Make sure to play the Japanese dub, not the atrocious English one, and remove the lazy smoothening filter on the sprites. This isn't nostalgia; the sprites look terrible. Anyway, "Grandia" would have been amazing when I was 12, but it quickly goes into a lot of JRPG-ness I find even more trite now and I just didn't care for the story at all. It doesn't help that any female with an iota of sex appeal is going to have that exploited (Sue luckily escapes this), and it's actually a pretty sexist game. Narrative nonsense. Some dungeons play 5 second tracks that will not. stop. looping, even when the rest of the soundtrack is great. But it's hard to not love Justin and some story beats, even if the overall story is perfunctory and clichéd. And the combat system, which is highly acclaimed, is as every bit of good as you've heard.