A generic adventure supported by an excellent battle system.
The story starts around a magical crystal that supplies infinite water to the village of Nohl. This crystal is stolen by force causing a solar eclipse that drowns the land in evil light. Lang, a rookie member of the vigilant corps must fight his way across uncharted lands to get it back and restore peace.
This story at no point offers any real wow moments but gets the job done in sending your party from dungeon to dungeon, and often those are both the same dungeon as there tends to be a lot of backtracking. The characters unfortunately fair no better with the young spikey haired hero, the wise old man, the tom boy girl, the giant muscle bound character and the obligatory child character. If you have played a JRPG before, then none of the above should sound new to you.
Graphically Legaia 2 is, I suppose solid would be the word. The characters are all very anime styled though the designs aren't that inspiring and the animations are pretty jerky with the slowest running in the universe. The textures are also pretty bland as is most of the dungeon design with your standard sewer, forest and ruins cropping up all to often. Despite this, for a game that came out 7 years ago it holds up fairly well.
Legaia 2 as an early PS2 game supports very little voice acting. None actually outside of a few battle victory lines which is almost a god send as it's pretty awful for every character. This game also has music, unmemorable background music, really nothing exciting.
With all these flaws you would think Legaia 2 would be a total write off however it does have one saving grace, and a pretty good one considering the amount it's used in the game; The battle system. Legaia 2 uses random turn based battles like many JRPG's but with a twist. Rather then just attack, each character is given a number of slots mapped to the d-pad, depending on what combination of directions is used special attacks known as arts can be unlocked and often chained together once more blocks are unlocked, leading to some devastating combos.
Apart from that the battle system has all the standard conventions of using items, gaining experience to level up after battle as well as it's own version of summons known as "origins". These summons are all linked one per character not of your choosing, all of which are essentially elementals such as fire, water, earth and lightning. Each Origin allows that player to use it's magic in a range of ways linked to it's element either for massive attacks or support magic such as healing, all of which use MP to cast. The Origins themselves also level up after the fight is over with their own experience bars occasionally unlocking more powerful spells as they go up the ranks.
The adventure lasts for a good 40 hours with a good amount of sidequests thrown in, but as previously mentioned there tends to be a lot of backtracking throughout the adventure that lets it down.
Legaia 2 while pretty average for the most part can be a fun game thanks to it's unique battle system however unless you're a hardcore RPG fan there are much better games for the PS2 available.