Story	6/10	Characters	6/10
	Graphics	6/10	Music	6/10
	Gameplay	6/10	Extras	6/10
Reviewer: Chi Phan Final Score: 6/10

As part of the special edition Growlanser Generations deluxe package from Working Designs, Growlanser II was re-introduce to a whole new audience on the Playstation 2 console. This was the first time this game was ever introduce to the North American market but originally the game was introduce in the Japanese market during the early Playstation days. How will an early Playstation game fair on the Playstation 2 market? We're going to take a look at that right now.

We are in a time of war. Humankind shall fall before me.      The story began with the character, Wein. After graduating from the Military Academy with his friend, Maximillian, Wein Cruz became a captain in Burnstein military. As part of his first assignment from his friend Maximillian, who had become a politician since their days in the Military Academy, Wein is to pick up some books for Maximillian at the Magic Academy in the Rolandia Kingdom. With two of Wein's officers companying him, Hans and Charlone, the three set out to the Magic Academy. Once arriving and picking up the books at the Magic Academy, new orders from Maximillian arrived telling the group to meet Maximillian at a dam in Rolandia. Upon arriving at the dam, the group witnessed Maximillian destroying the dam which in turn led to the destruction of nearby villages and towns. Before they can ask Maximillian what is going on, he fled upon the arrival of the Rolandia army. With Maximillian gone and Wein and his friends at the crime scene, the Rolandia army mistaken Wein's group as the group responsible for destroying the dam. Obviously this was a set up by Maximillian so Wein and his friends fled for their lives. Soon word spread to the capital of Rolandia that is was a Burnstein military group that was behind the events at the dam and that this was an act of aggression from the Burnstein Kingdom. War quickly broke out afterwards. While all this is happening, Wein and his friends are still trapped inside Rolandia Kingdom looking for a way to return to Burnstein Kingdom to clear their names and find out what was Maximillian intentions. That's pretty much the gist of the overall story of Growlanser II. Now how the story actually unfolds in the end is very unique to the fact that there are many paths that gamers can take. You have the main path which in turns gives you multiple endings base on the girl that Wein has the strongest relationship with. Then you have two separate paths with Wein turning over to the other side, the dark side if you call it that, as alternatives paths. It's kind of nice that the game gives you the option of choosing good or evil as the path you want to choose. Despite that, if you look at the overall story, it's fairly short regardless of what path you chose. This in turn makes the story a bit undeveloped overall. With three possible different routes the story can take, the story has problems trying to develop a key central main bad guy. It sort of flip flop back and forth during the war between the two kingdoms. There's also the lack of defining a clear history on those two kingdoms and the root of their hatred for one another. They give you glimpses of previous events that lead to the previous war but nothing more than that. We need to know more about these kingdoms and the royal families that run these kingdoms but we never get a chance. The story focuses too much on the events of Wein trying to become an Imperial Knight and his attempt to clear his name but not on the events surrounding Wein and his friends as they make their journey back to Burnstein Kingdom. In the end, you just can't seem to connect yourself to this story and that's a disappointment.

Are we going to be friends?      Growlanser II boasts up to nine key characters in the story. But out of the nine key characters, only three are limited enough to have a more prominent role in the story. The three characters are Wein Cruz, the main character, Charlone and Hans. The other characters are more of a supporting casts than anything else. The developments of these characters are done more through the relationship building process as part of the gameplay between Wein and each party member. You get bits and pieces of each character's past and their feelings on things as Wein interact with them through dialogues. It's a limited background development at best. The characters still come out too plain for gamers to actually care for. Wein himself isn't developed to the best he can be. We don't know too much about his past and family other than a few mention here and there. It be a bit more nice to know more about his mother and his father and what it's like to be apart of the Cruz family and how prominent the Cruz family is. But then again you can't expect too much of a character development when the story itself is very short and undeveloped as a whole. The overall casts of characters are just not very appealing at all. It's too bad too.

Are we in a painting?      Since this game was first introduce in the early Playstation days, you're not going to get state of the art graphics here. The game isn't loaded with fully detailed polygons in a rich 3-D environment that will stun you like what you see in today's rpg games. What you get is more or less a 2-D world with sprites and background environments done through pixels. From that time period, the graphics not bad. Just that clearly when you compare it to today's standard, it looks very outdated and old. The short character sprites look decent with the influence of the 16 bit era character sprite designs but more improved and rounded in details. The backgrounds are done in a pixel artwork designs or even hand drawn artwork. Each character has their own anime style drawn artwork avatar that pops up when they are talking. Visually speaking the game has that old nostalgia look, back when rpg games were still in their early stages. Some old school rpgers may find the game visually very appealing from that stand point.

