Grandia 3

Purchase at Play-Asia

Early on in Grandia 3, there’s a scene where our three main characters – Yuuki, the heroic adventuresome go-getter; Miranda, Yuuki’s surrogate mother; and Alfina, a blond, elven priestess – take a break for the night and cook some dinner. Alfina is in charge of preparing the feast, which makes everyone else nearly vomit in disgust. This is obviously meant to be amusing. Now, having experienced quite a bit of anime and video games, a scene like this leads me to believe one of two things: either the Japanese find the concept of a woman who can’t cook to be extremely hilarious, or the writers simply have no concept of a "cliche".

For Grandia fans, this shouldn’t be anything new.

While the original Saturn/Playstation game and its

Dreamcast/PS2 sequel seemed to accidentaly produce an interesting character or two, they seemed to only have plots because the JRPG genre deems it a necessity.

(And the one experiment at a dungeon crawler, the unfortunate Grandia Xtreme, is best left forgotten.) Fortunately, that’s never really been the focus of the series – Grandia has always been defined by its excellent battle system, and to a lesser extent, its pleasant environments.

This is pretty much what Grandia 3 delivers.

The game begins in a small village in the middle of nowhere, with young mechanic Yuuki dreaming of taking to the skies in his homemade airplane. His first test flight doesn’t quite go right, but he does accidentally save the maiden Alfina from an attack by some unfriendly folk. Naturally, his quest to escort the fair lady back to her homeland goes far beyond what he initially planned. Alfina’s brother, you see, has a affinity towards killing gods, and he’s doing it with disturbing regularity. Toss in an alternate world, full of glass mountainscapes and terribly depressed people that need rescuing, and you’ve got Grandia 3. It’s too easy to spot bits and pieces from other RPGs – Game Arts seems to grab generously from Sega’s Skies of Arcadia and its own Lunar games, amongst others. Yuuki is a rather bland hero, lacking the annoying exhuberance of Justin or the amusing apathy of Ryudo. Alfina is essentially an elven Aeris, just with a slightly greater attachment to the mortal coil. The supporting characters aren’t any better – beastboy Ull’s greatest personal trait is his tail; desert priestess Dahna is defined by her enormous rack. The fact that the only intriguing character is ditched early on is a virtual smack in the face. Maybe everyone will come off better in English, but they’re hardly the most intriguing pack of RPG characters.

All of the character artwork is done by You Yoshinari, mostly known for the incredible drawings in Valkyrie Profile. While they’re not quite as stunning here in Grandia, they’re more detailed than your usual text box portraits, and the varying facial expression seem to be taken almost exactly from the original game – Yuuki’s nervous smile seems analogous to Justin’s.

Artwork nonwithstanding, it’s Grandia’s environments that are far more interesting than any of the characters. The gigantic fields are pleasant enough at first, but when you encounter your first waterfall, its drops glistening in the sunlight, it elucidates just how gorgeous Grandia 3’s world is. Even the barren deserts look inviting. The limits are of the

PS2 are obviously being pushed here, as there’s plenty of jaggies and a bit of polygon tear, but they’re not horrible enough to detract considerably from the otherwise stunning effects.

Nearly all of the fields and dungeons are incredibly expansive, and usually flooded with bad guys. There aren’t any random battles, so you can choose to fight or not, but whacking them with a sword before rushing in will give you a slight tactical advantage.

Similarly, if the bad guys smack in you from behind, you’ll end up surrounded, which is obviously not a position you’ll want to be in.

Grandia’s famous battle system is an exemplary mixture of real-time and turn based strategy. A derivative of the Active Time Battle System from the older Final Fantasy games, it maintains the chaotic, fast paced feel of Star Ocean 3 while giving complete control over your party’s action, so you don’t need to leave any of your actions to dimwitted AI players. Your characters have two main types of attacks: a Combo attack, which will hit a foe multiple times, and a Critical attack, which is weaker, but has the potential to slow down a bad guy. If you deliver a Critical blow at the right moment – in other words, just before they’re about to attack – then you’ll Cancel their action and cause them to lose their turn.

