According to the game's executive producer Takeshi Miyaji in a 2000 Dreamcast Magazine interview, the interviewer asked him if the game's target demographic would be a little older now given that Grandia II was the second game in the series, and he responded:

"Yeah. To begin with, obviously the people who played Grandia are also now 3-4 years older. So that was one reason we raised our target age.

The other reason is that, with the Grandia series, we don’t want to make the same game every time. The last game was a young boy’s tale of adventure, but in Grandia we wanted to show other things. By raising the target age, we could make the world a little more edgy and mature."