Grandia II

"The Big Letdownski"

When I played the original Grandia, I was knocked into next week. The battle system was exciting, the plot was unpredictable, and most importantly, the characters were fully realized and fun to listen to. I quickly grew attached to the characters in the game, and I was occasionally moved to tears by the storyline.

Needless to say, Grandia II is no Grandia I, but I just assumed that reviewers were simply setting their expectations too high. So I went out and bought it. I'm sorry to say it, but Grandia II not only failed to meet my expectations, it undershot them by several miles. I guess there are worse RPG's available, and this looks to be the best RPG the dreamcast has to offer (although PSO looks promising). It's just that I had hoped for so much more than this waste of space could deliver. On to the numbers:

Graphics: 9
Very, very nice. Everything is extremely colorful, and great lighting effects abound. There is absolutely ZERO slowdown or glitching, and the spell effects look quite nice. The villages are all very attractive, and the character models are well animated (although it is odd but forgivable that they lack mouths). On the downside, I thought that the move to full 3D as opposed to the 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds of the original resulted in a loss of some expression. In addition to this, the character design left something to be desired, as not much work seemed to have gone into the supporting characters.

Sound: 8
I don't tend to notice sound very much, as I usually play with my own music blaring. Still, what I heard was quite good. The voice acting is so much better than the voice acting in Grandia that it isn't even funny. The music was pleasant, although not on the level of Lunar or Crono Trigger.

Gameplay: 7.5
The battle engine in Grandia II is nearly flawless, as it takes the already amazing engine from Grandia and fixes almost every one of it's faults. You have a choice of two attacks, combo (two quick attacks that add up to a lot of damage) and critical (one stronger attack that adds up to less damage, but can cancel enemy moves). One welcome improvement is that the combo can't cancel moves anymore, meaning that you actually have a reason to use critical. The magic system, Grandia's biggest flaw, has been changed, mostly for the better. In Grandia, the only way to gain new magic was to cast old magic. This meant that I spent almost every battle casting ''WOW!!'' and other useless spells to raise my earth magic, or something. In Grandia II, you gain ''skill coins'' and ''magic coins'' after every battle (independent of magic use) which can be used to essentially purchase magic for any of several mana eggs, which you can equip, similar to the first game. The mana eggs are now impossible to miss, since you get them from boss battles (a welcome change). Now that you don't have to worry about magic raising, you can concentrate on getting battles done with as quickly as possible. The downside to this is that it is absurdly easy to power up far beyond you need to. If you want to, you can concentrate on the useful spells (ignoring ''WOW!!'' and it's ilk), and get almost all the best spells pretty easily. I almost never cast ''BURN'' for instance, because I received ''Burnflame'' at practically the same time. So in a very short time, you have already learned most of the magic you'll need, causing you to only use about 4 or five attack spells since none of the others are really of any use. This lack in variety gets a little old. Once you consider the fact that you can even equip your characters with ''skills'' that can boost their stats considerably or increase their HP up to 80%, and the game becomes even easier. Another annoyance I had with the battle engine was the camera. Sometimes, the camera will zoom in to catch a character dealing a deathblow to an enemy. Unfortunately, this often makes it so that you can't see what else is going on with the other characters. This doesn't interfere with battle strategy, since you can press a button to go to a bird's eye view when you have to input commands, but couldn't they have allowed you to do this also while you were watching the fight? Oh, and nothing is done to fix the classic Grandia problem of characters cutting each other off, then running around in circles like idiots because they don't have a clear path to their target, but again, this doesn't affect gameplay too much. Now you may say ''That doesn't sound so bad'', and you're right, it isn't. What destroys this game is...

STORY : 2

Oh my God. The only time I have been less interested in an RPG's storyline was in Panzer Dragoon Saga (I don't care what you say, that game sucked). Let's start with the characters. Someone must have complained (rightfully so) that Justin seemed like a bit of a goody two shoes in Grandia. Thankfully, we get the anti-Justin in the form of Ryudo. Ryudo is a wisecracking, sarcastic jerk, which would lead some people to dislike him as a lead. I at first found him to be a bit harsh toward the supporting cast. But as time went on, I realized that his cruel attitude is really the only interesting thing about anyone in this game. The love interest, Elena, is the most colorless and bland heroine in any RPG. She only does what is pure and right, and is overall, very boring. I can't understand Ryudo having the slightest interest in her. The supporting cast members are just as idiotic. Roan is just there to fill a place in the battle lineup. Mareg is a boring ogre who doesn't have much to say, but insists on talking. He says some variant of ''I can SMELL the evil's stench!'' about every 10 minutes. As for Tio, the robot girl, I kind of liked her, until I realized that her entire section of the plot was stolen directly from Robo in Crono Trigger. The only other member of the cast that I liked was Millenia, but I won't go further into that for fear of spoiling.
These faceless drones are cast adrift in a story without a point. While Grandia had a great mystery that kept me electrified from beginning to end, Grandia II is content with trotting out one RPG cliche after another, in lieu of an actual plot. The subplot about Ryudo's brother was built up so much, that I thought it would actually be interesting. But this conflict is resolved so quickly and easily that it might as well have not even been brought up at all. It's like the story was created by RPG Generator 5.0. Add to this the endless amount of time spent in story sequences and cutscenes that amount to ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, and you have a game so boring that I couldn't even bring myself to play past the 33 hour mark.

That's right, I didn't even have the stamina to finish this blasted game. I really wanted to like Grandia II, but I grew tired of going through endless battles, casting the same spells, with no promise of reward. All I get is another pointless quest. Whoopee. This game was an unparalelled letdown.

Overall Rating: 6 (great engine, if only they could have applied it to something interesting)

Buy or Rent? RPG nuts might want to rent it, simply to enjoy the excellent battle engine and pretty colors. It's really not worth your time though.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/26/01, Updated 02/26/01