Grandia II has a good but simple battle system, but that's about all it has going for it.
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.