If you are searching for a gem of role-playing, you've found it.
Grandia, by GameArts, is a RPG. Well, they do sell a lot in Japan. the story takes place in a sub-industrial world; the main character, Justin, is (proclaims himself to be) an adventurer, and together with his friend Sue and the professional adventurer Feena, they set off to the discovery of an ancient race, while followed by the evil forces of the Garlyle Army. The storyline is interesting enough to keep you playing the game, at least to know what's about to happen, or how the plot will resolve. Maybe it dulles down a bit on the second disc, but still interesting enough.
The gameplay is not so different from other RPGs, except for a few elements. When entering in battle with a monster (visible on the screen, no random fights), Justin and the others appear on a battleground where they can move freely. The turns are decided by a bar, on the bottom of the screen, composed of a large portion called COM, and a small portion called ACT, with icons (representing characters) that runs continuosly on it; when a character reaches the ACT line, he will decide the action to make. Then, it will take him another little bar to actually perform the action, which can be a short or a long time, depending on many things (status, power of the spell, etc.). When done, the icon returns back to the beginning of the COM bar. This makes for a nice change from other RPGs, because a character on the ACT time can have its action canceled by a special attack. Also, the introduction of area-based battleground means that range-spells are present too, differentiating a bit from the usual All or Solo. Every character has Special Points and Magic Points. The division between SP and MP decides which moves one can actually use in battle. The level-up system is pretty normal (based on EXp points), but the single-stat level up is far more complex. Basically, every action regarding a particular element or attack, goes to advance your single-stat toward 100%. Affecting the advancement are the number of enemies (or friends) hit, the strenght of the attack and the actual level of the stat - of course, an higher stat takes more time to advance again. When a stat passes to next level, it will bring new points to some attributes. This goes for magic elements, and for different weapons: every character can use more than one kind of weapon, and depending on which one was progressed to 100, a different attribute will go up. This is nice because one can shape his characters in different ways, only changing the weapon. All in all, the gameplay feels refreshing, and no doubt you will enjoy it a lot.
The difficulty of the game is not so high. The "cancel" concept can make some fights more tactical than others, but generally you won't have many problems going forward. Add this to the general lack of sidequests (there is only one long extra dungeon, and two short ones), and you will get my drift. But Grandia is by no mean a short game: even with almost no sidequests, it will take you something like 70 hours to complete it. Compared to the new game in the series (Grandia III came out two days ago), this is a lot more. Perhaps the magic level-up system will get boring after a while, especially because some elements aren't suited to be used more than necessary, but you will probably want to go forward anyway. That's how the game is.
My only complaints are about the technical sides of the game. Granted, this is a port from a Saturn game, a system which was difficult to program for, but some things really bug me. First of all, the sound doesn't appear at times, and other times the music will continue even after the battle. Also, the games has a tendency on freezing in some areas. Of course, it could be my copy, but I find it easier to believe that it's the PAL release. on the bright side, the musical score is nice and never boring, and the graphics, while a bit crisp and dated (it's a 1997/98 Saturn game we're talking about, folks), do feel right on the spot for the genre. Especially, the 2D characters on the 3D world are an interesting change from, let's say, Final Fantasy VIII, and are quite detailed. The battles are all in 2D scenes, and maybe the backgrounds could've used a bit more details on them. The voice-over is pretty pathetic - they would have been better off leaving the Japanese voices.
Grandia was one of the best games on the Saturn, and the same goes for the PSX. While it does suffer from a stronger competition (Final Fantasy above all), this RPG definately surpasses many others present on the Sony console. At the price it's sold for now, given you can find it, it's a must for any lover of the genre. Also, if you like the game, you may consider the other titles in the series - Grandia II and III are great games as well, although they couldn't recreate the magic of the original.