Grandia 2 is a great Playstation 2 game, but it has numerous flaws that can make gameplay tedious unless you are a RPG fan. Terrible graphics and sound effects combine with occasionally poor gameplay mean that Grandia 2 often gets extremely tedious. Even with these flaws, Grandia 2 is still a game worth buying.
The graphics in Grandia 2 are comparable to those of Final Fantasy 9, a PS1 game. But on the PS2, its graphics just look shameful. Although it was initially released on the Dreamcast, it is no excuse for such socking graphics. The background is too blocky and the characters lack basic facial items, such as noses and mouths. Compared to the likes of Final Fantasy 10, Grandia's graphic are horrid.
Music is mostly of a high level, although there is little variation in tunes: you listen to a one minute loop of music for hours on end. It does tend to get tedious to listen to the tunes as you near the end of the game. Only a little of the conversations between characters is voiced, and a again, it is a mixture. Towards the beginning of the game, the vocals are done extremely poorly, but as the game progresses, they improve substantially. Sound effects are done unforgivably poorly. For something that is fairly easy to do, they are done horribly. They are far too loud and they grate along.
Good story. Although it is fairly simple, the betrayals in the last half of the game add suspense. The only problem with the story is it takes far too long to actually start. The first ten hours of the game are spent building up the plot for its beginning.
The gameplay again, like most aspects of the game, it is both good and bad. I will start off with the good side. The battle system is the best of any RPG that I have played, mainly because of the freedom you are given. Leveling up is also handled well, with each character keeping both individual moves but changeable magic. Menu management is also neat and tidy. Now, for the bad. There is FAR too much aimless wandering about. Most of the game is spent toiling along roads from one place to another. Sometimes , it can be up to 3 hours just spent walking and battling on a road. This gets boring after a while. On the topic of boredom, magic animations are made too long. When you are using something all the time almost it is very annoying to see it last for over 30 seconds at a time. These detract from the brilliant battle system.
Grandia 2 takes almost exactly 40 hours to complete, which is a decent enough size for a game, considering some take only 14 minutes. Disappointingly, there are NO option quests, making it a very linear game.
Never have I played and finished a game before and never wanted to play it through again. Although Grandia 2 is good fun, the pathetic absence of side quests, the absence of any kind of incentives for repeat play, the boring gameplay and the simple story mean that after it is finished, once, there is really no point to play it again.
Grandia 2 is a great game. The majority of its flaws are easy to forget. At the moment, if you have ff10 and are looking for another RPG to play, get Grandia 2. In Australia, where I live, we get games about 6 months after America, and sometimes we don't get them at all (like Chrono Cross or Xenosaga), so there may be other good RPG's out, like Kingdom Hearts that are well worth buying instead of Grandia 2.
Grandia 2 is a game that RPG fans will probably love, if you can look past the boring gameplay
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