Grandia II is kinda....

[Aeolus]

that power of love bullshit and the best character in the game leaving for a retarded reason pissed me off.

So which game are you talking about here? (Well okay, it's probably not 2 since Ryudo never leaves as well as Millennia I guess.)

[Alisha]

grandia 3. 2 is a classic.

[Dincrest]

And once again, we have a Grandia thread where the forgotten Grandia game remains forgotten.  Grandia Xtreme.  It is the forgettable Grandia game for obvious reasons, but I still think it had the most refined form of the Grandia battle engine.  Otherwise, it wasn't great.  At least Grandia 3 was memorable, albeit memorable for all the wrong reasons. 

[Agent D.]

I didn't like grandia xtreme at all, the characters were odd looking, the environments were ugly, the music sucked. It felt lile they took all the bad aesthetics from every grandia title and mashed em together here. However, the battle system was probably the best of every grandia title. Not saying much though, grandia has a terrific battle system. I remember when I rented it from blockbuster (yeah that long ago, lol), the disc was like pristine. The guy behind the counter said he'd never even seen the disc before, and he worked there for 3 years. I was surprised till I started to play it. God was I bored in seconds. Even the dialogue was just bleh.

I'll stick to pre ending grandia 2 for good dialogue.

[Dincrest]

Belt headband! 

What I liked about the first two Grandia games was that they were personal journeys for the protagonists.  For Justin, it was a coming-of-age journey and convenient plot devices be damned, we saw him come of age.  For Ryudo, it was a journey of redemption; sappy endgame sequence be damned, Ryudo did find that being a festering cynic is not quite synonymous with being a realist and that there are positive aspects to reality too.  I don't recall any journey theme for whatshisface in Grandia Xtreme.  And Grandia 3's Yuki... it could, nay SHOULD, have been a simple journey of a boy chasing his dream and leaving the nest.  A good theme to tie into that could, nay should, have been his mom's psychological journey coming to grips with her son becoming a man and not her little boy any more (though any mom will always view her son as "her little boy" no matter how old he gets.)  A simple tale of a boy, his plane, and the changing dynamic of his relationship with his mom.  But it definitely didn't happen that way. 

My wishful thinking would be that the next Grandia game returns to form where the theme is a personal journey for the protagonist.  And even more wishful thinking would be to have the next Grandia game have a female protagonist, but that's probably stretching it. 

[Yggdrasil]

Haven't read this thread too much but, I was reading a little bit about the series in Wikipedia and saw Grandia Online.

What happen with that?

[Annubis]

Didn't it get stuck in eternal development hell?

[Aeolus]

Vaporware. Same with that SaGa MMO and a bunch of other MMOs.

Everquest proved you could make money off of MMO subscriptions. WoW proved that nobody but WoW could make money off of MMOs (unless you were FFIX since you had the console MMO field). Everybody else either went free to play with premiums at a price, wasn't fantasy based, went under, or never left the drawing board.

[Wingman]

I really liked Grandia II, but only got to play about 10 hours in on the Dreamcast. If I remember correctly, the PS2 version suffered from a lot of slow down.

[Annubis]

Oh yeah. On the PS2, the FPS in towns would sink drastically.
Dungeons/combat were fine though.

[Monsoon]

I'm actually in the middle of replaying Grandia II right now - the storyline isn't the most sophisticated piece of work, but the main characters are appealing and the systems in place for combat and customization absolutely hold up.  I'm playing it on the PS2, and there are definitely slowdown issues present in towns and during some spell/skill animations.  The voice work is spotty at a technical level, but the individual voice performances are about as good as I remember (The Little Mermaid's in it!).