YMMV / Grandia II

• Alternative Character Interpretation: After The Reveal that Selene has been infected by Valmar's Heart, it raises the question of how much free will she had during the events of the game.
• Anti-Climax Boss: While there is an in-story reason to it, as it serves to demonstrate that for all his braggings Zera is still a mere flawed human, the final boss is extremely disappointing, especially when compared to (say) huge complicated fights earlier on like the Eye of Valmar — he has only one part, does nothing but try to spam powerful spells at you over and over in a game where that strategy is trivial to counter, and even if that was still a threat at that point in the game he lacks Contractual Boss Immunity to Spellbinding Eye, meaning you can keep him paralyzed permanently and ensure that he never gets a single turn. Thankfully not so much in the Hard Mode added in the Steam release. His action rate is now insanely fast and he has much more HP. The general strategy is to debuff him to Act -5 to slow down his attack rate but even then his attack rate is faster than the player party. He still isn't the hardest boss, however, and Spellbinding Eye still works, albeit it is weaker.
• Awesome Music: Almost the entire soundtrack by Noriyuki Iwadare, but special mention goes to the final boss theme, which gives a hopeful yet intense feeling that showcases the "all or nothing" atmosphere greatly.
• Best Boss Ever: The second fight against Melfice, as well as the Valmar Core for being the most challenging bosses in the game, as well as requiring complex strategies and being accompained by Awesome Music. In fact, some were dissapointed that the Valmar Core isn't the final boss but the penultimate one, as the next one is widely agreed to be a letdown.
• Best Level Ever: Count how many tropes on the main page are about the events surrounding Mirumu Village.
• Complete Monster:
  • Pope Zera is the head of the Church of Granas with a devious plan to summon forth a dark god. Once a devout follower of Granas, Pope Zera went mad after learning that Granas died from the fight against Valmar. Believing that strength can only come from the darkness since light lost to it, Zera hopes to summon the Dark God Valmar in hopes of having a god. While trying to gather the different pieces of Valmar to resurrect, Zera has his subordinate Selene go around the world to kill potential threats and gather pieces of Valmar, giving Selene the Heart of Valmar. After learning that Elena has most of the pieces of Valmar, Zera has Elena get the final pieces by tricking her into thinking that it would stop Valmar. Once she was able to, Zera starts to reveal his true colors by having Selene execute his followers, to get Selene's piece absorbed by Elena. After Elena became a proper vessel for Valmar, Zera takes her to perform the ritual to bring Valmar back. When Elena was saved from the clutches of Zera, Zera decide to use himself as Valmar's vessel, attempting to kill the party, succeeding in claiming Mareg's life. Now with Valmar's power, Zera tries to end humanity by sending an army of evil monsters, and transform the dead into zombies believing it to be the fate of humanity. A nihilistic maniac, Zera believes that humanity is hopeless, and intended to purge them himself.
  • Valmar, the God of Evil, is a malevolent being that has plagued the world for many centuries. Summoned to fight off the dystopian rule of the followers of Granas, Valmar went out of control and killed indiscriminately, reigning terror. In his fight against Granas, Valmar won but was sealed away in order to recover. Divided into individual pieces, whenever someone stumbles upon one of Valmar's seal, the piece there would take forcibly take over the person, corrupting the victim by twisting their desire and then consuming their soul before making them his vessel, causing a disaster in the surrounding area. These include depriving people the sense of taste, or trapping them in an eternal sleep. After Pope Zera was able to resurrect Valmar, Valmar willingly merged with Zera to bring destruction to the world in hopes of finding the last piece he's missing to return to his full power. Realizing Ryudo has the final piece, he tries to corrupt him as well through mental attacks by claiming he's just a monster like him. When the party confronts Valmar himself, he tries to goad them to join him once more, before trying to kill them.
