• Sega Dreamcast Grandia II game.

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 P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); 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 See more ( javascript:void(0) )