alt Hacker NewsI haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun.
Unfortunately in my casual playthrough I accidentally broke the combat system and by the end of the game nothing was a challenge; as with many other games there are "resistances" and "vulnerabilities" but also as with most non-Shin Megami Tensei games of the era, they aren't really strong enough or frequent enough to matter. I just pumped all my upgrades into Fire upgrades until eventually my routine end-game battle was one character to wipe all the enemies in one move, move to next battle. You could easily pump an elemental bonus enough to overwhelm the resistances the enemies had. More resistances and immunities distributed around would have helped prevent a degenerate strategy.
And of all the battle systems to have a degenerate strategy for, this one hurts the most because it is otherwise so good.
(Sadly, Grandia III was never completed. It was released... but it was never completed. The game as shipped has visible gaping holes in it, which is sad because what is there was quite good.)
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It's very common with RPGs of that era (and all eras really) that the developers don't test every edge case and end up leaving ultra-powered (and just as many or more close to useless) builds in the game. Every feature added increases the possibility of breakage by some quadratic factor. Once your battle system hits a certain level of complexity it's close to inevitable.
Even carefully developed modern games like Baldur's Gate 3 have game breaking build options.
I think besides the mechanics, the other thing that makes the grandia/grandia 2 battle system so fun is how snappy all the animations and interactions are. You never really feel like you're waiting for things to happen even though it is semi turn based.
Grandia II is the only JRPG I've ever really truly enjoyed the battle system of. I feel like with a lot of JRPG's I'm sitting around doing math.
Grandia 2 was largely just timing things such that if you did it right you would bonk the enemies turn back repeatedly and they'd never get to attack. Way more fun.
Grandia II's battle system was really great but the story and voice acting was so rough haha, I ended up not caring about any of the characters and skipping all that I could to get to the combat
When the core mechanics are that good, it's frustrating to see them undermined by soft balancing
Grandia II battle system also breaks when you get Teo. An area effect Critical? Basically allows you to completely control every battle even if you haven't invested in a board wiping Uber character.
My first experience with Grandia was Grandia II as well but on PS2. I ended up getting the PC version as well, which at the time was fairly novel to see JRPG's on PC. Grandia II is still one of my nostalgic favorites. As you mentioned the typical turn based combat with positioning was a fun addition that could change your combat experience each time. Was like an evolution of the Chrono Trigger combat system.
Im probably a fool for posting this but this thread and these responses warm my heart. It's good to see so many people were affected by this era of gaming from Sega the same way that I was.
The battle system in the later SMT games, especially after 3 is one of the best turn based systems I've ever played. It was a refinement of FFXs in so many ways. It encouraged you to "break" it as it were.
Then there's games like Grandia 2... And Shenmue. God, I love Shenmue these days. The first one is brilliant in so many ways I didn't recognize when I played it when it came out. Absolutely wonderful game. The track that plays when Ryo and Guizhang fight the Mad Angels at the dock, "Earth and Sea", takes me back. For me, it's the most perfect Christmas game that Sega ever made