  • High Priestess Selene is a bloodthirsty follower of Zera who enjoys killing. The head of the Cardinal Knights, Selene is responsible for purging anyone associated with darkness, even if this means killing innocents as collateral. When she arrives in Mirumu Village, she was gladly preparing to burn down an innocent mother and daughter before being driven out by the party. Revealed latter as a devout follower of Zera's plan, Selene was tasked with making sure that Elena was able to collect all the pieces of Valmar so she could be used as Valmar's vessel, even if this meant endangering the group by summoning the Body of Valmar. Once the party was able to collect most of the pieces, Selene then slaughtered the people of the church and the people who went to them for help, cutting them down with her mindless knights. When the party confronts her for her actions, she reveals her motivation was that she believes the only thing worthy for her followers was death and that she herself has a piece of Valmar which she took willingly, before fighting the party so she or Elena can have all the pieces needed to summon Valmar.
• Demonic Spiders: The Devils in the Special Stage. They have the spell BA-BOOM, which has its damage boosted to inflict enough damage to kill your entire party even with full HP and very high defense. If you see one charging the spell, you'd better cancel it. The good thing is that the only area they appear in is fully optional, but it's still required to obtain the final Mana Egg and some other good items.
• Even Better Sequel: Grandia was considered an excellent and groundbreaking JRPG, albeit with some notable flaws. Grandia II improved massively on these flaws (particularly the quality of the voice acting), providing an absolutely fantastic story, and was considered to have the best combat system of any JRPG at the time and for quite some time afterward; until the PS2/PC ports were released 2 years after its initial release (both considered Porting Disasters), it was considered one of the Dreamcast's Killer Apps for JRPG fans, and is widely regarded as the second-best JRPG on the console after Skies of Arcadia. Its only real flaws were its somewhat short length and relatively easy difficulty.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Why is Ryudo able to resist being possessed by the Horns of Valmar? It's because the pieces of Valmar feed on people's desires, either good or bad, and at this point in his life, Ryudo had become so cynical and apathetic that he had no real desires, beyond his survival and that of his friends. The Horns had very little to feed on.
  • Why can't Millenia just tell Ryudo Elena's idiotic plan to get herself killed to save Ryudo that would probably also get Ryudo killed anyway? Its because she IS Elena,formed from Elena's suppressed desire and the desire Elena is suppressing is her desire to forget all about her mission and throw herself at Ryudo. She physically can't tell him because Elena is so determined to keep it from him, so she resorts to what she can do, attempting to save Ryudo's life by trying to steal his heart and ruin Elena and Ryudo's relationship, which by that point doesn't work either because Ryudo is in love with both girls and can't choose.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The "Spellbinding Eye" technique can turn anything into an immobile, incapacitated punching bag. In a subversion of Contractual Boss Immunity, this includes the final boss. This is slightly nerfed in the Hard Mode, but nothing is still completely immune to it, it's just not guaranteed to work anymore and has a shorter duration.
  • Equip one character with maxed out Attract ability, to ensure they are the only ones ever attacked, along with every defensive skill book ability you can find, then have then defend every round. They will be taking single or low double digit damage even at the end game, rendering every boss a joke. Add in the Dragon Scales accessory, which No-Sells any attack that does less than 200 damage, and laugh at your enemies' feeble attempts to harm your nigh-invulnerable tank, without even bothering with the Defend command.
  • Early in the game (really early), you can fight enemies that drop an item which permanently increases your Defense. Grind enough and you are practically invincible. The only way to get killed using those is when facing the Bonus Dungeon's Demonic Spider enemies that can wipe out your party in one hit. The Valmar Pieces and Pope Zera-Valmar are ridiculously easy.
  • The ability that reduces the action-time cost for using items is also a severe one in combination with the reusable staff that does an AOE attack... which delays the turn of anyone it hits, meaning that with someone using it at enhanced speed, most enemies will barely get to act at all.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In Liligue city it's suggested that a disease causes people to lose their sense of taste, somewhat goofy at the time but post-2020 this is one of the symptoms of Covid-19
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: A major complaint by gamers was the game's relative easiness, with a couple bosses as exceptions, largely because certain combinations of skills would let you break the balance over your knee. This might be the main reason why there's a hard mode in the Steam re-release in the first place.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: An initial playthrough should only take about 10-20 hours, depending on how good you are, and replays should take even less. The game is notably considerably shorter than its predecessor, about half as long or less. This is less because of the length itself, and more that the game doesn't give a lot of time for expanding on certain aspect and can sometimes rush from beat to beat without giving each aspect the time it needs to be fleshed out even if the ideas were good, particularly in the second half of the game where the pacing and reliance on a few Ass Pull drew a lot of criticism. Going out of your way to speak to all NPCs and hunt down flavor text will lengthen the game noticeably.
