Product description
-------------------
Ryudo has been hired to protect a young priestess who must
participate in a ceremony to halt the encroaching rebirth of
Valmar, the God of Darkness. Embroiled between the forces of good
and evil, Ryudo must follow his destiny and save the people he
detests so much.
.com
----
See if this sounds familiar: You're from an outcast mercenary
class that upstanding folk don't want around until there's
trouble. You're sent on a mission with an innocent, idealistic
woman with whom you don't immediately get along. Forces of
darkness, safely contained until recently, have escaped and are
threatening a world-ending clash with the forces of light, unless
you successfully intercede. This is one of the safest templates
for console role-playing games, as well as the story in Grandia
II.
Thankfully, however, everything else in the game is fresh and
provides hours upon hours of fun. The backdrops and character
designs are colorful without being flashy, the game has a great
pace (for an RPG), and players never have to stand around too
long for the next thing to do. Even the writing, within its
cookie-cutter plot, is smart, well translated, and occasionally
funny.
The game's strongest element, though, is its battle system.
Taking the best of turn-based and real-time battle engines,
Grandia II forces you to choose your moves carefully with respect
to timing and position. The battles are very simple in the
beginning, but grow increasingly complex as you fight larger
numbers of monsters with a growing party of allies. How you meet
your encounters--whether you initiate the fight, are ambushed, or
meet head on--affects both the timing of the blows and the
positions of the contestants. Battles emphasize counterattacks
and combination blows, but you'll soon find that movement and
defense keep you alive against the tougher enemies. Elemental
magic, items, and skill books are just icing on the cake. Even if
the battles do grow old, the random fights are fairly easy to
avoid, and a versatile AI option lets you cruise-control through
the rest.
Grandia II may just be the traditional role-playing game that
Dreamcast owners have been waiting for. The question of whether
or not it is too traditional doesn't matter, since it offers a
better experience than most that have come before. --Porter B.
Hall
Pros:
* Battle system creates interesting, complex fights
* Solid, traditional role-playing game for a system with few
others in the genre Cons:* Predictable plot and characters
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Review
------
The Sega fans rejoiced! Finally, the Dreamcast would be blessed
with not only a real RPG but the sequel to the Saturn's most
beloved RPG. And then the Sega fans were disappointed. Grandia II
is a great RPG, but GameArts has clearly reacted to the market
and made Grandia's sequel a less-risky, more middle-of-the road
RPG than its lauded predecessor.
It's not that the first Grandia's story was original or risky,
but what GameArts has come up with for Grandia II is another
heard-this-before scenario. Thousands of years ago, Granas and
Valmer, the ever-dueling gods of light and dark, engaged in their
final battle. The resulting cataclysm shattered the world and
created many seemingly impassible cracks in the planet's surface.
While the two gods were slumbering, a church to Granas was
erected, and this sacred order kept Valmer's evil forces sealed
away. One young girl, Elena, is the key to keeping the seal
intact. Hired to escort Elena to the seal-maintenance ceremony,
mercenary heroes Ryudo and Sky witness the ceremony's sabotage,
where evil forces are released onto the world. Pursued by the
mysterious and flirty demon-woman Millenia, Ryudo and Elena hurry
onward to prevent Valmer's awakening. Grandia II definitely has
some twists, but the overall story is largely uninspired and
rehashed.
GameArts has opted not to carry on the first Grandia's story and
instead has built a largely unrelated game with a similar feel.
Boyish adventurer Justin and sweetheart Feena are nowhere to be
found: This is an entirely new world, full of entirely new
adventures. Returning are the now-famous battle system, art
style, and interactive, rotatable dungeons of Grandia. To make
the game more acceptable to modern-day RPG fans, GameArts has
made this story more mature than Grandia's childish story;
however, this is also one of the game's weaker points. The
original Grandia's characters lent the game a sense of wonder
that Grandia II's characters just can't duplicate, and the result
is a game that feels far less "grand."
The original Grandia features one of the best RPG battle systems
to date. Fortunately, Grandia II builds on an identical system
that includes snazzy 3D graphics. Each character is given the
standard RPG options, such as attack and magic, but the
presentation is completely different from that of any other game.
The action proceeds in pseudo real time and pauses only for
commands and spells. The rest of the time the action is alive
with the thrill of battle. Because your characters attack
independently of one another, as do the enemies, the battles are
quick and exciting. But there's also actual strategy here, which
is missing from a lot of RPGs. Enemy and character placement
actually counts for something in Grandia II. Enemies are visible
in the game's many dungeons, and they pull you into battle on
contact ues by means of skill books, mana eggs, and lots of
points. Upon completing a battle, you are awarded a number of
magic and attack skill points based on the number of enemies
slain and the methods used to dispatch them. Dumped in two
communal pools, these points can be distributed among the party
to unlock new techniques or improve existing ones. And you can
equip characters with mana eggs that contain spells that you can
unlock via the magic skill points. Keeping the party's magic
completely interchangeable has its advantages, but this added
flexibility lessens the a of skill required of you in
battle. Skill books let you learn stat-modifying abilities, used
with the attack skill points.
While Grandia II's visuals are garishly colorful and smoothly
animated, the characters and monsters are all relatively low in
polygons and stand out from the impressively detailed 3D
environments. Spells, likewise, have taken an odd graphical
route. Some spells use full-motion video, while others do not.
The 3D characters are often superimposed over these FMV spells,
but sometimes they'll appear in 2D cartoon form. The overall
experience is inconsistent and unsettling, especially since
there's nothing about FMV effects that the Dreamcast can't
handle. Grandia II's sound is just like the original's, and it
features twangy upbeat tunes and lots of voices for battle and
story sequences.
With some of the original story's magic gone and a dumbed-down
experience system in tow, Grandia II is a letdown. It could've
been better had the developer opted to push the limits of the
game's hardware and RPG design. GameArts has definitely put
together a solid RPG with Grandia II, but fans of the original
shouldn't expect the Second Coming.--Michael Vreeland--Copyright
© 2000 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole
or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
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