Grandia III

"Seems to do everything in its power to make you regret purchasing it"

Grandia III is an excruciating experience; both tedious and boring, it does almost nothing new. It has the worst cast of characters I've ever seen in an RPG, it has the worst plot I've ever seen in an RPG, (keep in mind I've played RPG's like the Evolution series, Radiata Stories, and Atelier Iris; Eternal Mana, none of which were exactly known for their plots, to put it mildly) the dialogue is uninspired and often poorly written, the world is lacking any sort of development, there's no sense of adventure.....Grandia III was a huge waste of my time and was one of the worst RPG's I've ever played. It flies far and beyond "disappointing"; it's a disgrace that seems to take everything that's wrong with the RPG genre and combine it into one really, ...REALLY bad game.

I'll start with the graphics, which are the only thing Grandia III finds any success in. Vibrant and colorful, amazingly so in places, the visual style makes many locations very impressive-looking. Textures are kind of lacking in some areas, but overall, the graphics are just.....amazing. The limiting top-down view from Grandia II has been completely ditched in this installment, and now we have a camera that follows the character around through the environments, and it's controllable. Many important cutscenes are done in FMV. Created by the studio Robot, (who did the amazing intro to Baten Kaitos on the GC,) the FMV's are often impressive, and there are so many of them that Grandia III is on 2 DVD's despite only being a 35-hour game with amazingly little to explore. (More on that later.) At any rate, the graphics here are truly impressive and its obvious that more work went into them than into the game itself.

Plot; The first big issue is the storyline. Grandia III gets off to an excellent start. The opening scenes, featuring Yuki and his friend hiding from Yuki's mother while building his plane in their tiny, quiet village of Anfog, are really excellent. Almost instantly, these characters are likable and the dialogue is charming and funny. The voice acting is great for many characters, and the music in the game's opening scenes is very good. This lasts for the first 10 hours of the game. Grandia III's first 10 hours seem to take inspiration from Final Fantasy 10 and Skies of Arcadia and I admit, I was fooled into thinking that it would be this excellent all the way through. Yuki, his mother Miranda, Alfina the Communicator, and a gambling sailor, Alonso, all start their journey from this small island to the city of Mendi in order to bring the communicator (who ends up on your island at the start of the game. What she was doing there to begin with....is never explained) to a temple on the mainland so she can participate in an important ceremony.

Heh...sound familiar? It should if you've played any Japanese RPG in the past 10 years, including Grandia II. Still, I was at first able to get past it because the cutscenes are well-produced, the sense of adventure is great, the graphics are amazing, the characters seem likable, and the music seems actually decent. The dynamic between the characters is really amazing. Yuki and his mother, (one of the most interesting and likable characters in any RPG I've played,) have great dynamic, and Alonso brings a real sense of "Skies of Arcadia"-like adventure to the storyline. And Yuki's desire to be a pilot and fly the skies is cool. Yeah, it's been done before in RPG's, but I don't think with PLANES, exactly. Maybe airships. So it worked for me. Overall, the first 10 hours of this game are really RPG greatness.

Once you reach a certain point, though, the game begins an extremely noticeable spiral downward, as the game's great setup all crumbles literally right before your eyes. Once you reach the city of Mendi, the plot changes directions completely. Some great characters leave your party for no reason whatsoever...literally NEVER to return. Ever. Once they leave, they're gone, never to make another appearance in the entire game, or to even be mentioned. The plot also completely changes gears at this point, and eliminating these characters was probably one of the dumbest decisions an RPG developer has ever made. A couple hours after Mendi, the flight concept and sense of discovery is almost entirely lost in favor of a "Stop this villain!" plot, the remaining characters lose almost ALL personality, and the characters who eventually replace those who leave are never given any opportunity to shine. Ok, Ulf likes food. That's it. That's the extent of his development. Dahna lost the love of her life. That's the extent of her development. These 2 characters are given practically ZERO dialogue in any important cutscenes. Then there's the 2 other characters. Alfina the Communicator is one of the most annoying RPG characters I've ever seen. She literally cries in almost EVERY BIG EVENT. All the way through the game. She whines, she cries, she's stubborn...she's pathetic. When will RPG scenario writers realize that watching a character constantly cry does NOT make us feel bad for her; it makes us HATE her! And, of course, she loves her brother, even though he's threatening to destroy the world.

