"No longer grand."

As a fan of the original Grandia, I can easily say my romp in this new land was a disappointment. Game Arts’ Saturn RPG turned PlayStation RPG Grandia was an amazing epic quest worth taking. It had the perfect mixture of an excellent plot, challenge, and one of the best battle systems ever seen in an RPG. While I can see some good in this Dreamcast sequel, there is also a lot of bad.

The story itself isn’t anywhere near as interesting as the first installment. After starting a new game, we learn about a boring war between Granas, the God of Light, and Valmar, the God of Darkness. The war was a fierce one that carved the land up until both Gods’ powers were drained. Now many years later you take the role of Ryudo, a real jerk that goes around being moody. Ryudo is hired to protect a priestess during some sort of religious ceremony. However everything goes wrong and conflict ensues! Eventually Ryudo and his party of beast-men, robots, and silly little boys must travel the world to collect the body parts of the evil God of Darkness Valmar. The plot itself is rather bland and uninteresting as most of the plot twists are “So and so body part is located here!”. In addition Game Arts tries to be comical like in the original game, but often fails with Working Designs-esque dialogue such as “Save the drama fo’ yo momma.” It almost seems as if they tried to make the game more epic but still keep the comedy, and it just doesn’t work. Maybe they should have just had another adventure starring Justin (“he‘s so manly, he‘s so brave“).

The characters are really dull in this title. As I’ve said, our protagonist is a big jerk. He spends much of the game making fun of religion and calling people names. Come on, how is this better than Justin’s striving to be an adventurer and then failing miserably? Then there’s the main heroine Elena. She’s weak and meek, but damn is she good with magic. Then there’s the other mage Millenia. She’s rude, crude, and often eludes suspicion from her peers (Gee, a weird chick with red hair. Let‘s join up with her!). Then there’s the quick little boy named Roan (who reminds me of Link from the Zelda series . . . . and wasn’t that Link rip-off from Dark Cloud called Toan? ), and a big tank of a fighter Mareg the beast-man. Lastly we have Tio, a robot that wields giant rings and has no emotions but sure as hell tries to have them (I‘m as confused as you are).

Luckily the awesome battle system from Grandia remains intact. The sweet action bar has been brought back. Essentially all your characters are on this bar as they wait their turn. When they reach the Command portion of the bar, you can use whatever commands you’d like ranging from normal attacks to devastating special techniques. Next your character goes to the Act section, where they must wait as they summon their strength to execute their next maneuver. The wait for each action differs for each command. Physical attacks usually can be used quickly while stronger attacks like magic tend to have longer wait times. The coolest part about this battle system is how you can hamper your enemies impending attacks. Let’s say that a big goon were to be getting ready to use an attack. If you where to use your critical physical attack or some other powerful command and connect, then you may cancel your foe’s attack and send them back to the beginning of the action bar. Or you can simply hack away at your enemies and make them momentarily stop in their movement on the action bar. It’s really cool to set up a chain of combos where your entire party simply pummels a single enemy and never let’s him attack. In addition, your characters (and enemies) are constantly move around the battlefield making ranged attacks an interesting concept once again placed upon this awesome battle system.

Game Arts made the entire process of learning magic and techniques a whole lot easier and user-friendly. Rather than going through hours of combat like in the original Grandia, here you’ll have to utilize coins acquired through battle to learn new skills as well as powering them up. Powering up a spell or technique makes the wait before you execute it much faster. In addition, this time around you can swap magic. Each character must equip a Mana Egg in order to learn magic, and you use coins on this item rather than the character. The benefit of this system is that you’re not limited to one character having a certain spell. For example in the first game, if I taught Zap to Justin, he would know that spell for the entire game. Now say if I equip a Mana Egg with Zap on Ryudo in Grandia 2, he can easily unequip the egg at any time. This way you can avoid any problems that may occur dealing with spells such as if a party member leaves (no more, “Ah shucks! My healer just left for the entire game!”). Unfortunately there is a downside. You win far too many coins with each battle. While this may not sound so bad to some people, I felt it really threw off the balance of the entire game. I was just blasting through Grandia 2 without any trouble thanks to my ridiculously powerful skills as well as weak enemies.

The dungeons are excellent and better than ever. The smooth visuals of the Sega Dreamcast eliminate all the horrendous slowdown present in the PlayStation version of Grandia and makes trekking through the game a breeze. But every so often you’ll notice an enemy lurking about the dungeons in real-time. You can try to avoid them or dash toward the group head-first. Most likely you’ll have to fight an enemy and be greeted with the excellent battle system . . . . and the dreaded spell animations. One of the biggest problems with this game is how ludicrously lengthy each spell or special technique animation truly is. Just imagine this if you will: you encounter a pack of four wolves. They growl and show their teeth at you making you get ready to pummel them into submission. They make their way to the Command section and it would seem a bunch of them choose spells for their attacks. So then you see the first spell. A huge whirlwind FMV/cinema scene pops up, tosses rocks about and crashes your party the ground with a loud splat. It’s jaw-dropping gorgeous. Then the next wolf casts the same spell. It’s pretty boring the second time. The third wolf just so happens to utilize that spell for a third time. It’s pissing you off by now, so you mash the start button (or any button) in hope that it will skip the spell animation. The animation continues on. Finally the fourth wolf has his turn and . . . . attacks physically (thank God). By now you’re not going to want to employ any of your own flashy spells, but sometimes you have to. This only lengthens the battles further with you just sitting their watching the same damn whirlwind, pillars of flame or what have you. Grandia 2 really needed a way to skip spell animations. I could have easily bumped up the score had Game Arts done so. But what it all boils down to is you’ll be constantly avoiding battles or just running away from every fight to in order pick up the pace, and since the game is so damn easy, you can get away with it. What’s the point of an awesome battle engine when you don‘t even want to bother with battling?

As for the game’s length, what can I say? While Grandia 2 may not have lasted longer than my 40+ hour adventure in the original game, 25 hours was still a respectable and decent length for any console RPG.

Grandia 2’s visuals are by far the greatest aspect of the game next to the sweet battle system. The smooth polygons for each and every environment are just fabulous. The character models on the other hand could have used more work (like actual mouths!). The spell and special technique animations and dazzling effects are simply awe-inspiring and wonderful to see (for the first time). But as I’ve mentioned before, they become tedious fairly quickly. In addition, the lack slowdown makes the game progress without a hitch.

The game’s soundtrack is comprised of cliche soft RPG music that can easily be forgotten. About the only songs I can even faintly recall are the extreme guitar riff sporting battle music. The sound effects are top-notch with the sizzling of flames and the clanging of blades. Now as for the voice acting, while it may be of better quality this time around, the insipid filth that each character spews forth makes you focus on the stupidity of what they’re saying rather than the sweet acting.

So there you have it, folks. Grandia 2 is simply not the game a real fan like me wanted. I was pretty disappointed considering this was one of the games that made me really want a Dreamcast. With a terrible story, constant lengthy spell animations, and too easy fights, this title can’t be called a classic just for its returning amazing battle system and more friendly magic and technique system. Luckily my disgust for the series’ new flaws got me talking with a friend of mine, who recommended another RPG on the Dreamcast: Skies of Arcadia.

If you still want to play Grandia 2, I’d try reading a nice book in between those spell animations. I highly recommend The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Perhaps its lunacy can make up for the forced humor in this title.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/04