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Grandia III
PlayStation 2
A Hit-and-Miss Series Misses Again
2/5 stars
I have never been the biggest fan of the ‘Grandia’ series. I found the original “Grandia” to be childish and grindy, with its only redeeming factor being its novel battle system. “Grandia 2” impressed me by keeping the novel battle system and improving upon the incredibly weak story and characters of the original game. After skipping “Grandia Xtreme” due to some horrible reviews, I ultimately bought “Grandia 3,” hoping for an experience similar to “Grandia 2.” But then the game sat in my backlog for years as 7th Generation hardware and games took my attention away from the 6th Generation. With the 8th Generation having just begun, I finally got a chance to play through this game and find out if it was worth the wait.
Presentation
“Grandia 3” is an okay-looking game that uses graphical assets of vastly disparate quality. During normal gameplay, such as moving around the environments or during battles, the game uses relatively simple polygon models for the characters and environments. These can look a bit blurry on a HDTV, even with PS3 upscaling and smoothing providing assistance. During the game’s many, many cutscenes, the engine switches to higher-resolution models – though rarely goes the fully-pre-rendered route – that still look good on a high-resolution screen. Though it is painfully obvious when the models are switched, as the low-res models just bob their heads Power Ranger-style when they talk, while the high-res models have full lip-synching (which is actually pretty well done). The character designs are decent. While none of the characters look super-annoying and moe (like so many 7th Gen RPGs), there are just too many anime clichés to say the design is ‘good.’ Environmental designs, on the other hand, are incredibly boring. The game is dominated by small, mostly-linear environments with little exploration. These environments tend to be Spartan and somewhat blocky, lacking in fine detail and ambient animation.
The sound in “Grandia 3” is fairly average as well. While there are a few good pieces of music in the soundtrack (specifically the final boss music stands out), the shop music is really annoying. The game begins and ends with the same J-pop tune, which is reasonable pleasant for those who enjoy that music genre, but doesn’t really fit with the tech/fantasy theme of the game as a whole. The voiceacting is adequate, with nobody standing out as particularly annoying. However, the delivery, perhaps to ‘match the flap’ (lip-synching) frequently suffers from William Shatneresque pauses at inappropriate times.
Story
“Grandia 3’s” biggest failing is its narrative. After introducing the main character, Yuki, a spunky youth from an isolated village who dreams of being an airplane pilot, a series of accidents results in Yuki, his MILF mom Miranda, and a girl with pointed ears named Alphina, fleeing from a stereotypically stupid enemy soldier. It turns out that Alphina is a Communicator, who can speak with the godlike Guardians of the world, and is headed toward the main temple at Arcriff to take the place of her brother, another Communicator, who has disappeared. Along the way, this trio meets up with a gambling-obsessed, horny sea captain (seriously, the guy has horns growing out of his forehead) named Alphonso who promises to take them across the sea to the mainland where Arcriff is located.
Upon reaching Arcriff, Yuki and Alphina discover that, not only has her brother, Emelious, abandoned his duties as a Communicator, but he has actually turned against the Guardians and intends to destroy them using a power taken from the Guardians’ home dimension called the Verse Realm. Naturally, this power ends up being more than Emelious can handle, and the heroes are left to deal with a force that wants nothing more than to turn the entire world into glass.
Along the way from the story’s humble beginning to its predictable ending, Yuki and Alphina join forces with a wolf-boy dragon-rider named Ulf and a massive-breasted desert chieftainess named Dahna. Miranda and Alphonso, sadly the only two playable characters in the game with any personality or character development, leave the party and run off together (bow-chicka-bow-wow) before Yuki and Alphina even reach Arcriff, never to be heard from again. Out of the four main characters, only Alphina receives any major character development, as Yuki seems to exist merely to provide a convenient method of flying around the game’s small, empty overworld, Ulf exists solely for comic relief, and Dahna exists solely for eye-candy (though she and her lover, Raven, a double agent working to derail the villains from the inside, do have a couple of poignant scenes).