• Narm: Aside from being an underwhelming battle, the final boss is ridiculous to look at. Its design is a pale blue butterfly like figure, which is solid enough. However when it attacks◊, Pope Zera's face pops out like an inflated balloon accompanied by an angry and for some reason cross-eyed Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises face and shouting out lines at the top of his lungs.
• Narm Charm: The themes, A Deus and Canção do Povo, are supposed to be in Portuguese, but the singer's Japanese accent and use of Japanese syllables makes it sound anything but. Even Portuguese speakers couldn't make out the language of the songs at first. Although it doesn't stop many people, including Portuguese speakers, from finding the themes enjoyable to listen to despite the consistent mispronunciations.
• Nightmare Fuel: The game is full of this really, only partially covered up by the cute graphics.
  • The Moon of Valmar is in fact a gigantic egg, complete with an enormous eye looking down on the world below. Oh, and Mareg, the Beastman who's been a part of your party for two thirds of the game? He dies torn apart and eaten alive by hundreds of critters.
  • There was also the part where you enter a young girl's soul, which, due to her internal suffering and Demonic Possession, gets more dark and twisted the further in you go.
  • Selene releasing the Heart of Valmar. Yick.
  • The Body of Valmar is a massive, shuddering lump of flesh.
  • The animation for the Claws of Valmar's special move, Grudging Claw, requires the target to be sealed in a giant sphere which a large bony clawed hand then squeezes... making it ooze blood. The claws then squeeze until the sphere bursts with a lot of blood and gore spraying around. Needless to say, not one for the squeamish.
• Player Punch: Mareg's sudden, brutal, and utterly selfless death. Rather than worry poor Tio (who is beside herself), he stays behind at the bottleneck and smilingly says that he'll be right along. He's doing this with a mouthful of blood, you see.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Playstation 2 port was notoriously buggy and suffered from frequent slowdowns, due to the lack of available Video RAM on the console.
  • The PC version (not the Steam release) even more so. It's possible that Millenia, during her Hopeless Boss Fight, will not end the fight to progress the story, and will just wear you down until you inevitably start over (this happens if you run the Tutorial in the Carbo Village Weapons Shop before fighting Millenia). It's also possible for the characters' mugshots to randomly replace item textures in battle, so monsters drop Millenia coins or Roan bombs.
  • The Switch port, which seems to have the same issues as the Playstation 2 version, but worse. In addition to the graphical issues inherited from the Playstation 2 version, audio issues abound even with almost a year of patches. Thankfully most of them can be remedied by playing in Docked mode. But seeing as to how the Switch is meant to be a portable console, the half-assed quality of this port (and the original Grandia's, which were bundled together in one pack) are inexcusable for a "remastered" game released at its pricepoint.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The standard battle theme resembles, of all things, "Roundball Rock", the NBA on NBC theme from the 1990s.
• That One Boss:
  • The Eye of Valmar deserves a mention for being a surprisingly difficult boss in a game that was otherwise not too hard until that point.
  • The second fight against Melfice also deserves a mention. Not only he's incredibly fast, but he has his own version of the Sky Dragon Slash, which hits the entire party and can easily kill your allies. On top of that, he becomes fiercer when you destroy any of his parts, and he can really surprise the player given the game's overall difficulty, aside from the hard mode and an achievement where only Ryudo must deal damage to him in the Steam re-release, which only makes him even harder.
  • The crowning example has to be the penultimate boss, the Valmar Core AKA the Big Bad Zera. He has three heads which act as the Core's main offensive actors, with the Core itself behind. All of the parts are very hard, and on top of that the main unit can use an incredibly strong move that does massive damage to the party unless it's canceled, and a special move that zeroes out all buffs and debuffs you may have cast. And in Hard Mode, well...
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Roan sounds more like a girl with a stuffy nose than a boy. He also looks more like a girl than a boy, especially after getting his prince(ss?) outfit.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The Eye of Valmar. The difficulty depends on how well you have been leveling up your AOE skills and magic.

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