It's.. So.. Beautiful.. *eyes light up* :D
The flaws (though hardly any) are easily overlooked once you get into the story.
First, The characters:
The voice-acting is actually decent, nothing to get cringe-worthy about.
The characters are fun-loving, nothing bland and all have their own story within the main storyline, plus they're very nicely detailed and are easy to warm up to.
Graphics:
The graphics, in my opinion, are beautiful. Nothing has to be realistic looking to get my eyes sparkling, the cartoon effect that the graphics give makes me love the game even more. Some may say the graphics are childish but deep down they love them too! ;D I haven't come across any glitches within the game, it's a solid-built game by my watch.
Gameplay:
In some ways it's the same as the first Grandia, the battle system for example:
You see the enemies running around as you explore the world of Grandia, no random encounters so you can easily slip by, sometimes unnoticed, if you don't feel like entering into a battle.
Once in a battle, yourself and enemies take turns to attack, it's real-time based, in a sense. There's a bar at the bottom with the enemies (numbered A, B, C etc) and the faces of your party members, depending on how fast the characters speed is it effects how fast their face moves along the bar, once your face gets to a certain point a menu will pop up giving you your options to attack, use items/magic etc. Using a 'critical' on an enemy deals a certain amount of damage (not as much as a normal attack would deal) but it knocks that enemies face back a notch giving them a longer wait until they get their chance to attack.
Mana eggs:
You obtain these eggs differently than the first game, in this one you'll get an egg after defeating a certain boss. These eggs have their own magic which you can assign to a character of your choice, one could contain tons of fire magic, another could contain most healing magic. You can also level up the abilities contained within the eggs to give you the most effect from each spell.
Books:
Books are some-what like Mana eggs, you obtain them after a certain boss, the difference being that the books are used to level up HP, MP, Strength etc then you assign an ability from the book onto a character of your choice.
Each character has their own, personal abilities which have greater strength than their normal attacks, these can also be leveled up.
It's easy to get the hang of when you see it for yourself so don't worry.
Storyline:
I always say the storyline is the main aspect of a game, especially RPG's, and this game has that great storyline to fill it out.
I'm not going to give anything away except..
It's about a boy, called Ryudo, a Geohound who has a 'pet' talking eagle named Skye. They travel together doing work for others, to get paid obviously but one of his jobs go terribly wrong and he's forced to save the world from evil ;D Make sense? I doubt it since it's extremely brief but you'll know what i mean once/if you play it.
Overall this game is brilliant, though a step-down from the first (in my opinion)
The storyline is great, the gameplay is an instant classic and the graphics are something to love and the characters are easy to warm up to.
Overall i give this game an: 8.8 but because of Gamespot i'll go with 9 ^_^