Grandia II Hands-On

The first playable version of Grandia II for the Sega Dreamcast was present at Ubi Soft's booth during the E3 show. Only the battle portion of the game was playable, but it is a good sign of things to come for the sequel to Game Arts' sequel to the epic role-playing title. There were four characters in the party, each with special attacks, magic spells, and items. For the most part, the battle system is still the same from the first Grandia, where a gauge indicator shows when each character including the enemies gets their turn. The graphics of the game is quite impressive even at its early stages. Now that everything in the game is rendered in 3D polygons, each character's attacks (including magic spells, use items, etc.) are presented in a more cinematic style using all sorts of camera angles. This is proven so further when character casts a magic spell. Like Final Fantasy VIII or Persona, the presentation of the magic spell spans a little bit of time, and there's fear that it may become a drag once you've seen it for like a dozen times in the game. We hope that these can be skipped in the final version.

Grandia II is expected for a summer release in Japan, followed by a North American release within this year. The game will be published by Ubi Soft for the North American market.