Yes, like Grandia II, we have, (AGAIN) another evil brother who wields a giant, powerful sword who threatens to destroy the world. The main characters journey around to the various temples and visit the spirits to collect orbs containing their power before Emelious, her brother, kills the spirits. That's basically the entire plot. It's predictable, it's extremely underdeveloped, and it's boring! At one point, a "hidden realm" is discovered, and the possibilities are endless, but almost NOTHING is done with this new world. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell the point of it was. In fact, what is the point to anything? WHY does Emelious want to do what he does? Why were he and Alfina chosen as Communicators? Why does Emelious suddenly hate humanity? Who is that new villain who suddenly joins him in the last half hour of the game? What happened to another villain, who literally vanishes without a trace from the game a couple hours before the end of it, with no mention ever made of his absence? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE 2 CHARACTERS WHO LEAVE YOUR PARTY FOREVER? Why was Yuki's mother so young? What happened to Yuki's father? What was the point of the roots coming out of the sky other than "looking evil"? How does Yuki manage to survive at least 6 plane crashes over the course of the game that nobody could have possibly survived? WHAT were those two pilots doing in that town in the alps? Why did a certain pilot leave his plane up there for years in perfect form when he never intended to fly again? What exactly is Xorn? Why does he hate humanity? What's the deal with Raven, and why does he look and act so sinister? What happened to the pilot near the end of the game? Why did none of the characters ever mention it afterwards? And that's barely scratching the surface; there's even more. You can drive a truck through the holes in this storyline. Never before have I played an RPG with such a lazy, badly put together plot.

The game introduces many questions which it makes no attempts to answer. Everything that happens in Grandia III...it happens without explanation; without purpose. The plot seems to get worse as the game progresses, and the characters are NOTHING at all. They have no personality. The Grandia Meal Conversations that I liked so much in Grandia II are useless here because the characters are so unbearably annoying. They don't do anything in these conversations except further demonstrate their stereotypical personalities. For the first time in an RPG, I found myself skipping through the dialogue here. These conversations attempt to be funny, but it's so forced that it's almost embarrassing to read. Hate to add another complaint to the list, but even reading the text in this game is annoying as hell due to the slow speed with which it scrolls across the box. I'm a fast reader, so I ran out of patience fast. There's no way to adjust the text speed. It also pauses before certain words are displayed, as if to simulate actual speech. If that was their intention, why not just VOICE these scenes?

Yes, in true Grandia form, relatively little of this game is voiced. Although all big events are voiced, plenty of other, equally important events are handled with this tedious text crawl. Why's it so hard to voice the entire game? Why do some RPG developers not understand that when you have a lot of text-only conversations it makes the game seem inconsistent? It begins to seem like they had 2 teams working on it; one on the dialogue in the FMV's, and one on the text-based conversations elsewhere. The dialogue from the characters seems different in the 2 types of cutscenes, further eliminating any sense of personality from them. IF YOU'RE GOING TO VOICE THE GAME, VOICE THE WHOLE GAME! Final Fantasy 10 did this in 2001, Grandia III should be able to do this in 2006. There's no excuse. Oddly, there's no way to turn on any sort of subtitles in the FMV's, (which is a first) so for those of you who may be hard of hearing...you're out of luck. But then again, maybe you're better off not having to hear this painful dialogue.

...Overall, the plot of this game completely falls on its face. Terrible, often corny dialogue, lack of consistency between cutscenes and text despite a promising start, a horrible character cast, large, unanswered questions in the awful story, many unexplained events, and just lack of development of anything in general. It's really unfortunate, because the first 10 hours of the game were so promising. Things get bad once you reach Mendi, but they COMPLETELY fall apart a couple hours from there, when the developers officially stopped trying. Re-using the exact same plot from Grandia II and just changing the names around is mistake #1, as that plot wasn't too great to begin with. The characters here aren't even likable, and anything else they came up with is ripped from countless other RPG's that have done it better. I don't think I've ever played through an RPG with such a dull plot in my life.

Gameplay; Yet another aspect of this game that starts out promising and falls on its face. For the first 10-12 hours of the game, again, the battle system's fun and challenging, but not too tedious. It's really a great battle system, being an ATB system but feeling fresh and much faster than average. They introduced an extremely fun combo system where you knock the enemy into the air, then the other characters attack it. I can't picture a Grandia game without this system now. Battles are fun but they require some thought. It's a great balance. But after the 12-hour mark, (specifically, when you reach Dragon Valley,) the combat becomes nothing but tediousness.

