Grandia II: Like an old ride at Magic Mountain.

Many are probably too young to remember (or just didn't bother) but Magic Mountain retired the old Colossus rollercoaster - the first and only one I would ever get on in my life (close enough to the ground that it wouldn't result in instant death should something have failed as is the case with every other rollercoaster). But I digress.

There was so little that made sense with the way they ended the game it felt like the developers just ran out of suggestions.

What I Liked

Cutscenes - though there weren't enough of them.

Being able to level up and equip various skills and abilities to enhance the way your characters behaved in battle (certainly a small ancestor to the trend of AI settings).

For the time, this is a fairly long game. I did go long stretches of breaks (see below) but I think I clocked around 50 hours with 'advantages', so that's not bad at all.

What I Didn't Like

No overworld map. I don't like point navigation, at all. Sometimes I can tolerate it if the game doesn't fit with a map but this one was screaming for something.

The voice actors aren't bad, but their delivery of what they were given wasn't great. Roan is a standout as is Millenia; everyone else...ugh.

There's a distinct gap between your experiences in the first half of the game vs. the second half. There are times when it feels like you're playing two different games as far as the plot and story. The way certain characters act and behave, plus events that occurred that were told extremely well in the first half go completely ignored and forgotten for the second half; worse, some of them are just not explained.

That ending. Again...nowhere near as bad as Arc Rise Fantasia, but holy ham...what a terrible ending. Nothing concludes the way it should to leave the player satisfied. At all. The build to it made no sense, the climax which is a minor plot twist felt contrived and rushed and by the time credits roll, you're left wondering why they even bothered with character development in the first place.

It's probably good that the Grandia series were all separate games. I thoroughly enjoyed Grandia III and felt it was much better than this. I'm happy not to have to play it again, even though it's a throwback to the era when Working Delays Designs was working hard to delay your games (they didn't localize it - they lost the bid. Just saying it was during their prime).