RandV
It's a wolf v2.0
I just threw up in my mouth a bit. You may not be completely wrong (IRT people taking the wrong message away from the Grandia battle system), but I want you to be. Generally speaking I abhor ARPGs and find the first two Grandia games to be two of the best JRPGs ever made with a perfect battle system.
That battle system is perfection...and I've never played an ARPG and said anything positive about the battle system. I just don't enjoy the inherent mechanics in those types of games, not even Secret of Mana could move the needle for me there.
Yes he's just flat out wrong there. 'Action' JRPG's existed in the 8-bit era, starting with games like the Y's series, and on the SNES you had the first Secret of Mana, Star Ocean, and Tales game to name a few.
Grandia's system on the other hand was an evolution of the Lunar series, and ended up being a dead branch on the evolution tree when the series and the developer fizzled out at the end of the PS2 generation and never made the jump to the next.
This isn't really a very broad topic where X influenced Y influenced Z influenced (...) though. Like I said a few posts above, starting sometime in the mid-90's maybe every JRPG maker started trying their own unique take on making a 'battle system'. If you want to see what a world looks like where every RPG plays the same way, dive into the JRPG Maker ecosystem (not recommended! ).