"A good game, with an awesome battle system"

Grandia 2 is one of the very few Japanese RPGs for the PC and it is a good one.

Graphics: The graphic is well done. The style is very cute, so if you are one of those guys, just willing to play brutal looking monsters, stay away from this game. The animations of the different figures are very well done, at sometimes is it really funny to watch them. The battle graphics are very well done too and come along with a special bonus: The very cool and very impressive looking magic spells, are really movies laid over the battle graphics, so they could look extremely great. This game comes also along with a few cut scenes, but they are not that good, without being really bad.
8/10

Music and sound effects: The soundtrack of this game is fantastic! The theme, while fighting one of the larger bosses is one of the best battle themes ever! The town themes are very well too, and it is a pleasure listen to them. The sound effects are also of top quality and there is nothing to blame about them.
9/10

Gameplay: Now comes the really outstanding part. The gameplay of this game is brilliant and very hard to describe. The battle system is round based but fells and looks, like a real time battle system. You may need a little time to understand it, but when you master it (and this should not take too many time) you will really love it. Unlike Final Fantasy games there are no random encounters, you see your enemies during the normal game and can try to avoid or even surprise them, to have a big advantage when the battle starts. A other fantastic thing about this game is the character development system. After you won a battle you'll get experience points and a number of different coins, with this coins you can build up specials skills and magic abilities, but unlike many other RPGs, most of this skills are not character based, cause all your magic spells and many special skills were giving you by wearing special items (so called Mana Eggs and Skill Books), and you use this coins to build up this items, you can give to any character, so all can take benefit of their possibilities. The only problem about the gameplay could be, that you can't save everywhere and must use save points ore Inns to save your game, but the distance between two save opportunities, is never too long.
9/10

Story: Some people will hate me for this, but I don't like the story of Grandia 2. It is confusing and sometimes boring. But many people like it, so I will not spend any more words on that and simply say, that I don't like it.
4/10

Difficulty: Easy.
This game may be a little bit too easy for most gamers. For me it definitely was . In fact I lost just a ridiculous small number of fights, and won all boss battles on the first try. But it was still fun playing.

There is one special thing, I want to say about this game, before this review comes to it's end. You should not forget, that it is a port of a console game, and while other ports, are full of big technical problems on the PC, or are terribly to control or configure, I had no, really no problems with Grandia 2 in this direction. Bravo!

Last words: Grandia 2 is really good game, especially, if you own just a PC and no console, and are a friend of Japanese RPG. For all people, who have never played a Japanese RPG, this game is great, to get a first look on this fantastic genre.

Plus/minus:
+ good graphic
+ fantastic music
+ great battle system
+ very good character developing system

- bad story
- you can not save everywhere
- some of the in play cut scenes are far too long and can become very boring.

Overall: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/03