Grandia II

"One of the first RPGs for the PS2, can it compare to FFX?"

Grandia II has been made for The PlayStation 2. Grandia I and II were made for the Dreamcast and GameArts decided to bring it to the PS2. Like the Final Fantasy series is with all it's games, Grandia II is a completely different story from the first Grandia game.

On to the game, the graphics are all right, but nothing compared to FFX. The characters are kind of blocky, and there are VERY few FMV's. The sound is not great and the footsteps that you hear every time the character takes a step gets quite annoying. The music is all right but again FFX is better when it comes to sound and music.

The main character's name is Ryudo and he is a ''Geohound'', a person that does odd jobs for money. He has his trusty eagle Syke with him all the time too. He has an attitude, and is really frickin pessimistic. He's one of those ''seasoned veteran know it all'' type people that you see as the main character in RPG's a lot. He gets a job escorting a sister from the church, to a cathedral real far away, and that's where the story leads you.

One problem I had with the game was that it's sort of repetitive, like you go to one town and they have a problem you have to solve. then you go through some plains or mountains and get to the next town, who has another problem and so on. You can kind of see what's coming.

There is one thing that stands out in the game as being really great. That is it's battle system. It's really fun and in my opinion better then Final Fantasy's. Your character's icon moves on a thing called an IP gauge. When it gets about 3/4 through it comes to the work COMP. on the gauge. You choose your attack and the icon travels the other 1/4 of the way to the word that says ACT, and your character performs his/her move. What makes this more interesting is if you pick just a regular combo attack the icon will travel to ACT very quickly in about half a second. But if you pick a more advanced technique, the icon will travel to ACT much slower say like 10 seconds. There are ways to shorten the time it takes to reach ACT in the game for more advanced techniques though. Kind of hard to explain, but I did the best I could.

Moving on, the animation in battle for magic was very good. Some moves are done in anime too. The special moves were well done also. The battles are the best part in this game.

Another problem with the game is that there are NO side-quests at all. all you get is the story, which is not terrific, and that's it. Also the slow downs in this game are pretty annoying. It is not terrible, but in towns you encounter some slow downs where the text will move real slow, and you will walk in kind of slow motion. It is nothing major though.

Replay value in this game isn't that good. Most RPGs have good replay value but Grandia II, with no side-quests is only worth maybe two times going through the game. But, you could always sell it back or something.

In review, Granida II is a great game for hard core RPGers, and people that are looking for a new RPG because they have played everything, but if you are new to RPG's try out Final Fantasy X. It beats out Grandia II in EVERYTHING but battle system, but you might have other opinions about Grandia's battle system yourself. Go ahead, rent it or something because this game is definitely worth a try.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/18/02, Updated 08/18/02