Terra Memoria is a cheerful party-based RPG with a touch of Grandia
A time-travelling tale for old timers
In the event that I walk in front of a particle accelerator, get converted into digital data and am promptly isekai-ed into a gameworld, I hope that gameworld is the opening port town from the original Grandia, released on PS1 way back in 1997 (and ported to PC in 2019). There's something about that game's isometricky vantage point and precise combination of 2D pixel characters and 3D environments. The last sentence describes many virtual worlds of the late 90s, but none have stuck in my mind like Port Parm: that hodgepodge of green and rusty roofs, the canals cutting through the cobblestones, the smoky chimneys and people filling the alleyways. Bliss. I can still hear the seagulls blowing around the screen.
Oh sorry, I rhetorically lost myself for a minute there! I'm supposed to be telling you about Terra Memoria, a new RPG featuring time travel, magic crystals and animal wizards. Here's a trailer.
The areas from the Steam demo put me strongly in mind of Grandia - characters and objects have similar proportions, and there's a familiar hurly-burly to the town scenes - though the combat is rather more measured, with characters forming neat ranks and spaffing spells at each other according to an initiative bar at the bottom.
Terra Memoria is the story of six characters - a handyman, a blacksmith, a summoner, a sorcerer, a shapeshifter and a bard, going by the Steam page - who are swept up in a timeframe-hopping mystery involving angry ancient machines. They're calling it "cosy", but I think "feisty" is a more appropriate characterisation of the writing in the demo, which begins with one character having to defend a town against the aforesaid rogue contraptions.
This also introduces you to the game's construction mechanic, in which you craft stuff at worktables, then rotate and place it, from patches of grass to barricades. You can apparently build a whole village. I'm not sure I feel the need for building mechanics in games like these, but eh, it more-or-less worked for Ni No Kuni 2. More appetising is the opportunity to "write a regional guide" by collecting lore docs and pasting them into a nice colourful scrapbook.
The key to combat seems to be exploiting elemental weaknesses while weighing the pros and cons of attacks that impose cooldowns of varying lengths on the character, as indicated by the initiative bar before you commit to a choice. Magic boulders deal more damage than fireballs, but they might also let the target sneak in a riposte before your next turn. Shatter an enemy's guard by targeting elemental weaknesses, and much as in Grandia or the more recent Octopath Traveller, you can postpone their next move. It all seems straightforward enough - hopefully later battles are more challenging.
Terra Memoria is the work of French studio La Moutarde with Dear Villagers publishing, and feels like a Right Old Time. But don't take it from me, a rose-tinted buffoon chewing over his memories of the CRT era. Try the Next Fest demo for yourself, while it's still live. The full game is out spring 2024.