グランディアII公式ファンブック

Some nice bonus content for fans of the game

This is the official Grandia II comic anthology, based on the Dreamcast JRPG. Being a "fanbook", there really isn't any content in here for anyone who hasn't already played and thoroughly enjoyed the game. Since for me Grandia II has remained one of my all-time favourites for over 20 years (👵), I'm glad I was able to track this book down and experience some fresh content.

There are 11 comics by different artists, in addition to character profiles, a synopsis of the first couple hours of the game's story, a Millenia cosplay guide, and an interview with the art staff. I rated language learning as 4-stars just for the breadth of content here, as it provides practice reading everything from exaggerated manga dialogue to formal magazine-like copywriting, and although the difficulty is all over the map, being based on an IP the reader presumably knows well gives a lot of helpful context. There is no furigana, though, and the non-comic sections felt quite dense.

Entertainment-wise the comics were also pretty inconsistent from one to another. A lot of the attempts at humour haven't aged well (like Roan spending almost an entire comic with his head between Paella's breasts), and a couple of them simply aren't well-made from a technical standpoint (i.e. the panelling isn't clear enough to be able to tell what's going on), but for me the weaker comics were outweighed by the stronger ones, and I appreciated the opportunity to see more interactions between the characters. There are also a few comics centring on background characters (Gonzola's troupe), and even a character that was cut during development (Trash), which add some nice flavour to the world.

Overall I'm satisfied with it and had a good time reading, but some of it was definitely hard to get through, and I acknowledge that a lot of my enjoyment came from seeing new (to me) content for something I already love rather than the book itself being anything particularly special. If you've played Grandia II but didn't adore it, the out-of-print fanbook might not be worth hunting for.