Enemies suddenly become faster....much faster. They begin dishing out special moves that devastate your party OVER AND OVER again. Battles become extremely slow, because almost every time the enemy has a turn, the ATB meter freezes, the camera zooms on the enemy, and you must sit through his special move, which often cancels your party, (which means they move back on the ATB meter,) which means you'll have to wait even more until your next turn. Ah, but you're typically battling at least 6 enemies at a time in Grandia III. So it'll be another's turn before yours. Time to sit through ANOTHER special move that will deal damage to the party. As the party's getting damaged, YET ANOTHER enemy goes, hitting and paralyzing Alfina, your healer. Uh oh. She's now paralyzed, and won't be able to move for a while. Meanwhile, every time you kill an enemy, it doesn't matter, because ANOTHER enemy will go, using their "call allies" move to bring 2 or 3 more into the battle, which they use VERY frequently. One other enemy does a move...paralyzes more in your party. Meanwhile, your health is all running low, and your healer is still paralyzed. You decide to use 1 of your 9 HP recovery items (you know you shouldn't, because you have so few, but you have no choice,) but when you use it, you watch as the ATB meter charges,...then another enemy goes, doing a "cancel" move. Whoops...your character goes way back on the ATB meter, the item move cancelling. Then another enemy does QUAKE, completely wiping out the party, causing a Game Over screen and losing about 45 minutes of gameplay. Fun.

Enemies are just too powerful and they use special moves way too frequently; not only completely slowing down the pace of combat, but making things tedious and unnecessarily difficult. Now, you can use special moves too, but your special meter, (unlike the enemies') runs out fairly quickly, and there's really no way to recharge it, except hitting the enemy, which slowly recharges it. Nope, save points, (certain ones restore HP and MP) do not restore SP, and neither does sleeping at an inn. Really convenient, isn't it, when you use up all your SP on regular battles and you have none left for a boss and can't really do anything about it? Now, eventually you get a move that recharges SP, but it's only a small amount at a time, and the person who uses this move doesn't get her SP recharged. So she can only use it a couple of times before she runs out. As for gaining new special moves....it's seemingly completely random. During battle, you'll just be told, "you learned a new special move." So what if you're stuck on a boss, and the FAQ's say you "should use this move frequently," and you don't have it....how do you get it? Well, have fun bro, and thank you for purchasing Grandia III.

Though the Grandia battle system in general is fun, (though I find it to be horribly overrated,) it always gives off the illusion of fast speeds and fun combat...yet later in the game becomes nothing but a magic contest, with the enemies using lengthy magic and skill moves (which slow combat to a hault) almost every turn, and that then forces you, the gamer, to use them as well, completely ruining any sense of a fast-paced combat system. It also doesn't help that enemies in Grandia III have the ability to call their friends into the battle seemingly whenever the hell they want, so for every one you seem to kill, two more are called in. It's incredibly frustrating.

I've barely even gotten into bosses yet. This game is hard. Really hard. Bosses on disc 2, especially towards the end of the game, are almost insanely brutal. If I had trouble with them, I don't even want to think about causal gamers and casual RPG fans, who, I can say with full confidence, will not be able to beat this game. It's that simple. They have no hope of completing Grandia III. I don't know what I did wrong. I realize I didn't fully explore the clunky mana egg and skill book system, (which makes yet another return in Grandia III and is once again tedious,) but look, developers; IF I AM ABLE TO MAKE IT 28 HOURS INTO THIS 34-HOUR GAME, I SHOULD BE ABLE TO COMPLETE THE GAME. The difficulty ramps up so quickly and impossibly at the end that I couldn't complete it on my own. I had to go out and purchase a Gameshark and use it to get past the last 4-5 hours of the game. As I watched with my unlimited HP, MP, and SP, these brutal late-game bosses dished out moves that would have practically eliminated my party in one shot. They do these over and over and over again. I wondered, "what did I do wrong?" Grandia II was a little too easy, but developers; It's better if it's too easy than if it's too hard, because if it's too easy, it may be slightly disappointing, but at least the average gamer will be able to FINISH the game. And again...I never use devices like Gamesharks. I hate the idea of cheat codes. But I was up against a brick wall here. I could not complete this game. I wasn't under-leveled, I thought my characters had plenty of skills and magic (apparently not) and I thought I had a grasp of the combat system. But this game was, as far as I'm concerned, impossible. And I'm not new to the genre; I've completed many RPG's that have been deemed "challenging" (such as Xenosaga Episode 1) without breaking a sweat. Grandia III, though, was something I just could not complete. The ridiculously high difficulty is yet another nail in the game's coffin. The combat system and the gameplay in general become tedious and monotonous from about 12-hours on....and Grandia III never again becomes fun.