I like to play with my Orcana.      The music is pretty much average to a bit better than average. There's only really one tune that stands out and that's the Orcana tune that Wein plays. Other musical tunes seem to be standard ones that don't really catch your attention at all. You play the game and you hear the music running in the background but they don't sink into your mind at all. Once you turn the game off, the music becomes forgotten. This shouldn't be too surprising since the effectiveness of the music in a game depends on just how deep of an rpg story you are playing. Now looking at the bright side, if you actually listen to the musical soundtrack on its own outside of the game, you notice that the music is better than it was inside the game. Then you wonder how come you don't notice this inside the game. That's because story and music go hand in hand. If the story isn't as interesting as it should be, it can actually make the music sound more boring than it should. And that's the case here. Now the voice acting in this game isn't one that's very good too. This is more to the fact that some of the voices don't seem to match the characters that they belong too. This is one of those times where the game may have been better off without any voice acting added. It's hard to believe that some of these voices are being played by professional voice actors. One can only hope that Working Designs didn't shell out too much money to these voice actors.

Master your skills. You're going down! Game Information    Genre: Strategy Rpg    Publisher: Working Designs    Disc: 1 DVD Disc    Memory: 197 KB    Players: 1 Player Mode    Analog Control: Yes    Vibration Function: Yes    Rating: Teen    Release: December 2004      Technically speaking, the game is considered a strategy rpg game. However what's interesting about this gameplay is that it doesn't play like a strategy rpg game. I suppose this is due to the fact that unlike the more common strategy games where battle maps are done in a checker board or chess like board fashion, here it's more of a free style movement in a turn base atmosphere. The gameplay also seem to be very limited outside of the battle maps. Like with most common strategy game, you have a world map with dots on it representing the location of towns, villages, and dungeons. Each dot has lines connecting to each other making these lines as a trail or pathway to each location. Each time you arrive at a location, you'll get a cut scene which is then followed by a battle. After the battle you get more cut scenes and then move to your next destination. Typical strategy rpg gameplay. What makes the gameplay very limited is that once you arrive at a dot representing a city or village, you can't enter that city to explore it like with most strategy rpg game. What you have is a pop up menu where you can choose the option of shopping, resting, or having a dialogue scene with a party member or just random names of sprites. That's just too limited and not enough interaction for gamers. Gamers want to be able to enter a town or even a dungeon to explore it. Moving from one location to the next is too linear for gamers and not very fun. You need to give gamers the option to do more which this game doesn't. Now looking at the battle system, you can have a maximum of 8 party members. You enter commands for each party member and they will take actions base on those command. What's interesting here is that once you enter in a command, at that point once the battle start or restart, your fighters switches to auto mode and carry those command out until you decide to stop the fight and re-enter the commands again. Another thing to note is that as stated above, movement is base more on a free style movement as oppose to going square by square in a checker board like map. You have a marker where you can mark up to four positions on the battle map. Each marker will connect together through a line. The destination where the character will move to is the fourth marker. The character will move along the battle map base on the way the lines connect to each marker. Since it's not square to square, movement is almost free style but in a line base on how each marker connects to one another. Now the game does boast some interesting features that you don't see anywhere else. Friendship: This game uses a friendship meter system that is now common in some rpgs today. The friendship meter only works between Wein and his party members. As you progress in the game, Wein will interact with his party members in dialogue. You'll then have the option to choose how to respond to them. Each response you give will affect your friendship meter with them. The point of achieving a good friendship meter is that Wein will have a small special character ending with the character he has the strongest friendship meter with. Personally the character endings aren't that much of a big deal due to it being so short. Not to mention that it's practically the same for each character. Map Completion Conditions: Normally this wouldn't even be mention here since all strategy rpg games have conditions set about that you need to achieve in order to win the battle map fight. But this game does have three set of conditions to be aware of. Failure which is basically a game over condition, Clear which is when you have achieved the goal necessary to win, and Complete which is going beyond what was require to clear and win the battle. There's not much difference between Clear and Complete as you don't get any reward from going beyond what was require of you to do to Clear the map. However in order for you to be able to access or have a choice to access an alternative ending path in the game, you'll need to achieve Map Complete for all your battles instead of just a Clear condition. Rings: An interesting feature in this game is the use of a Ring System. Each character has their own unique weapon. However equipping rings is a way to boost the default stats of each character attacking base stats, so in a sense rings act like weapons. Each individual rings have its own unique stats. You would want to equip the ring that would boost the right stats for a particular character base on their strength and weaknesses. Now in addition to each ring having its own stats boosting attributes, the rings also have three gem slots available. Equipping gems into these slots will give additional attributes to the rings during combat. The type of gems you can equip onto the rings depends on the limit level of each gem slot on the rings. You can only equip or unequipped rings at a Ring Artisan shop. Gems: Gems comes in various levels. Each gem has a special attribute or offensive and defensive effect that can help a fighter in battle greatly. You can only equip a gem on a ring slot if that gem meets the required level of the ring slot. Unlike rings, you can equip and unequipped gems anytime without having to go to a specialty shop. The key to creating a strong fighter isn't so much as equipping a ring but equipping a ring that has the three gems that are most useful for you in battle. Skill Points: Growlanser II uses a skill points distribution system. This is quite an advance and unique system back in those days and one that is very good, allowing players to be able to fully customize their fighters. Each time a fighter level up, he/she will receive roughly about 3 skill points. You can then distribute these skill points to unlock tech fighting skills, magic, or stat boosting skills. By distributing these skill points, you are clearly molding your fighter in a direction you want them to be. If you want a fighter to be more of a magic user then you would be unlocking and mastering magic skills instead of the more technique fighting skills. And of course depending on which way you go, you would want to unlock the stats boosting skills that best suite a magic or melee user. I have to say that the Skill Points System is the most fun and addictive feature of the game. It's probably the only reason why you would want to level your characters up quickly, just so you can use and distribute your skill points onto your fighters. Tech Skills: Tech Skills are basically your special attack skills. In order for a character to be able to use a tech skill, they need to master it first by learning it. This is where you would want to distribute those skill points until you master a particular tech skill. The number of times that you can use a particular tech skill is dependant on the level of your fighter. The higher the level, the more times you can use that tech skill before the usage run out in battle. Magic: Being able to use magic works in the same way as tech skills. You'll need to master or learn the magic first by distributing your skill points to a particular magic. And like with tech skills, as you level up so will the level of your magic. The interesting thing here is that the level of the magic not only represent the power of the magic but it also represent the number of times you can distribute that magic. For example, let's say you have a level 6 fire magic. Now if you cast that level 6 fire magic on one monster, then that monster will be hit with the full power of a level 6 fire magic. Now if you want to cast that level 6 fire magic on more than one monster but on 3 monsters then you can distribute the magic base on a 6 point level system. Say one monster you will cast a level 3 fire magic, second monster you cast a level 2 fire magic, and the third monster you cast a level 1 fire magic. This is all from the level 6 fire magic. Hence you are distributing the levels of that level 6 fire magic in order to cast that magic on more than one target. This is how casting area effect magic or more than one target is done in this game. It's different but you'll be used to it. By today's standard, there are still some interesting unique features that this game has that no other rpg game have adopted. However the gameplay itself is a bit on the dull side due to the fact that it's pretty easy and very linear. Not being able to fully explore towns and dungeons hurt this game. The repeated process of story cut scene then battle map fight gets boring very quickly, especially if the story isn't interesting as well. By the time you finish this game, you don't feel much of an accomplishment at all. There's no sense of being satisfied with it because it's too basic and easy.

