This game is very dear to me. It was not only the first ever JRPG I played, it was also the game that made me better at English, taught me about consequence and danger and last, but not least what a great narrative can do to even hilariously bad voice acting and special mechanics you won't find in any other series and as I just finally completed the game since the age of 9, here's my honest review of this amazing game and it's endless wonder!

You hear the bagpipes play as the small town of Parm opens up before your eyes, showing all the different locations before meeting a girl who's searching for something... Or someone. And at the end of the wild goosechase you are introduced to what the girl wanted to find. The eccentric boy Justin who wants to become a full-fledged adventurer finally got found by the girl named Sue and her trustworthy pet friend Puff Puff (and NOT like in DragonBall) who needs him to finish a quest in town that they got challenged to by the town bully. But this is only the beginning as the young adventurers in-training will eventually spiral into more and more intense terrain of adventures that might be a bit too tough for two young kids and eventually leading to a great evil lying deep in the myths of an ancient civilization, Angelou.

This in comparison to GRANDIA II on Steam works like a charm. The only bugs I ran into were audio issues but it's such an old game by now that I didn't mind it, it actually felt fun at times when monster sounds looped yet it only happened once and that was it.

The gameplay is easy to get into yet very hard to master. You start with an overworld with a compass to guide you around the places you need to go which has two modes. FORWARD and BACK. At the time of release this was a magnificent feature but as the years went on, I noticed that it definitely has aged in not such a good way. It tends to confuse you more than enlighten you at times if you by mistake misclicked on the button and then it went back when you wanted to go forward and vice versa, but after a while you get used to this and notice your surroundings before moving on.

The combat system is smooth to understand. You have two categories, weapons and spells and while weapons are designated to up to 3 different types per character, spells are separated into 4 elements; Fire, Water, Wind and Earth. The way to progress other than levelling up your team is to keep using the same type of move over and over again until they levelled up (yes, weapon and spell profession essentially) and at certain intervals, you would learn new weapon Moves and Spells that could help you in ongoing battles. You had SP for weapons and 3 different MP values dependent on tier, 1/2/3. All of this melts down to a bit of a grind, but a really satisfying one as all you did made you stronger, nothing felt redundant at any point and in the later stages of the game, you could with clever tactics and planning make a boss completely unable to fight against you on even terms.

After 58 hours of gameplay and SEVERAL replays through the years on consoles, I can warmly, WARMLY recommend this game. GRANDIA is for many in Japan the Creme de la Creme of JRPGs and it has a cult following, loved by many worldwide. A great story and gameplay, an amazing soundtrack and last but not least AWFUL voice acting which I found absolutely hilarious, opening up a bit of my voice acting skills as I played this in it's entirety on stream and people loved it. 11/10 would hate on Sue again.