Why am I doing this now? It's Dreamcast day.
Every Dreamcast day (September 9th) I usually dust off my Dreamcast for a bit. In recent years as more and more of the Dreamcast's worthwhile games got ported to more modern platforms I've drifted to some of the last games that remained effectively Dreamcast-only: Jet Set Radio and Grandia II (for which the Dreamcast version remained the best version in the case of the latter). Now both have good PC ports, so I decided this was the right time to install the recent PC release of Grandia II (on Steam and GOG in case you don't know) and at least start a new file.
What's up with Grandia?
Grandia II in particular is one of my top JRPGs. It's one of maybe three or so I've completed multiple times. It doesn't do anything particularly huge to set it apart from other JRPGs. It's one of those things that hits all the genre pillars really well or at least well enough if you ask me, two in particular.
The game's actual plot is about as typical JRPG as you can get: Fantasy land with a cast of conflicting plucky characters and a corrupt Roman Catholicism analogue up to shady stuff etcetera etcetera. I think it's one of the games originally used to formulate that "Console RPG Tropes" list from way back. What sells it however is the execution of the writing for the characters, dialogue, and English localization. People might talk shit about the voice acting in 2015 and I guess that's fine, but it sounded a clear cut above almost any other game that came out in 2000, and even today I still think the actual writing holds up. A crutial difference from other standard JRPGs is how the main character is more of a world-weary-but-golden-heart jerkass with sibling rivalry problems instead of a wide-eyed 14-year-old. Grandia games even have this cool mechanic where at some points of the story the party will gather around a dinner table and you pick which ones talk as they dynamically bounce lines and context off each other. in Grandia II this has always been one of my most anticipated occurrences.
People will probably tell you the most stand-out thing in the Grandia series is the combat which is one of the best and most unique turn-based systems around. It's kind of like conducting an orchestra made up of time, and your enemies. Things move in real time as every character in a battle has a corresponding icon all moving along the same progress bar in the HUD. When a character's icon reaches the "command" point the gameplay freezes as they enter a command (you enter a command if it's one of your party) after which the icon quickly moves to the "action" point at the end of the bar whereupon they do their next action. The kicker is, if a character is hit with a strong attack between the "command" and "action" points -- after they've received a command but before they actually carry it out, that action is canceled and the character's icon is sent back about halfway across the progress bar. When you finally get the hang of it the system quickly becomes something that feels fast but also deep despite basically still being turn-based.
Grandia game bosses can feel uniquely epic too. Instead of one "character" they're usually represented in the battle as several "characters" based on their different limbs and whatnot. Depending on the difficulty Grandia bosses can turn into 60-plus-minute wars of attrition.
Oh, and you thought Final Fantasy summons were elaborate? How about a game that devotes entire anime FMVs to high-level spells?
Outside of that Grandia II can be markedly more linear than most JRPGs with almost no side quests to speak of, so most people finish it in a "mere" 30 hours.
Uh... there you go I guess. I basically wrote this up by ear hoping I could get at least one Squad person to buy the game and start a file.