Score: 10/10

One of many endings..      There are minor side quests that you can do. When I say minor I do mean minor to the put that it's not really worth a mention at all or doing at all. The only real extra that you can have access to during the game is the Battle Arena. In the Battle Arena you can fight various tournaments to gain access to some nice rings and gems for your characters. However the down side is that the tournaments are quite easy and very short. So in translation you won't be spending too much time in there. Now you can unlock other extras once you finish the game. Upon completing the game, an Extra Menu is open up for you. Inside this Extra Menu, you can have a look at Art Gallery, Outtakes, Music, and a mini game called Sandra's Story. Personally I didn't find the Extra Menu to be all that great. Once you finish the game, you can start a new game with a New Game+ save file. You'll be able to carry your money, rings, and gems over. The concept of replaying the game again is to try and take a different path to achieve a different ending since this game does have 3 possible path endings to choose from as well as multiple character endings in the main story ending. But if you smart, you can actually achieve those endings without having to actually replay a whole new game. It's really up to you on how you want to approach this. The incentives are there though if you do want to replay this game again.

As you can tell, this is your usual standard basic strategy rpg game despite it's use of a Ring and Gem System, and the way Movements are handle in battles. It's also a very short strategy rpg game. Compare to today's rpgs, there's nothing that this game really offers to gamers that stands out. Gameplay is too short as well as the story. The bright side is that unlike the first initial release in Japan when this game was release as a single game at full price, being part of a special deluxe package collection makes the cost of buying this game not too bad. Sure there are other better rpgs out there now but if you're looking for some early vintage Playstation strategy rpg game to be played on the Playstation 2 then Growlanser II should do the job. Just make sure it's really something that you want to spend your money on. Final Score: 6/10