Grandia II

"Despite some charming characters, the game's disappointing plot and repetitive gameplay make it difficult to recommend"

I'm completely new to the Grandia series. I've never played a Grandia game before the PS2 version of Grandia II. However, when I saw this in a store, I decided to purchase it, since Grandia II had been a game that I really wanted to try on the Dreamcast, but never got around to. Either the game totally fell apart in its port to the PS2 or it was vastly overrated to begin with; whatever the case, I found it to be fairly disappointing and painfully average.

Graphics; The game employs a bright and colorful style and the character models are nicely drawn (although the in-game models look like something from the N64 era,) and the game makes heavy use of anime FMVs, which is always a nice touch. Although the anime doesn't look great, (characters up close look very strange,) the fact that it's there is nice, and some of the stuff shown in these cutscenes are very cool. Similarly, during battle, many of the moves done are FMV's, which is also interesting. These look really cool, and get the job done.

That said...I've never played the DC version, so I can't compare them, but based on what I've heard and the little that I've seen of the DC version, the PS2 version looks and plays much worse. Environments are terrible looking. Due to the pulled back, above-view camera, nothing is ever really detailed, and when going through towns, everything looks EXTREMELY tiny, giving the game somewhat of a claustrophibic feeling. There's also slowdown; tons of it. When walking through town, things slow down to Matrix bullet-time speed. I'm not exagerating at all. You walk through an entire town in slow motion. This makes town exploration a real pain. Slowdown sometimes occurs in battle as well. Not only that, but sometimes certain colors blend with others to create an annoying FLASHING effect. During 1 particular battle, (which, luckily, is very short-lived,) the rapidly flashing colors on the floor were extremely distracting. Other problems include some pop-up of shadows on walls, some small loading errors, (sometimes the Victory Screen will not fully load, which...while not a big problem, makes the screen sometimes hard to read,) an overall lack of polish and texturing, and there are some instances of total laziness. Near the end of the game, a huge creature is shown in an anime FMV. A few minutes later, the characters look at the creature again, and the camera cuts to the Anime CGI creature........but it's simply a shot from the Anime FMV that occured minutes ago, but it's frozen, and pixilated, and unclear. I then realized that this was simply an image from the earlier FMV that was put on pause. It was actually pretty embarrassing. Cutscenes are all from the above-view with text boxes, which is a fairly outdated technique. The good news, however, is that sometimes the camera will go in close, and there's plenty of movement on the part of the characters, which is good. Still, though, this method of storytelling is really showing it's age. For a Dreamcast game it didn't look horrible but the PS2 port, despite the more powerful hardware and larger disc medium at the developers' disposal, looks and plays significantly worse, and that's very unfortunate.

Gameplay; Repetitive. That's 1 word to describe the gameplay of Grandia II. It follows a significant pattern; a dungeon occurs. Beat it. Go to a town, find out something's wrong. Go to a dungeon, beat the boss. Then, leave the town. Another dungeon. Go through it. Get to the next town. Find out something's wrong. Go to a dungeon, beat the boss. Then, leave the town. Another dungeon. Go through it. Get to the next town. Find out something's wrong. Go to a dungeon, beat the boss. Then, leave the town. Another dungeon. Get to the next town. Find out something's wrong.............

This repeats for pretty much the entire game. And while the dungeons are not at all difficult, (they are not puzzles, luckily. They simply involve walking from point A to point B and getting in battles,) they really took me out of the story, and many seem very forced, and irrelevent. They just seemed to be thrown in to push the game to an acceptable length. The battle system is very good, though. It uses an ATB wheel but moves very fast and actually offers some thrills and excitement. As far as RPG battle systems go, the Grandia series is definitely on the higher-end as far as fun factor goes. The problem is that at a certain point, it becomes clear that using powerful skills are the way to go, so the game seems to expect you to constantly use the same skills over and over again, (watch those cutscenes over and over again,) and while not long enough to be annoying...the cutscenes do get fairly stale, and it takes a lot of the fun out of the battle system. Again, the battle system's great until about halfway through the game, when you basically have to use abilities again and again...

The game's difficulty is on the easy side. Except for a couple of difficult bosses that come out of nowhere, you often won't be challenged by anything in Grandia II. Whether that's good or bad is up to your own personal opinion.

As far as world interaction goes, exploring towns is made annoying because of the slowdown, which is too bad, because the towns actually have quite a few buildings to explore and enter, which is a refreshing change from many recent RPG's. And the colorful visuals (which remain at least somewhat intact from the DC version) are pleasing on the eyes. That said, going from location to location is handled with a point-and-click map, which seems pretty lazy on the developers' part, especially since you often have to "select" dungeons to pass through on your way to towns anyway.

This leads to another large problem; the game's linearity. People who complain about Final Fantasy X being too linear have no idea what linearity is. FFX was not a linear game: a game like Grandia II, on the other hand, is. There is never any point where you can freely explore this world. There are NO sidequests to participate in. You are stuck on the main storyline the entire time. I don't care much about sidequests, but what I do care about is the basic ability to (at some point,) be able to freely go from one point of the world to another. But Grandia II never gives you that option! Not only does that give this game absolutely no replay value, but it means that you have no control whatsoever over anything! (Except for the interactive conversations, but even those stop about halfway through the game.)

