Grandia II Review

Disclaimer up front: this review might lack detail on Grandia II's battle system. I didn't get to see much of it. One area-of-effect spell — a firestorm, a tornado, an electrical storm — eliminated every enemy on screen for the vast majority of the game, and I'm not exaggerating. Monsters rarely got a turn. Commands I never scrolled down to remained mysteries for the entire twenty-three hours. There was a shield icon for a defensive stance, probably. And a white flag I assumed was "Surrender." Who would ever need either is beyond asking. I finished this game watching the same twenty-second spell animation on repeat, and the more I think about it, the angrier I get about what that does to everything else Grandia II tries to be.

The Battle System That Defeats Itself

Here's what makes this frustrating: there's a real combat system underneath the broken balance. A racetrack-style gauge shows incoming turns for all units. Toward the end of the gauge is an execution point where a command is selected, and a short distance further is the activation point where the command fires. The strategic hook: if you land an attack on an enemy between their execution and activation phases, you trigger a "Cancel" that resets their entire turn timer. It's a timing-based interrupt system that should reward awareness and positioning.

I gave this melee approach a brief attempt and found it unpolished. Character pathing is bad — units move in real time around other party members and enemies, taking unpredictably long routes across the field. This throws off Cancel timing and creates situations where you swing at thin air because an enemy shifted position just as your attack wound up. It feels messy. You take more damage, listen to cheesy shouts of "heee-ya!", and most importantly, spend far more time per fight compared to casting a single AoE spell that ends everything before the enemy acts.

That's the core problem. Why engage with a timing-based interrupt system when one spell — selected before the first enemy turn — clears the field every time? The optimal strategy is also the most boring strategy, and Grandia II never forces you to abandon it. I kept leveling up the same AoE skills and buying mana potions for the rare case my pools ran dry. Late game, when the difficulty supposedly ramped up, I had to start using two AoE spells instead of one. Both still fired before any monster got a turn. I'm not sure if this was overlooked in testing or if the testers simply never played the way any rational person would.

Drama Without Danger

When battles stop being battles and become pointless interruptions, the drama dies with them. There's a scenario I remember specifically: the party had to double back out of a dungeon. Enemies ambushed us at every turn — this was supposed to be intense, overwhelming, a desperate escape where survival was uncertain. The battles went down with two spells per usual. I thought nothing of it. Then a cutscene played where a party member sacrificed himself, screaming for us to run while he "held them off."

I sat there thinking: "Wait. We were doing perfectly fine. You didn't need to do that." The sacrifice was supposed to carry emotional weight. The combat had already robbed it of any. This is what broken balance does to a JRPG — it doesn't just make fights boring, it destroys the narrative's ability to create stakes. Every "desperate" scenario, every "overwhelming" ambush, every "impossible odds" setpiece landed with the tension of ordering coffee. The game kept telling me I was in danger. I never was.

The Story: Love Is the Answer (To Every Question, Apparently)

Ryuudo is an expert swordsman for hire, and he's very rude. Elena is a priestess, and she's very humble. I wonder where this is going. Then there's Millennia — a demon sharing Elena's body who's brash and flirtatious as counterpoint to Elena's purity. There's an android named Tio who doesn't understand what "having a heart" feels like. And a talking beast-man named Mareg who can smell danger in any environment, including outer space. Each character reaches their respective epiphany, walks to the center of the screen, and proclaims that love is the answer. I can handle corny. This sits well below my tolerance.

The villain's ideology — a god who has lost faith in humanity — could be interesting if the game engaged with it beyond "he's wrong because our heroes believe in friendship." The voice acting is hilariously over-acted, swinging between wooden line readings and scenery-chewing melodrama with nothing in between. Morals are delivered with the subtlety of a children's show: war is bad, love conquers all, believe in yourself. The emotional moments that are supposed to land — and I acknowledge this is a game many people love — felt hollow to me because the combat had already trained me not to take anything seriously.

The Camera: Accidentally the Most Engaging Part

This is going to sound like a backhanded compliment because it is: the most engaging part of Grandia II is fighting the camera. The isometric view is zoomed in an unhelpful amount, giving you a tiny field of vision in environments full of winding paths, dead ends, and branching corridors. With just a compass and constant camera rotation, keeping your bearings in caverns and forests becomes a genuine spatial challenge — like Breath of Fire IV's limited viewing angles, except here it's arguably worse.

I shouldn't be praising a game for making me wrestle with its camera. But when the combat offers zero resistance and the story offers zero surprises, the simple act of figuring out which direction to walk became the closest thing to engagement that Grandia II provided. That's damning, and I know it.

Production: Spotty, Dated, and Occasionally Bizarre

The HD Remaster improved resolution but couldn't fix the underlying production issues. Character models are blocky and unflattering — an early and unimpressive step from the PS1 era. Spell effects are rendered as two-dimensional cartoon animations layered onto the 3D battlefield, creating a bizarre cel-shade clash that looks cheap rather than stylistic. These AoE animations — nuclear explosions, volcanic eruptions, electrical storms — are both overpowered and low-budget, a combination that makes watching them for the five-hundredth time feel like punishment.

Voice work disappears entirely for long stretches and then returns at random, as if the recording budget ran out partway through and nobody planned around it. Environmental sounds fill the quiet scenes instead — repetitive machinery, birds, crickets looping for minutes while you read dialogue. The production values were middling for the Dreamcast in 2000 and have aged into something closer to "barely functional" in 2026. The HD Remaster on Steam is the best available version, but "best available" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

The Verdict: Broken Balance Breaks Everything

I know Grandia II has defenders. A reader named Plum once told me this review was unfair, that Millennia and Roan were highlights I'd overlooked, and that the game deserved better than my assessment. I respect that opinion. Millennia is the most interesting character in the cast, and I should have given her more credit in the original review. Roan's arc — a young prince growing into leadership — has more nuance than I acknowledged.

But my core complaint hasn't changed in ten years: Grandia II's AoE spell balance is fundamentally broken, and that breakage contaminates everything else. Combat becomes a formality. Dramatic scenarios lose their stakes. Character growth feels unearned when the journey it's built on posed no resistance. Hundreds of encounters ended with a single spell cast, and that fact is not something I can review around. It's the experience. Willingly ignoring the optimal strategy — pretending the spells don't exist — doesn't fix the problem. It just means you're doing the game's balancing work for it, and that's not my job as a player.

If you love Grandia II, I'm glad it works for you. For me, twenty-three hours of watching the same electrical storm animation while a cast of archetypes learned that love is the answer was enough. More than enough. Play the original Grandia instead — its sense of adventure and wonder does what this sequel's broken combat prevents.

All images are official screenshots from Grandia II HD Remaster (Game Arts / GungHo). Originally published March 2016. Updated March 30, 2026.