I just can’t do it anymore.  I’m done with Grandia II.  I’ve just had it with the annoying characters, the kludgy dialogue and the shoddy port to the PS2.  I made it about 5 hours into the game and it showed no signs of improving.

The sad thing is I loved the original and I still loved the combat in Grandia II.  But it was completely overshadowed for me by the above issues.

So I’m going to hang onto Grandia III just in case and change gears completely.  I think I’m going to play Final Fantasy VIII, which is a game I started and gave up on twice.  I’ll write more about that later and why I feel it’s time to give it another try.

I’m about 5 hours into Grandia II and my initial impressions are very mixed.  As always, the battle system is amazing and I really wish they’d license it out to other RPG developers.  There are so many strategic options that it makes wandering around and fighting monsters a complete joy.  I also love the fact that there are no random battles.  Once you clear an area of monsters it stays cleared.  It makes me feel like my little party of misfits is truly wandering the countryside and getting rid of the bad guys.

Then I get to a town or a conversation and everything becomes really painful.  First is the fact that there’s no way to adjust the text speed and there appears to be no way to speed through the text most of the time.  Then at the end of just about every sentence there’s a 1-2 second pause before the little arrow appears indicating you can press the button to advance to the next part of the speech.  That 1-2 second pause, repeated over and over, is murdering my soul.

Then there’s dialog like this:

If your idea of fun is wading through rivers of blood, gobbets of flesh and gut fresh upon your lips, then yes, it will be fun.

It all just combines into a relatively painful experience so far.  It doesn’t help that the main character is a completely uninteresting, whiny little bitch.

So I’ll play a bit longer and see if things improve.  So far it’s a great battle system with some completely bizarre design choices.

Slowly, and without really meaning to, I’ve begun playing Grandia II.  I purchased this game no less than 3 separate times (once on the Dreamcast, once on the PC and now on the PS2) so I figured I should at least see what it’s like.

And it’s… okay so far.  I’m about two hours in so I haven’t really formed a solid opinion but it’s pleasant enough.  They battle system is fantastic which was one of the things I loved about the first Grandia.  One thing I do hate is the inability to have characters show all their text at once.  You know… when they… do this… sort of… thing.  It just irritates the hell out of me when developers assume I have the slow reading speed of a 2nd-grader.

So, for now at least, it’s Grandia II.