"Xtremely Grand-ia!"

The past Grandia games were pretty good, especially Grandia II, which IMO, is the best out of the series up to this day. To get started with this review, I loved Grandia Xtreme as much as any other RPG i've played.

Graphics :

The graphics to Grandia Xtreme are fairly decent. Not that it matters anyway, but it's good none-the-less. The graphics of the spells casted are good and it really beats the spell effects of Grandia and Grandia II.

Graphics Score : 7/10

Story :

Okay, so this is one of the downfalls in this game. Not that of a big deal because the gameplay makes up for this. You play as an arrogant seventeen year old named Evann. He receives letters from the Nortis Army, telling him to join the army. Evann denies every single one and one day, gets kidnapped by the army and forcefully makes him do the dirty work. He is suppose to stop the Elemental Disorders, which are bad conditions or i'd like to call it just Bad Weather. =P I won't go on, but it isn't Grandia and Grandia II storyline, that's for sure.

Story Score : 5/10

Gameplay :

Now this is one of the major things that make this game good. Game Arts designed a totally unique battle system that gets you addicted to the game. You control Evann around several dungeons, meeting monsters along the way. The traditional random encounter is gone and finally, you can either try to avoid or fight the monsters. Now this is where it gets the really good scoring. Once you encounter an enemy, a rather medium sized circular gauge appears on the bottom right hand corner of your screen. There are icons for your characters and icons for the monsters.

These icons move from the beggining of the circle and stop first at the COM line, which is abbreviated to Command. This is the phase where you give your characters a command, such as doing a two hit combo, a critical, a magic spell, use an item, escape, do a special move, or use the A.I, which lets the computer do the action for you. Once you do this, that characters icon will start to move towards the ACT line, which is abbreviated for Action. Some moves such as the combos may go really fast but some like magic spells go really slow and leaves your character open for an attack and perhaps get cancelled. Once your character reaches the ACT line, he / she initiates the move.

Your characters can also initiate double, triple and even quadruple techniques that can unleash devestating damage on an enemy. Very good Game Arts and Enix!

The controls are good, especially in the dungeons. A small tweak has been added. In order to surprise or get a forestall on your enemies, you need to hold the X button down and approach the enemy. Getting the enemy from behind while pressing the X button gets you an even more chance to kill them before they can even act. Now if you encounter an enemy without pressing the X, Evann will get surprised a lot of times so the X button is quite handy.

Gameplay Score : 9/10

Sound :

The sound is good, not Final Fantasy ( Ehem, i'm not an FF fanboy! ) but it's good. Some battle music appear in Grandia Xtreme that has been in Grandia and Grandia II. The voices are fairly done well, except for Dean Cain's, who does Evann's voice. He seems to have that whining tone everytime I hear Evann's voice.

Sound Score : 7/10

Replayability? :

You can replay this game after the end. A secret dungeon awaits that has 100 levels of fierce combat!

Buy or Rent? :

I would recommend to rent this game first before buying it. It's basically a Dungeon Crawler with a lot of good RPG elements. If you like it, buy it. If you don't, then don't. Simple as that.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/12/03, Updated 01/12/03