To get back on topic...
I bought Grandia III and Xenosaga Episode One last week (and also reserved .hack//GU and FFXII).
I spent a good deal of time playing Grandia III this weekend, and my honest opinion is that unless you're a serious fan of the Grandia series, battle systems & endless critter fights, and/or sticky-sweet RPG stylings, you'd be better off not wasting your money.
The absolute best part of the game is the fighting system. It's clever, entertaining, and the animation sequences aren't so long that you can go to the store for a snack and make it back before they're over - about 5 to 15 seconds is the average range for special move sequences. It's also rather smooth, and graphically quite pleasing. It's also fairly balanced (which is the clever part), so you'll have to use all the tactics you have at your disposal to make it very far. The fighting itself is not balanced however, because while some battles are creampuff hack 'n slash, others can eat up quite a lot of time.
Background graphics are gorgeous, though I think they got lazy for one section of the world and just experimented with texture and lighting effects on their "normal" world graphics to make it all look very shiny. The character graphics are pretty good - anime style, but they could use some polishing up. They're a bit too plastic-dollish, and for a recent game, with current technology, even on PS2, it could have been a lot better.
Sound... agh, the sound. There's a pretty good intro song by Miz called "In the Air" - J-Pop at its finest, but the rest... just blargh. It's okay once you get used to it, I suppose, but it's really cartoonishly agitating.
Story... just poorly written, full stop. The scenes waver between being stupidly touching to annoyingly silly with no graceful segue to bridge the gap in tone. Not to mention that for the first 10 hours or so of playing, you still have no clue why you're even doing any of this. Oh, and your main adventuring partner at the beginning of the game is your mom - and let's face it, that's just weird. Especially since she looks about 2 years older than you do. I'm still waiting to find out if she's actually my sister or something. That would at least be a little less weird. Sort of.
All in all, even with all the negative criticism, I find it strangely engaging.
So, I'll let you all know what I think of Xenosaga (been wanting to play it since it came out, but I didn't have any money to buy it then
).