock has to do with the radical change in the available stances for each character, as now they are limited to just two stances and locking different stance sets per gender, such as the male scout having dagger-based stances and the female scout having the healing and buff-based stances. And now switching to a different stance will have a 20-second cooldown. Personal skills were removed, Fighters couldn’t provoke mobs and Musketeers lost their Concentration buff

There are also more changes with the stances, as you’re not required to level them to unlock new skills by gaining experience in battles, as they become available in certain character levels, and upgrading skills now requires stance books that you can acquire from quest rewards instead of earning stance points when leveling up. It removes the redundancy of having to grind two different levels, but the limit of two stances will require you to change your party more often if you plan to experiment with different party lineups.

Character quests were improved where you can see all the available recruitable characters per city once you progress further in the story quests and even see the full list of quests to complete before you recruit them. The biggest change when recruiting characters is that they go directly to your roster list and don’t come in tradable RNPC cards like in the original, so players who plan to have three Puppeteer Catherines in their roster will have their dreams crushed.

Some of the recruitable characters have different variants; the regular ones that you can recruit by finishing their quests, and the other ones that we can call premium versions, these have whole different stances and sport new appearances where you can recruit them by chance through persuasion but with extremely low success rate and fewer attempts, you can instantly recruit these characters with premium recruitment vouchers that you can purchase from the item mall.

 

 

There’s one gripe that I had with the character designs in the mobile version, more specifically the character portraits. One look at the portraits and it looks like they were AI-generated artwork, especially the faces of female characters that have certain shines on their cheeks, which can be unsettling as they have striking similarities to those AI art that you randomly see on your social media feed. And if you remember the original models and portraits from the original, you’ll notice some character faces in the mobile version were changed, most noticeably the recruitable characters like Adelina, Bernelli and more, it’s highly possible that the developers skipped the original character renders as they were all based on the old game engine, but it could’ve been nice if they didn’t alter the facial appearances and just improve the details of the characters.

 

 

Questionable Microtransactions

 

 

For any free-to-play games, it is essential to have a robust selection of premium items for players to purchase that gives the publisher and developer revenue to keep the game running and at the same time, have items like consumables and cosmetics that enhance the player experience, while keeping it balanced that it doesn’t give an unfair advantage to other players that didn’t purchase.

Unfortunately, there are some items that I found in the closed beta that could cause problems in terms of player experience and economy in the long run, and that as purchasing Vis (the general in-game currency) through Feso (the premium currency used to purchase in the item mall), and vice-versa.

It may look harmless at first, where players have the option to spend real money to replenish their in-game currency for essentials like upgrades and purchasing gear on the market board. But on the flip side, this will become an open field for gold farmers to exploit the ability to convert Feso with Vis and eventually become a profit scheme that would attract a different kind of audience that is more on earning rather than enjoying the game.

Another thing that causes concern is the potential power creeping of premium items such as accessories from premium boxes. The power level gap between a normal accessory from an SSR accessory is so high that players who can spend more real money on premium boxes have more chance to get stronger accessories. This has been a recurring problem with free-to-play games that force players to spend if they intend to keep up with the meta.

 

 

Other Changes

The biggest attraction to Granado Espada aside from controlling 3 characters simultaneously is the music, the soundtrack had its mix of classical, rock and EDM that became iconic to fans that even the famous DJ Tiesto had his share of tracks for the game. The mobile version had some noticeable reductions to the soundtrack, where some maps used to have around 4 to 6 music tracks and now it’s just at 2, and the jukebox function that lets you customize your music playlist is gone, and of course for obvious reasons, all the music from Tiesto has been removed.

The pose feature that has been a fan-favorite in Granado Espada which lets you do different poses for your characters when taking screenshots, is noticeably absent in the mobile version. It’s quite bizarre for it to be omitted in this day of age where every user is active on social media, and it could’ve been an effective tool to use to market the game by the players, so hopefully they bring this feature back in future updates.

 

 

Worth the Change?

 

 

Though I haven’t tackled the rest of the gameplay features and contents as some are probably locked in the story quests, I managed to experience most of the essentials that are enough to make the comparisons.  The changes made the game easier to navigate for newcomers, especially in the starting tutorial that explains the basics and is easier to digest. The other improvements streamlined the experience by removing the redundancy of taking and completing quests without the need to run back and forth the whole time to an NPC, and getting premium characters now have the treatment of some sort of pseudo-Gacha games where you have a chance to acquire them, but you can spend a premium to get them immediately. Some of the omissions could be overlooked by new players as these don’t change the gameplay experience in any way that would make it unappealing, though veterans would surely miss these in terms of aesthetics. The biggest possible crime would be the microtransaction that has the indirect push for real money trading for in-game currency that can alter the in-game economy and littering the map with bots that will make the game less fun for players who just want to enjoy the game.

Would I return to Granado Espada now that it has a mobile version? Probably, perhaps for a couple of days and just stop when I reach a big wall that forces me to spend money just to progress. Can a game from the late 2000s survive in a market of mobile MMOs that have adopted more action-oriented gameplay? We already witnessed more classic MMORPGs being revived and ported to mobile, heck even completely new games, some did survive for a couple of years and some just died from obscurity, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Granado Espada M will be launching their Open Beta Test very soon on Android and iOS as well as on PC