The game's really not at all bad, though. Despite this huge list of complaints, the first half of Grandia II is actually very fun, all things considered. The problem is that it's just so repetitive that by the middle of the game it becomes boring and its flaws become much more apparent.

Sound; The music in Grandia II is terrible. It's highly synthesized, sometimes headache-causing, and incredibly annoying. The music for Valmar, (The game's evil force,) was so lame and badly performed that it was laughable. While some of the event music fares a little better, (namely, the piano music,) and the final boss music is fairly cool, most of the music in this game just verges on the "annoying." Almost every dungeon in the entire game uses the same music, and it's nothing impressive either. I was surprised by this, because the Grandia series seems to get endless acclaim about its music. I just don't see anything special about the music here. It's lighthearted and fun, I guess, but definitely not groundbreaking in any way, and its highly synthesized delivery's pretty hard on the ears. I found it to be among the worst soundtracks I've heard in an RPG.

The voice acting is another story. But before I get into that, I will tell you that there's very little voice acting in this game. Only some events are voiced, and sometimes, not even fully. (The voices will suddnely "turn on" at a point during the event.) Most of the game involves reading text boxes with pictures displaying the facial expressions of the characters in them. (Luckily, there are PLENTY of these facial expressions, so none feel overused.) But when the voices do kick in, they are fairly impressive. Ryudo's (the main character,) voice is decent, although way too melodramatic at times, especially towards the end of the game. Tio, Melenia, Elena, and Mareg have very good voices, while Roan's voice is simply okay. Overall, though, the voice acting was very convincing, which is surprising. (In a good way.) It's too bad there wasn't more of it. It's (presumably) a result of the small Dreamcast discs, and, again, if Ubisoft had put any effort into this PS2 port at all, they would have called the voice actors back in and had them record some more because in its current form, it's bizarre and feels incomplete.

Replay Value; The linearity of the game doesn't do much to help the replay value, (as I mentioned earlier,) and clocking in at only about 32 hours of game time, (with no way to extend it,) ...there's just not much to do in this game. Once you beat this, it's over. And that won't even take you a long time. Whatever you do, don't get this game unless it's in a bargain bin.

Story; This is another weakness of Grandia II. The story's really nothing special. Nothing new is brought to the table, and it tells the same old RPG story. However, the first half of the game had promise; there are scenes where the characters sit around and have meals, and you control the characters in conversation. You learn a lot about them, and it seems that while the game won't have a great main plot, at least it will be a character-driven story. And the characters definitely are well-developed. The game's lighthearted tone is also very appealing, and the writing's sometimes pretty sharp, with Ryudo, the sarcastic hero, providing some funny comments that add interest to some cutscenes we've all seen before. The issue here is that after around the half-way point, the focus shifts away from these well-developed characters and instead focuses on a fairly generic premise that's just not particularly exciting.

Basically, Valmar, the evil god of the past, is coming back, and after the ceremony to stop this evil god failed, Ryudo is told to escort Elena, a sister of Granas, (Granas is basically the opposite of Valmar,) to the town where the headquarters of the religion (Granas,) is located. Once there, they learn of a way to stop Valmar; it's a sword by the name of Gransabar, and they must go and retrieve it. The generic plot becomes nearly unbearable once it goes "serious" on us; The 2nd half of this game attempts to be darker and more serious, removing almost all its charm in the process. The character developement scenes (Where you control the conversation at meals,) stop, the jokes end, and the game becomes nothing but a dead serious "save the world" scenario, and they really failed at it. The villain doesn't seem sinister enough, the danger never seems real enough, the dialogue (when trying to sound serious and important,) never seems convincing enough, ...it just doesn't work. So you end up with a game where half of it's a fun, humorous ride loaded with character development...and the other half is an overdramatic, "save the world" story that throws the strong character development away and tries too hard to be dramatic. The fact that the repetitive gameplay continues through all this makes the situation seem even worse.

Grandia II, despite getting off to a promising start, overall doesn't seem like anything worth recommending. There's not much of a plot, the world's only so-so, you have no way to explore, it's repetitive, the graphics are terrible, there's no replay value whatsoever, and the battle system, while good, is no reason to buy the game. The game, at 32 hours, is a decent enough length for an RPG, but there is NOTHING you can do to extend this length. No sidequests, no extra exploration, NOTHING. The gameplay was very fun for the first half of the game, but once you realize that you're basically doing the same thing over and over again, it loses its fun. It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, and the first half provides some good laughs and charming characters, and on the Dreamcast, where it actually ran well on the hardware, I might have even given it a 7/10 score. But this version, loaded with its technical flaws and (let's face it, the game looked outdated to begin with) small scale, is so painfully average that it ended up being just one big disappointment. The fact that this overly linear, repetitive, and shallow game showed it's face on the Dreamcast right after the release of Skies of Arcadia, and again on the PS2 right after the release of Final Fantasy X, is just embarrasing.

There's better stuff out there; there was on the Dreamcast and there is now on the PS2. Grandia II's just a lazy port of an outdated game; a game which feels like an RPG from the mid 90's that somehow ended up being released this console generation.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/23/05, Updated 12/01/08

Game Release: Grandia II (US, 01/28/02)