Granada (グラナダ) - MegaDrive/Genesis

When I first fired up Granada, I was expecting some kind of overhead shooter in the style of Ikari Warriors, but with one of those cleverly misspelled Japanese titles evoking Regan-era military interventions. I really had no idea what to expect, and the opening scroller's telling of the story isn't all that helpful either. However, the opening theme music was rocking -- a "theme" that would carry through the rest of the game.

It turns out, Granada is not this kind of game.

The next thing I thought was that it was a re-imagining of 1988's arcade sleeper hit "Assault". Assault is one of those games that shouldn't have been able to exist in the late 80's, it made extensive use of full-screen scaling and rotation and had an almost impossibly refined, tactical gameplay style that rewarded careful planning and use of cover that wouldn't really be seen for another few years. It was right on the cusp of what was commercially possible and was sadly ignored by gamers.

However, the Genesis, which came out the same year, was entirely incapable of providing even a watered down experience of Assault. It possessed no hardware scaling and rotation help of any kind, and the extensive use of digitized audio was also just right out of reach of the system as well. Assault's complex twin stick tank controls were also unlikely to be cleanly replicated on the Genesis' button sparse controller. If anything Assault would have been more likely to become a SNES game except Namco and Nintendo had a famously caustic relationship during this time period, prompting Namco to principally work on the Genesis -- combined with the low sales for Assault, meant a home port of Assault wasn't seen until the Playstation years, and even then only as part of a games bundle.

Whether Granada was influenced by Assault is something only the developers know. There had certainly been previous games in the general style, but Assault feels like a turning point. The tank was nimble, the music was rocking and the levels were huge. Wolf Team built Granada in the post-Assault world and it has that same sort of epic feeling to it.

Granada was originally released on the unstoppable Sharp X68000 and looked and felt every bit a late 80s, early 90s arcade title should. Except it never made it to the arcade. Instead it has the same sort of thoughtful tactical gameplay that Assault has, and a little bit of the methodical game style home computer games tend to have. Instead of trying to wow the player with huge sprites, Wolf Team focused the game around a tiny player tank with a 500 ft. overview of the immediate area around the tank. This viewpoint, combined with a 10,000 ft. objective radar in the lower corner allows the player to plan attacks and take out enemies with more deliberation than Ikari Warriors.

Graphically, the X68000 game wasn't terribly impressive, but a solid visual experience. The levels were carefully designed around the player tank and each level provides a different kind of power up to assist you -- from an A.I. controlled drone to a giant attack disc, the power ups combine with the levels to bring different levels of strategy to each area.

Granada on the Genesis is thus a port of the X68000 original. Done in the same year, it was likely helped by some shared architectures between the two systems. It's remarkably faithful to the original. The graphical fidelity is not quite as good, the colors are a little muted, but it's perfectly recognizable as Granada.

The music, however, survives the transition almost completely intact, and this is a great thing. The soundtrack for Granada is a percussive synth-rock masterpiece that artfully uses the Genesis sound hardware in fantastic ways. Composers Masaaki Uno and Motoi Sakuraba created a pulse pounding soundtrack that helps make up for many of the graphical shortcomings of the game.

It's a shame Granada is not better known as I was unable to find even a single cover of this fantastic soundtrack -- and it's dying for such a treatment.

Gameplaywise Granada is a little mixed. The basic controls are fine, if a little twitchy and slightly encumbered by the Genesis' controllers. However, some of the powerups can be hard to use. The AI drone, for example, generally follows you around, but will sometimes just take off and disappear, and it shoots whenever it feels like it. Sometimes, this is not so helpful. The levels, even with the strategic map, can take a while to learn, and can sometimes be a little frustrating to navigate around. Bosses are likewise mixed, they're either fantastically easy, or frustratingly hard to figure out. It took me several goes at the the level-2 boss before I figured out the trick to kill it, and then the fight lasted just a few seconds. It feels like maybe one more layer of polish and balance would have pushed Granada over the top.

The game is also relatively short once you figure it out, less than an hour to run through it.

Granada is one of those almost entirely unknown sleeper games that more people should definitely be aware of. It's definitely worth playing today and holds up well. It's a solid B+ experience that rewards getting familiar with.