Bad. The first impressions evoked by Grandia II‘s Anniversary Edition are not good at all.
First, there’s the controller issue. If you’ve got an Xbox controller you have to fiddle with some windows settings to get the game to recognize it correctly, and if you don’t then x360ce is required. Next are the audio issues. There are no volume settings. None. There is no way to raise/lower the volume of the BGM, effects, or voices either individually or all at once (besides opening up and re-mixing the .ogg files in a sound editor). This would be bad enough on its own, but ends up compounded by the fact that the effects are louder than the music which is in turn louder than the voices.
What else is bad? The camera. While you can rotate the camera at will, you cannot manually zoom in or out. That appears to happen at random, with the default being ‘zoomed in as close as possible’. And speaking of things that you don’t have control over, here’s another: Storyline dialog. You can’t make it appear/scroll faster. Think ‘unskippable cutscenes’ except the scenes take place in the normal game field.
One positive thing I can say about it is that it gives you the option to use the Japanese voices… but that’s all so far. Well, I guess I can also say that the battle system seems to be slightly interesting. Time will tell I suppose, though if either the storyline or characters aren’t at least decent I don’t think I’m going to get very far with this one.