GRANDIA II HD Remaster Reviews

Great game!

It really sucks to have to do this to my favorite JRPG of this era (back when I played it on Dreamcast) but the game crashes so badly so often that its a roulette wheel if it is going to reset after every battle and lose you all your progress making this port is entirely unplayable. Add into that that there is a separate sound settings menu you have to launch from the steam settings (that nothing tells you about) which is the only thing that will let you adjust the footstep sounds to not be at earthquake levels and you have possibly the worst port that has ever made it to steam. I can only currently play this game as I have the limited run physical edition on switch. This Port is a joke and it is clear by now they do not intend to fix it. The game itself is very good and one of my #1 favorite jrpgs so I would recommend getting a copy for Dreamcast or the HD collection on switch or PS4 (though it will likely be scalper priced now) (and honestly, even as messy as the PS2 port looked at least it RAN unlike this version, so you may even look into that if its the easiest to get).

It hasn't aged well, the combat is still amazing, and very addictive, but there are well known bugs when it comes to crashing on the victory screen, ruining the experience. The dialogue is as slow as it was on DC/PS2 and the content of said dialogue is still poorly written and stilted.

its just a fun and old classic though the camera angles could use a bit of work

The Good: It's a much beloved classic RPG. The Bad: It's a terrible port. The Ugly: How bad is Lunar Remaster Collection going to be?

DO NOT BUY has a severe stability issue which causes the game to crash frequently, normally this isn't a huge deal but the game has no autosave function and also unskippable cutscenes. Such a shame a truly classic jrpg left to rot in the dust get it on a console is your best bet

I played it as a child, i love this game but i wouldnt recommend this game because it didnt age well.

