My all time favorite RPG by far.
The story is at first, kind of the basic storyline for any RPG. You are a geohound (mercenary guy) who gets hired to protect a girl who has to do stuff for a church. But then it gets interesting when you learn about this religion that they have and some battle between the good god (Granas) and the evil god (Valmar). Add in plenty of plot twists and you get a pretty good story. Also the sarcastic hero, Ryudo is pretty bad ass so thats always a plus.
The gameplay is what makes this game really stand out though. The battle system is by far the coolest thing I have ever seen. First off, there are no random battles in this game (THANK GOD!!!!!!!!). While not the first game to do this, it's always a plus to get rid of the stupid random battles. The way it works is that you can see the enemies on the screen and if you run into them, it initiates a battle. The AI isn't bad but it isn't great either. Sometimes you can walk right in front of the enemies and they won't see you, other times you will be really far away from them and they will charge at you. It usually works pretty well though. Also, if you attack the monsters without them seeing you you get an initiative bonus which puts your characters higher up on the ACT meter (will explain in a second) and bunches up the enemies so your magic will hit them all easier. But the opposite will happen if the enemies hit you from behind. Okay, onto the battle system. This game uses a unique system which I call the ACT meter. It has a meter in the corner of the screen with little thumbnails of all the characters on it. This includes your party and the enemies. Now each of the characters will move up the meter at different speeds depending on there MOV stat. When it gets to about 3/4ths up the meter it will pause the battle and let you select what you want that character to do. Then you wait for the meter to get to the act phase where your character will use whatever attack you told them to use. This works for all kinds of attacks or magics. This system adds a lot of strategy for battles because you can do things such as slowing down the enemies on the meter or speeding up your own characters. Probably the coolest part of this system is that in the time between when you select your attack and when you act it out, there is a period of time where your attacks can be "cancelled" or you can cancel your enemies attacks. There's nothing more fulfilling than cancelling out a boss's special attacks =). That's kind of the basic rundown of the system but it gets a lot more indepth than I can explain here.
Now, the special attacks system. there are two kinds of special attacks in Grandia 2. Magic and Moves. The moves that you can get are special for each character. When you win a battle your party gets Special Coins (SC's). after the battle, you can spend these SC's to buy special moves or upgrade your current moves for each individual character. It's a little bit like the Skies of Arcadia system but more flexible as you can upgrade you current attacks. Upgrading attacks will make the move stronger (obviously) as well as make your meter rise faster (as special attacks will make the meter rise INCREDIBLY SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOWLY at level one). On to magic. Throughout the game you get items called Mana Egg's. these are the source of your magic. As with SC for moves, you get MC for magic. You spend this MC not on the individual character but on the egg which you can equip to any one of your people. What this means is if you level up one egg a lot and then the character using that egg runs out of MP, then you can switch it to another character so they can use the magics instead. The way the MC works is that you get a menu for all the spells that egg has. you can, in the same way as moves work, either get new spells or upgrade current ones. However, you can only get certain spells when your egg gets up to a high enough level (it raises one level every time you upgrade or buy a spell). This system works really well and made the game a lot more exciting than the typical FF-clone.
The graphics in the game are incredible for it's time. Now that we have games like Oblivion, or any other xbox 360 games, the graphics aren't incredible. This in no way means they are bad though. The sprites, while not very exciting (they have no mouths and remind you of upgraded versions of the RPG maker sprites) at least have nothing bad on them. Nothing bugs me more than playing a game with voices that are off with the mouths. This brings me into sounds and voices. Video game music has never impressed me before. But Grandia 2's music was catchy. It's a little bit of a blend of church music and the typical RPG battle music. Once you get attached to the game, the music catches on too. The voiceovers are only done during important scenes to the story. When there are voices, though, they are really well done (except for Roan's voice, he's kind of annoying to listen to =P). They all fit with their characters and it is fun to listen to. This does make you wanting more voiceover scenes as they are very infrequent.
Overall, this is an incredible game and every fan of RPG's should definitely check this out. I played it through about a year ago and i just picked it up again and it hasn't lost any of it's glamour. Oh yeah, one last thing. For any of you who are worried about it being too short. Have no fear, this game will last you quite a while.