This is my first Grandia experience. The game itself was ugly, had a ton of
bugs, extremely linear, but the fun battle system and decent storyline
made up for all the flaws. Speaking of being extremely linear, this
game moves in a straight line all the way through, there's no turning
back ever. Grandia II felt really short also.
----------Battle System----------
Grandia II prides itself on the innovative battle system, but I'm not
buying it. It's a little different from normal, but still pretty much
the same turn based action. I'm not ragging on it to much, it's still a
pretty fun and fast paced system, but not original by any sense.
Everyone's active time is shown on the same bar with the enemies as
well. When your time reaches "Command", everything pauses while you get
to send out your command. Then your character will be set in another
shorter part of the bar telling you how much time you have left until
your command will act. If you're hit while your character is waiting to
act, his command might be canceled, the same goes for the enemies.
That's the only real difference I can see, other than that it's the
same ol' same ol'. That's not a problem either because I enjoy turn
based RPGs the most.
The battles flow really well and never
slow down until a boss fight. That's good because I don't want to spend
hours trying to get at the end of a dungeon. Despite the generic looks
of the dungeons, I ended up liking to crawl through them looking for
battles and treasures. The enemies aren't random, so you can't just
stay in one spot to level up. Enemies show up on the screen as proper
representation of what you'll end up fighting. If you caught one, then
you'll fight multiple versions of it. Sometimes they roll in a pack of
2, if you caught them then you'll fight even more, there's even mixed
enemies too.
After each battle you'll gain experience, money
plus Magic Coins and Special Coins. These coins can be used to boost
your stats in your Skill books, or gain new abilities in your Mana eggs
or special character specific attacks. You get books after defeating a
boss, each book as 6 status boosters.
The camera only moves in
a 360 direction, and its VERY slow, this frustrated me a lot. The
camera is always in one position as well, so it makes it harder to find
ramps or even treasures behind walls. In towns, fields and dungeons you
have a compass. The compass tells you where to forward or back, or in
towns where the major houses are like Inns or the General Stores.
----------Characters / Story----------
The game followed the same trap as Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door.
You go to a town, find out the problem, go through a dungeon, fight the
boss, report back, walk through a field to the next town and repeat.
The story is good and the characters have a decent amount of
personality to make up for the repetition in story though. There's some
good twists all the way through to keep you interested until it ends,
but I thought it ended a bit to soon and felt short handed. Everything
feel to nicely into place to perfectly for them.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics on the back of the box are REALLY misleading. I know most
games do this, but not this much. I'll give it the benefit of the
doubt, but games like Skies of Arcadia look so much better than this.
Grandia II almost looks like a PS1 game rushed into production to meet
up with Dreamcast standards but didn't quite get everything polished.
The characters look alright, except for Roan, who looks like a little
girl. In the in game scenes, the characters don't have mouths either,
which is weird looking. The battles and spells all look great, as do
the cutscenes with a nice mix of CGI and Anime but the towns look like
crap and the dungeons look poorly constructed into mazes and about 4
different backgrounds for each level. All the townsfolk look alike and
you'll be fighting about 4 or 5 different monsters per level, not
counting the boss. Towards the end of the game you'll be fighting the
same monsters you did in pervious levels but with different skill
levels. This is pretty usually for RPGs to do this, but they at least
throw in some NEW ones here and there, Grandia II does not.
There's moments when the pixels will fluctuate, some will turn
transparent and back again. This happens all the time, and that’s not
even the worst thing about Grandia II. The biggest problem that should
of been fixed is the slow downs. It mostly happen in towns with alot of
people walking around, everything just starts to go into slow motion.
This is really annoying and almost makes the game unplayable. The
battles aren't effected though. You can’t skip the long battle
cutscenes either, even if you’ve seen them 100 times over.
----------Sound----------
All the main characters are voiced over, but they don't voice most of
the dialog, only the most important parts of the dialog in the game.
Roan has the most annoying voice, he sounds like a mix of a small
nervous child and a feeble 90 year old man. Ryudo sounds a bit whiney,
but I liked just about everyone else in the game.
The battle
music reminds me of John Tesh's NBA on NBC theme. This annoys and
amuses me. In some towns you'll hear generic guitar solos. There are a
few good tunes in the game though, like the slow violin track, but
truly nothing remarkable.
----------World Map----------
The world map is kind of large but it's separated off into sections.
Within each section are points, each point is a town or field. After
you go from the beginning point to the end point of a section, you're
off to the next section and you won't be revisiting that old section
for a while.
I didn't find any secrets, treasures or puzzles
in the towns, so I eventually gave up looking for them. Dungeons only
have a few puzzles each and anyone could figure them out. The only
problem with the dungeons is a combination of bad graphics, bad camera
angles and maze like tendencies, but they're short and easy to figure
out, since there's always alot of dead ends.
Once you walk
into a town the story starts and tells you want to do, like the game is
holding your hand all the way through. The townsfolk rarely have
anything decent to say, so they're mostly skipable. At the entrance of
the town there's ALWAYS an Inn to the right and a Shop to the left,
this gets old and gives me one more reason to not walk around the towns.
----------Time to Complete Game (first run through, last save before final boss)----------
37:28:07
No reward for beating it, although the ending sequence was about a half hour long.