New to Grandia 3 are aerial combos – when you use a Critical attack, there’s a chance that you’ll fling your enemy into the air. If you command any of your character to attack the foe flailing helplessly in the sky, you’ll deliver an instant, powerful smackdown.

(An amusing gauge keeps track of how high you can toss your enemies.)

Naturally, the bad guys can do the same thing to you, so you have to be careful when using magic or other attacks that take a few seconds to charge. While each character can be equipped with any magical spell (either bought or obtained through Mana Eggs), everyone has an arsenal of unique special moves, which drain your SP meter. These special moves are essential to your victory – while slow to charge at first, their repeated use will eventually allow them to be executed instantaneously, which is necessary to cancel enemy attacks. The designers must have realized that this is a bit overwhelming for newcomers, so an automatic help system will occasionally point you in the right direction, guiding you to use certain attacks on certain enemies.

While the difficulty is managable through a good portion of the game, it suddenly takes a gigantic spike at the end of the first disc. From then on, Grandia 3 becomes obnoxiously ruthless. Your foes – usually attacking in large numbers and possessing far greater speed than any of your party members – have no problem charging into your group and attacking everyone for incredible (and often fatal) damage. The game expects you to Cancel their attacks before they can be executed, but if fate isn’t on your side and the closest character doesn’t have enough SP to use a special attack, forget it – you’re screwed. It also exposes one of the few major flaws with the Grandia battle system – for a game that’s so heavily dependent on location-based attacks, you have absolutely no control over your character’s positioning. This was rarely a huge deal in the previous games, but given the ferocity of many of your enemies, this minor issue quickly balloons into an incredibly frustrating flaw.

Grandia is also not a game that you can power-level through – even the most ridiculously hard enemies give minimal experience, which isn’t that crucial to victory anyway. You fight mostly to gain special attacks, which are far more crucial than your attack or defense values. You’re never told you when you’ll get new moves or when they’ll upgrade. As a result, repeated combat feels a little empty, since your goals are often so abstract. Still, you’ll end up fighting a lot just because it’s a lot of fun, and is a refreshing alternative to pretty much everything out there on the market.

Along with the battle system, Grandia has also been somewhat notable for its music, mostly in its rocking battle themes and sweeping orchestral pieces. So it’s a little disheartening that the game opens with a J-Pop song (with lyrics in English) as opposed to classical feel of its predecessors. Beyond that, there’s some good music – the original Grandia theme pops up in the victory fanfare, and the game has its own memorable melody that’s used repeatedly. Other than than the battle music and soothing exploration theme, the rest of the music is somewhat subdued.

Compared to the distinctively upbeat town themes from the previous games, the soundtracks feels a little bland as a whole.

Import Friendly? Literacy Level: 5

All of the text is in Japanese, although the icons are used in battle, so it’s not terribly difficult. Cutscenes are unsubtitled, which is a little annoying.

US Bound?

Though nothing official has been announced, some translated screenshots have surfaced from Square-Enix, so it will most likely be coming here in 2006.

+ Highs: Incredible graphics and a superb battle system

- Lows: Bland characters, intermittedly interesting story, and extreme difficulty in the later segments

Overall: There’s another part early in Grandia 3 where Alfina, excited at being in an airplane for the first time in her life, stands up, closes her eyes and holds out her arms, letting the wind flow around her body. The only thing I could do at this point was thank God that Celine Dion was nowhere to be found. It’s not like there aren’t any genuinely emotional moments in Grandia 3, but they’re balanced out by all of the cornball cheesiness. Still, if you can forgive this, and are up to the challenge of the battle system, then Grandia 3’s sprawling worlds are well worth adventuring through.

Written by Kurt Kalata.

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