Grandia II

The Good
I must say, the combat system is rather nice, And the towns are amazingly detailed and original. The mix of drawn animation and game animation in the special attacks looks awesome.

The Bad
For one thing, the voice acting. It's like they lined up the most wretched, annoying people on earth up and recruited them all in an act of pity. Why they dub games at all that have subtitles already built in I've never understood. Ryudo's voice was hauntingly familiar, and, upon further research, I discovered that it was done by the same guy who destroyed the ninja turtles movie as Leonardo, and the Akira dub as Kaneda. I loathe that man. Also, the little emotion boxes next to the subtitles got under my skin. You can already understand what the characters are thinking by their (grating) speech, and, since there are only four or five different character faces each, the designers ended up having to approximate most of the time. "She's exasperated. What's the closest picture we have to that?" "Fear, sir, that or berserk rage" "Ehh, let's go with the berserk rage, then. I always liked that one." You get the idea.

The Bottom Line
Great to play, but turn the sound down. And, while it makes a handy frisbee, I'd suggest you don't pay any extra for the accompanying music CD.