I managed to finish BOF5 without restarting once (or dying once), and found a few of the bosses to be difficult, with maybe one or two being really close calls. I found as long as I battled every monster in the game I was leveled up perfectly find and could hold my own against pretty much anything. Just be sure to use your environment to your advantage during battle.

If you liked both Grandia games, you should give Xtreme a shot. I'm pretty much the only person on earth that liked it, but if you love Grandia for the battles, then you'll love Xtreme.

What did you like about it? I heard it was primarily a dungeon crawler. Is Grandia 3 any good? Better than Xtreme?

About Grandia, though, I hated the fact that you had to level up your magic (I think you also had to level up your weapons, maybe in grandia 2 as well?). I liked grandia 2 a lot more, though.

Wild Arms 4 and Wild Arms 5 have random battles, but there is a specific system in place where you can turn off all random battles in an area if you defeat the Sol Niger. Maybe half the time this is accessible at the start of a dungeon, with the downside being that the other half the time, the Sol Niger savepoint is at the end of the dungeon where you've already slugged through a bunch of random battles. Just in case, I recommend 4 over 5.

Of course, Valkyrie Profile and as IC said, its sequel. Explanation hopefully not needed.

Radiata Stories starts off decent, but tapers off the further you get into the story with the time system and amount of characters.

That's pretty much what I liked about it. Minimal storyline, a choice of some pretty distinct character play styles, and lots and lots of Grandia style battles.

I haven't played Grandia 3, though a lot of people said it was pretty crappy. I've been meaning to pick it up for a while now, since that's what everyone else said about Xtreme, but it's still one of my favorites for the PS2.

Oh, and if you're into dungeon crawling with just battle enemies zelda/diablo style, then you could check out Dark Cloud 2. The first one in the series is absolutely terrible, but the second was a blast.

I tried playing BOF: DQ but the save system pissed me off. I never got past the first "boss", even after multiple attempts.

If I recall correctly, Legend of Mana doesn't have random battles either. I don't remember if there are some mandatory ones though.

Summonmaster, is Wild Arms 3 any good? Is 4 better?

Zerg, Legend of Mana had the same style of play as all of the other Mana games. The battles are about as random as Zelda or Megaman.

I loved Wild Arms 3 as well, and if I recall correctly, there were random battles too but you could cancel them up to a certain amount of times which would go up throughout the game somehow. One other GFFer was wondering about Wild Arms 3 also and ended up loving it after trying it. There are couple of points that may turn you off, like having to repeatedly scan the overworld for destinations.

Wild Arms 4 introduces the HEX battle system which people either hate or love. Of course, I loved it too but it really boils to down to if the HEX system is for you, with Wild Arms 4, since it seems to be hit or miss with people.

I read some stuff about wild arms 4 about how it had a platformer puzzle aspect to it (like jumping puzzles). What is this like? And for Wild arms 3, does it have puzzles as well (like wild arms 2 did)? Are any of them extremely hard (I find it very annoying when I have to consult a walkthrough to get through a puzzle)?

Also, about wild arms 3, what are some things that set it apart from other RPGs? It seems like a pretty basic rpg to me, but still interesting because of the wild west theme.