And unfortunately, that's all this game is; fighting battle after battle after battle. You basically walk on seemingly ENDLESS paths, leading to nowhere, getting in battle after battle after battle after battle. And you are typically traveling to NOTHING. The characters will say, (or, rather, Yuki and Alfina will; the other 2 characters rarely ever say anything,) that they need to visit this spirit, and you'll travel across this endless path, or explore an endless dungeon, finally reaching your destination...and nothing really happens. You talk to this spirit, it gives you something, and that's it. "Well, off to the next one." This game, plot-wise and gameplay-wise, is a disaster. Hardcore RPG fans who like to fully explore all the various skill systems, magic systems, etc. in every RPG they play, will likely have fun with the gameplay throughout Grandia III, but everyone else won't.

...but then again, they may not like Grandia III either, since there are NO SIDEQUESTS IN THE ENTIRE GAME. None. Now, as a gamer who never does sidequests, I wasn't too bothered by this, and unlike Grandia II, Grandia III at least allows you to travel wherever you want at some points. But hardcore RPG gamers will be very disappointed at how linear and "sidequest-free" this game is. So...who was Grandia III meant for? It's too difficult for casual RPG gamers and casual gamers in general, and way too linear, predictable, and sidequest-free for hardcore RPG gamers....so who was this game made for? Even basic game design concepts seem to have escaped the grasp of the developers. You can only carry 9 of a given item (which doesn't exactly ease the pain of a tough boss, let me put it that way,) and yet the game has no problem depriving you of item shops. Once you leave the first village, when's the next item shop? 10 hours later. I really wish I were kidding.

Sound; like the graphics, the sound effects fully bring you into the environments. Great job here. The music is completely a mixed bag, though. Series composer Noriyuki Iwadare once again returns, and once again, the music is only so-so. Some is amazing, don't get me wrong. Lots of the event music (particularly the emotional events) is done extremely well, as are the battle themes. And for the first 10-12 hours of the game, the ambient music that plays when you explore the environments is relaxing. Unfortunately, (again) this doesn't last past 10-12 hours. See, this environment music plays in EVERY SINGLE ENVIRONMENT during the ENTIRE GAME. (With maybe 1 or 2 exceptions.) Every time you walk along a path, they cue this exact same music. The dungeon music, (which starts playing in every dungeon starting with...Dragon Valley) is amazingly boring and makes dungeon exploration even more tedious. Music when in towns ranges from the great, (Anfog Village) to the terrible (Baccula Settlement, which sounds like Iwadare composed it during a crack binge,) and the term "mixed bag" never applied better to a game. Needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of this guy's music. On another note, the voice acting is great in most cases, which bodes well for the dubbing of Final Fantasy XII.

Despite some great production values, Grandia III is a complete disaster. From a horrible, hole-filled story with really bad, under-developed characters to an extremely tedious, overly-difficult combat system and repetitive gameplay, Grandia III seems to do everything in its power to make you regret purchasing it. While the recent Tales of Legendia, for example, seemed to try its best to allow you to have fun while playing it, the developers of Grandia III seemed to want nothing more than to punish you for buying their game. The battle system's designed to be extremely tedious, and they clearly put no effort whatsoever into the storyline. Excellent graphics and a great opening 10 hours save this game from getting a 1/10 or 2/10 score, but it comes close. Very close. Grandia III is among the worst gameplay experiences I've ever had. If you really want to experience the great (but vastly overrated) Grandia battle system, you should probably pick up a copy of Grandia II instead, (the Dreamcast version, not the technical disaster that was the PS2 port,) but even Grandia II wasn't great, (although it was much better than this,) and there are much better RPG's out there than this series.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/10/06, Updated 07/30/09

Game Release: Grandia III (US, 02/14/06)