I have doubts between it and Xenogears... I loved the Xenogears battle system too but I think the level yp in Grandia better.

Grandia 3 never got a PAL release so i never got the opportunity to play it sadly. Ive watched clips of it on youtube and the battle system dosent look that bad at all. Does it get repetitive at all? 

for anyone that played Grandia 3; did you find it wierd that Yuki's mother(who was a pretty damn good fighter) just leaves with the fisherman and both never make an apperence ever again!? WTF!?

ff7 materia system was similar. I don't know why none of the next games followed suit..

Yeah one of the best JRPGs ever made. Absolutely brilliant.

I really need to play this game. For some odd reason I've completed Grandia 2 but never even picked up Grandia 1. Should probably fix that.

Grandia is my favorite RPG all time, it was truly epic, the greatest adventure I've ever embarked on in a video game.

It's not so much that it gets repetitive but rather they get rid of two likeable characters and just cram in 2 others without any sort of character development. Then there's a huge level spike on disc 2. Despite being able to beat the final boss on disc 1, the enemies on disc 2 were really sticking it to me unless I grinded. The combat is a highlight if anything.

Water to wine... nothing similiar.

In Grandia you have levels for Weapons and four types of magic elements... a combination of all these level give you news magics or skills, he magic/skill are unique per character... so if you have Sword lvl3 + Water lvl 2 you receive the Skill X... Earth lvl4 + Fire lvl 7 = Some Wind Magic... there are a lot of combinations for every char and you can choose the path to level up your char.

Now do you want that I describe the materia system?

I'd definitely like to see more games take on a skill system like that.

Love Grandia. Really great sense of fun and adventure through the whole game. Was gutted when the designer died.