Grandia Xtreme, despite its poor presentation and bare-bones storyline, may be worth playing for the combat alone.
Not-so-Good: Everything else
Grandia Xtreme, an off-shoot of the popular RPG franchise, is a RPG that mixes dungeon-crawling with traditional RPG conventions. The game sports a deep and rewarding combat system that stays engaging throughout most of the game, a true rarity amongst RPGs, but aside from that, the game is sorely lacking.
You play as Evann, an inexperienced Ranger (a person who can open special gates to allow for teleportation) who has a strong dislike for the army, especially a certain Colonel named Kroitz. Through a series of mishaps, you eventually find yourself forcefully enlisted in the army as part of a team charged with investigating the four elemental disorders that are causing massive chaos.
Being an RPG, a good deal of your time in this game is spent in combat. Thankfully, unlike many RPGs, Grandia Xtreme's battle system is fun and rewards careful planning over continuously hitting "attack". The battle system is a cross between real-time and turn-based combat. The characters all move in real-time on a 3-d plane, but once it comes time for a character to act, the game pauses to allow you to select an action. You have access to special skills, multi-character combos, magical spells, items, attacks, as well as the ability to evade and defend.
Special abilities are handled using SP which is accumulated through using other actions. Each character over time will acquire several abilities as well as team-based attacks with other characters. The 3D plane figures into these attacks really well, as you'll have to choose your moves wisely based on where the enemies stand on the field. The same is true for spells and regular attacks (if an enemy is to far away, your character will get fatigued before reaching his/her target). There's a lot of strategy that goes into the battles and you'll have a lot of different factors to consider. One of the most essential aspects of combat is using critical hits well. You have access to two basic attacks for each character: critical and combo. Combo is stronger, but critical hits have the ability to counter your enemy's action if timed properly.
Outside of combat, all you'll really be doing is buying equipment in town and exploring the games dungeons. Unlike most RPGs, you won't be journeying through various towns and such. Grandia Xtreme is layed out much like a typical dungeon crawler, where you'll be exploring dungeons, buying and selling stuff at town, going deeper into the dungeon, eventually making on to the next one, etc. etc. This whole process gets pretty repetitive and with little in terms of storyline to motivate you, the game can get pretty boring.
That statement might be a little misleading. It's not that the game has very little story, it's just that the storyline is pretty dull and predictable, featuring the same basic twists that you've seen countless times before. Aside from the story, the game's presentation is its weakest link. The character models are blocky and animations are extremely stiff. The dungeons are even worse, as you'll likely get sick of the same low-res, repeating geometry by the first floor of each one. The game packs a handful of CGI cutscenes. These are a nice change of pace, but pale in comparison to what's been featured in other RPGs (namely the Final Fantasy series).
The audio doesn't fare any better. The background music can be cheesy, overly excited, and often, just plain annoying. At its best, it's decent but never good or memorable. The voice acting is probably the games biggest offender. This game features some of the most wooden voice work I've ever seen and it doesn't help that the script is poor to begin with.
Grandia Xtreme isn't a particularly long game. You can complete it in well under 30 hours (possibly under 20). There is a post-game dungeon, as well as some pretty in-depth magic and skill systems to explore. You can also always revist dungeons to level-up, but the game isn't really hard enough that you'd need to. Other than that, there isn't much else to see in this game. Grandia Xtreme had a ton of potential in its fantastic combat system, but unfortunately, other facets of the game couldn't uphold a similar level of quality. If you can look past the ugly presentation and the lack-luster storyline, you'll find a really solid RPG combat experience that may be worth playing for genre vets.