[h1] Grandia 2 - Geohunting [/h1] [i] This review contains spoilers. [/i] [i]This review is about the Anniversary Edition and may not reflect the experience with HD Remaster version [/i] [b]TL;dr:[/b] Grandia 2 is remembered fondly by many. Suffering from technical issues like stuttering and instability, it still is fun game to play while lacking modern quality of life features. The story is in today’s world a typical RPG story but is elevated by good writing. [b]Recommended.[/b] [table] [tr] [td]Platforms played on[/td] [td]Windows desktop Steam Deck [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Pros[/td] [td]World design. Localization is well done. [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Cons[/td] [td]Very linear design, which means it's easy to lock yourself out of areas. Buggy with visual glitches, audio vanishing and other issues. [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Things to know?[/td] [td]Game is locked to 30 fps but allows for 60 fps in battles. Original screen ratio of 4:3 is only available for the Anniversary Edition Players can switch to Anniversary Edition from beta branch [/td] [/tr] [/table] [hr][/hr] [h2]Grandia 2[/h2] Grandia 2 was originally released in 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast and later to Playstation 2 and Windows in 2002. It was later released as a enhanced version called Anniversary Edition and later again as HD Remaster. While number 2 in the Grandia series, it’s not sequel to the first Grandia and features full 3D-graphics. [hr][/hr] [h2]Overview of the Story and Gameplay[/h2] Grandia 2 tells the story of Ryudo, a Geohound (mercenary) who takes the job to escort Elena, a songstress for the church. When the escort mission fails, he is tasked to escort Elena to the Holy See to meet the Pope. Grandia is a fantasy JRPG. You control a party exploring dungeons, caverns and forests while traveling from village to another. During battles you enter in a unique turn-based battle system that uses something called “IP gauge”. Your characters move while waiting for their turn, with very limited control from the player. The battles take place in a 3D arena with limited area. Abilities that hit areas are dependent on the character placement. Characters can learn skills that use SP or magic that uses MP. Magic is learned from mana eggs and only usable if corresponding mana egg is equipped. At beginning of the game, you are limited to 1 or even 2 and it takes quite some time before you have enough mana eggs for your whole party. You can also learn passive skills from skill books. Magic, skills and passive skills each use special currency. Either magic coins or special coins that are used to buy magic and skills. Speaking of parties, you can control up to 4 characters at time, each with their own specific weapons and armour limitations. You don’t have reserve characters nor any control on who is in your party at any given time. [hr][/hr] [h2]The Tech[/h2] This review is about Anniversary Edition and does not consider differences in HD Remaster. Grandia 2 has its PC settings in a separate app/launcher. The game supports multiple resolutions in different aspect ratios. However, Grandia 2 is played in 4:3 resolution. Setting up a higher resolution in full-screen mode just results into black bars on the sides. To get 16:9 aspect ratio, you can always switch to HD Remaster, which in turn disables 4:3 aspect ratio (with side effect of cropping some material). The players have options for MSAA Anti-aliasing up to 8x, V-Sync, Full Screen, Shadows and for pausing the game when losing the focus. Grandia 2 is hard capped to 30 fps, but an option to allow 60 FPS battles exists in the settings. The game logic is tied to the fps, so lowering the fps slows the game as well. The game itself suffers from graphical glitches like flashing objects, some objects becoming transparent and game suffering from stuttering when played on windowed mode. Should one disable the Pause game when losing focus, the game won’t pick up gamepad inputs, but it will pick up inputs from keyboard. On Audio side you have volume level settings 5 different audios, such as ambience volume, footstep volume and music volume. The game allows you to choose between Japanese and English voices. The audio quality is not the best however and can be really heard from the voice acting and music. One thing to note is that the cutscenes don’t have subtitles, which means that you may miss some of the story content if you don’t speak Japanese or English. Choosing a voiceover language does not really matter outside of battles. Only parts of the game outside of battles are voice acted. Most of the story is conveyed with text as was the norm of games of that era. One unique thing in the game is that many of the special effects in battles or even special moves are pre-recorded videos. Most of the cutscenes are 3D renders, but curiously one of the special moves uses anime video. I only experienced a single crash during my around 30 hours of gametime. The game is not supported on Steam Deck. The Anniversary edition works without tinkering and the energy consumption is quite low offering a nice amount of playtime. The game has cloud-saves so you can pick up your game progress on Deck while away from your computer. HD-remaster however does require tinkering to get it to run on Steam Deck. [h2]Miscellaneous[/h2] [b]DLC:[/b] The game has no DLC available. [b]Achievements:[/b] The game has 36 achievements. One of the achievements is tied to difficulty level and there are missable achievements. There is also one achievement tied to playing Anniversary Edition of the game. You can access Anniversary Edition by switching to a beta branch in the game settings. There is no new game +, so if you aim to do everything in one playthrough, start the game on hard mode. [hr][/hr] [h2]My opinions[/h2] Grandia 2 is one of those RPGs that I’ve meant to play for a long time. Now that I finally did it, I have to say it has aged quite well. The game design is very linear, you mainly go from place A to place B most of the time. The dungeon designs are not very complex and only few have any real puzzles requiring to be solved. The enemies are limited and don’t really respawn, making farming experience and other stuff an effort (there is a farming zone at the end of the game). The game mostly suffers from very, very long spell animations, which can make some of the battles quite a slog and quickly direct players instead to just use skills with shorter cast times. The story is nothing special, it has some very interesting beats, but I feel like they failed to properly incorporate these elements. It’s especially clear at last parts of the game, where some of the stuff is just dumped and then never mentioned again. The game has some minigames, but on PC the mini games are not working properly requiring cheese tactics to be winnable. The music is okay. There are some tracks that sound nice, but most of the time the tracks are not something you will really remember. The game’s writing is something I quite enjoyed. Some of the localized lines were great and really brought out the personality of the different characters. Localization was done well, and I didn’t really see that many typos. At very late game, it was clear that some of the things were rushed as you could see some of the windows not having correct sizes. The game also had some features that I would like to see to return in other games. Like discussing with the party when you take a rest at the inn. All in all, Grandia 2 is great game. There are better games and nostalgia goggles are heavy with this game, but it does some stuff very well. [b]Highly recommended.[/b]