All I meant was that you could level up your abilities in battle with the limit break and materia, not to mention that materia changes to new effects at some points, and you can combo different materias to create new abilities, then you have to use the right armors and weapons to maximize AP gain and effectiveness in battle.

Sure it's not half the system grandia looks to be, but it was a great system that kept every battle feeling worth it.

Both Grandia 1 and Grandia 2 were great in their own ways.

Really though, its do you like the light hearted Justin or the hilariously pissy Ryudo?

Sides, Grandia 2 still has some of the best 1 liners EVER in a video game.

The article is pointing out that with Grandia, each time you attack with a weapon, use a special attack, or use a spell, the weapon or magic type that you used will gain its own experience.  So if you never use fire magic, the level for that magic will never increase.

Ohhh yeah... Materia is a great system... just not similar to Grandia lol.

And Materia is based in Esper system of FFVI the biggest difference is in Esper you learn the skill/magic forever... in Materia the "materia" learn the Skill/Magic and you have to equip the Materia in Weapon/Armos slot to use them... but the system are close.

Grandia was tight. Well, can't believe I said tight but that was the language used when the game was out. I really loved it. The character development was inspiring to me. The music was awesome. The battles were addicting and the best part to me... NO PRE-RENDERED GRAPHICS!

Grandia is my all time favorite game. Just listen to this theme and not feel like going on an adventure.

I remember the Grandia series, fantastic for their time. Really wish they'd make a new one, along with a new Lunar game.

You can say that the game was... grand?

"Skills were improved by practice and practice alone"

Secret of Mana did that before. Leveling up magic doesn't give new spells, but characters learn new special moves by leveling up weapons. It's an action RPG, but the concept was there.

"Many recent narrative-based games, such as Final Fantasy XIII and the Dragon Age games, have changed that structure in ways that raise the stakes of each individual fight. They do this by having your health and/or magic recharge instantly or quickly as soon as combat ends, effectively meaning your resource management becomes focused on each individual fight."

They copied it from a 18 year old Sailor Moon SNES RPG (if no other game did it before), it had in-battle voice acting for special attacks so it was really cool.

I remember Tales of Symphonia taking a similar route by having characters unlock upgraded versions of their attacks after using an attack a certain amount of times. However, the system was not nearly as well-implemented as Grandia's and only had to do with skills, not equipped weapons.

Ah Grandia, one of the biggest gems in the Saturn and PSX lineups. Also one of my favourite games of all time, it's combat system completely blew me away when I played it.

It seemed simple at first, but it was rather complex and in-depth, especially when you add in the different Eggs to learn different types of magic, the rather large span of abilities that each character could learn (and how it would increase given some story events) and how each one had a different effect on the action bar.

Not much credit is given to it and Grandia 2, mostly because the series fell into a complete mess with Xtreme and 3 (sadly).