Aside from this bland cast of cardboard heroes, there are an equal number of cardboard supporting villains on Emelious’ side. I can’t even remember any of their names, as they are frequently only on-screen once or twice and are frequently never even introduced or have their motivations or backstories explained. Emelious himself is really the only one who gets any development (making the entire game, in essence, ‘The Alphina and Emelious Family Emotional Trauma Hour’), but in revealing his motivations, the game makes Emelious into a completely unsympathetic villain. His motivations are entirely juvenile and absurd, and tantamount to a child destroying the world in a temper tantrum. Even the narrative’s attempt at redeeming him in the end felt hollow to me.
“Grandia 3’s” narrative is also painfully linear, with no exploration or sidequests of any kind. It barely makes sense for Yuki to be able to fly anywhere in the world (after crashing about 4 different planes as part of the narrative) when there are so few places in the world to go. There are even things on the map that look like they might be explorable, but the game never gives the player the opportunity to have Yuki land there. While “Grandia 3” is a two-disc game, it seems that most of the space is taken up with cutscene data, as the entire game can be completed in 35-40 hours.
Gameplay
The battle system in “Grandia 3” makes up the bulk of the gameplay, as do the battle systems in most other RPGs. Like other games in the ‘Grandia’ franchise, “Grandia 3’s” battle system revolves almost entirely around the concept of ‘canceling’ enemy special attacks before they can go off. Each character and enemy has an icon on an IP Gauge, which is circular in this game as opposed to a straight bar from the previous ‘Grandia’ games. Characters’ Initiative stat determines how quickly their icon moves around the circle. Upon reaching the COM line at the bottom of the circle, the action pauses and allows the player to input a command. Then the commanded character’s icon moves across a colored section of the circle to the ACT line, at which point the character performs their action. At any time while a character/enemy icon is between the COM and ACT lines, that command can be canceled by a critical attack or a special attack that specifically states that it has a cancelling effect.
Characters can perform either a single critical attack or two combo attacks per turn, cast a spell, use an item, or use a special ability. Special attacks are powered by SP, which characters accumulate by hitting enemies or being hit by enemies. Special attacks are also, unfortunately, learned quite randomly during battles and level up just as randomly through use. Unlike older ‘Grandia’ games, magic no longer needs to be leveled-up through use, but instead by equipping a mana egg, which provides a boost depending on the quality of the egg.
Characters also have Magic and Skill slots, which seem to randomly unlock after battles by using special attacks or magical attacks a lot. These slots can be filled with Magic and Skills bought from stores or obtained through destroying mana eggs and skill books. No character learns any skills or magic in any other way. It’s possible to set up some really effective strategies through Skill distribution, and powerful Magic load-outs are essential to victory, lending a solid and interesting strategy to the game’s many battles.
But the main gameplay flaw in “Grandia 3” is also the game’s MANY battles. Each environment is filled with a set number of enemies that are visible on-screen. Touching one triggers a battle transition. It’s also possible to get ‘surprise’ attacks by having Yuki hit an enemy on the field with his sword before transitioning into battle, but I found the benefit to be completely negligible. The problem is the ridiculously small amount of experience each battle typically provides. Most of disc 1 is pretty well-balanced, with one spot right before the transition to disc 2 providing 5 easy encounters that award 1200 experience each. However, upon transitioning to disc 2, enemies experience a massive hit point boost and start awarding 200-500 experience per battle. When a single random encounter takes 10 minutes because enemies have 4-times the health they should, continually summon MORE enemies, and force the player to waste MP casting big-damage spells and healing, it’s not really worth the effort to even bother with these battles. After experiencing a terrible difficulty spike and a ‘that one boss’ moment half-way through disc 2, I went back to grind on the weak enemies from the end of disc 1… which were STILL giving me 3-times as much experience per battle as the enemies I was supposed to be fighting! Something went horribly wrong with the encounter design in disc 2 of this game, as it makes no sense that a player should want or need to avoid all random encounters in the current area in favor of grinding on weak enemies from a previous area. And to add insult to injury, a lot of fancy special attacks and spells (both from characters and enemies) have long, unskippable animations, dragging long battles out even more.
Overall
While the ‘Grandia’ battle system is still good, not even its hybrid mix of turn-based and real-time strategizing can save the rest of this disastrous game. “Grandia 3” is too burdened by its linear, clichéd, hokey narrative and poorly designed enemy encounters to be anywhere near ‘good.’ It’s looking more and more like “Grandia 2” was a complete fluke and that the rest of the series is something even hardcore RPG fans should avoid.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 1.5/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
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