Grandia II

"Some nice music and a decent battle system protect this game from being complete garbage"

Around Christmas of 2000 I was blessed by getting Majora's mask Skies of arcadia THPS2 and of course Grandia II. I heard grandia 2 was a wonderful game so I decided I would hold off on it. I beat MM and Soa (favorite RPG thus far) and then played G2 and let me tell you it disappointed me in so many ways. The only thing that saved it from being a horrible game was the nice story and the somewhat interesting battle system.

Graphics-8/10
Over all they were okay. This game really pushes out smooth textured backgrounds, yet the in game characters are rather blocky, the cinemas were pretty cheap looking also. The game also had a rather dull color scheme. I was amazed with some of the special moves how they incorporated in cinemas with those.

Music/Sound-9/10
Probably what amazed me the most was the nice music and the superb sound effects. Every thing sounds as it should and the music is always there to set the mood. No complaints here and even some of the best music in a video game, also I am glad they got a great group of voice actors because that helped to set the mood ( I believe the guy who hired the MGS voice actors got the people to act). I just wish there was more speech and less dialogue.

Gameplay-7/10
This is where the game begins to slip, sure the battle system is a nice mix of turned base and real-time action. Yet however I do prefer one or the other this system was fun but nothing want to see constantly repeated. I was a fan of the Chrono trigger Esq monster system (NO RANDOM BATTLES!!!!!). And the actual battle's are a bit more fun the usual, no ATB bar like in FF games, you see the characters who are coming up on a bar on the bottom of the screen. If you use a speed increasing spell or get stopped the character Icon speeds up or slows down respectively. Also you have normal and critical attacks, normal may damage more but the critical nock your opponent back to the start of the bar, this can be helpful in a tricky situation. Also learning spells/moves is done in a pretty cool way as well, you get mana eggs and skill books. After each battle you get AP and then you use the AP on the skill books/mana eggs to learn different skills, you then equip the egg or book on a character to use the skill. It's pretty cool but once you get the hang of it you will see its about as simple as the FF7 materia system, I do like however that it allows complete character customization. Your better character may leave and a new one may come in but if you put all the skill books/mana eggs from the old character on the new one it will have all of the old persons magic and similar stats, but he/she will have there own unique set of ability. I didn't like this tho, you had to use the team the game wanted you to you were never allowed to mix and match to find the best team. Well so far it sounds good and original right well I have one big problem with the game, it is WAY TO SHORT AND EXTREMELY LINEAR. I mean it took me about 27 or so hours to beat the game I tried to prolong my journey I looked every where but it didn't help. Also after each town you went to a forest/cave/etc type area to get to the new town, It got fairly repetitious. No world map to explore just put the cursor where you wanted to go next, there may of been 1 mana egg that you might of missed if you didn't go somewhat out of your way to get it. You couldn't really backtrack until the end of the game either you almost always had to do/go where the story wanted you.

Story/Character depth-7/10
The story is very linear and was pretty boring to play through until about the last 5 or so hours when like 50000 plot twists hit you all around the same time, you learn one thing then something else happens that makes you go there to find out 2687909543 other things happen and you have to go here, here and here. I really wish the story developed throughout the game instead of at the end. But towards the end the story does get really good, especially if you are into the whole religion thing (xenogears fans). The characters range from interesting (ryudo) cool (skye) and just plain different (Roan). Ryudo starts out all jerk like which makes him pretty interesting but towards the end he ends up like soooo many other hero-Esq characters. I refuse to tell you more then I already have, you can see how the characters develop on your own and make your own opinion.

Control-10/10
Nothing wrong it controls just fine, just putting this short sentence in incase readers get curious.

Overall-7/10
It's not a bad game by any means, how ever it is extremely basic. I would recommend it to any RPG fans since it is rather common and only costs about 20 dollars. But if you see SOA and if it is 40 dollars I would recommend you buy that seeing as it is simply a much, MUCH better game. This game really disappointed me, I thought it would be so much more. I guess playing SOA first got my hopes up and spoiled me a bit to much. Play G2 first and skies second to appreciate both games for what they are.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/23/02, Updated 01/23/02