Grandia III (2005)
2025-02-02
Grandia III is an insult to Grandia. i played Grandia I and II for the first time last year, and they're already near and dear to my heart. they are truly wonderful games that deserve every bit of prestige they have garnered over the years. they both have wonderful, colorful worlds with delightful casts of characters and stories far more meaningful than you would initially expect. this makes the amount of disrespect that Grandia III has for the series at its core astounding and insulting. i went in knowing that this game would be bad, sure, but i thought that it would at least be entertaining if nothing else. my expectations were already in the gutter after forcing myself through Grandia Xtreme very recently and being underwhelmed at best and annoyed at worst, anyway. and it was entertaining for the first five hours or so! but it very quickly became clear to me that Grandia III is orders of magnitude worse than Xtreme in every conceivable way, and not in any ways that you can turn your brain off and laugh at if you care about video games at all.
the elephant in the room with this game is the writing. no exaggeration, it feels like Grandia III was written by an alien. it's bizarre. none of these characters say anything that ever feels like something a human being would say. i would say that it reads like incoherent AI slop, but this game came out in 2005. so, no, a real human being wrote this, multiple people looked it over, and they all thought this was good enough to ship. wow! it's completely incomprehensible from the jump, too--why does Yuuki's mom look like a 16-year-old? why does she, literally, truly, forever leave the game five hours in to go on a romantic getaway with another guy who had only been in the party for about an hour and change? why does the guy who is definitely not just diet Rapp a permanent party member when he's completely irrelevant to the plot? why does he use a flail as a weapon when he's supposed to be a dragoon? why is everyone in the desert town white? why is the leader of the desert town a white woman "fortune teller" (which is never relevant) with an extremely orientalist outfit who breasts boobily everywhere? why is her "character arc" resolved within fifteen minutes of meeting her? why are there multiple worlds when it's pretty much completely irrelevant? why does the game very obviously try to ape Final Fantasy X at multiple points in cutscene direction and tenor?
why is Alfina so obsessed with her brother, to the point where it legitimately reads like incest? she constantly talks about how she wants to "become one with him" and uses explicitly romantic vocabulary when she talks about how she loves him. all she does for about half of the game is cry about her brother, how much she loves him, how much she misses him, how much she wants him back so that they can become one and never be apart again. the feeling is mutual from her brother, too. at first blush there's some kind of doomed toxic BL going on with him and another guy who doesn't matter at all, which could be interesting if this game wasn't written by a freak alien. but that's all brushed aside because he is exactly as obsessed with Alfina as she is with him, and uses the same romantic vocabulary when he says that he loves her... it is truly, truly bizarre. but it ultimately doesn't matter because he dies, Yuuki and Alfina end up together with one (1) child (step up your game--Justin and Feena had like five kids that all looked to be the same age), and it's all happily ever after. i feel like i'm in upside down world just writing about this game's story and characters. it's genuinely unbelievable.
another great (ha ha) part of this is the voice acting. good grief. there's absolutely no chance in hell that the English dub is worse than this. pretty much every single character in this game sounds like they were voiced by a person who had, like, no other roles. it's horrendous. like, "how did this get okayed at every single step and make it into the final product, every single character sounds like shit and also they frequently clip the microphone when they scream" horrendous. Alfina and Hect sound like they've never acted before in their lives, but that actually isn't the case! looking at the credits for Kinami Haruka (Alfina) and Maeda Ayaka (Hect), it seems like they've massively tended toward acting for TV dramas and movies, with few (if any) voice acting credits other than this game. so, in a sense, i guess you could use Grandia III as an example of how acting and voice acting are different disciplines? i guess that's something? i can't imagine the voice direction was good, either, with how slipshod everything else in this game is. i also couldn't really blame the actors if they sandbagged on purpose because of how horrendous the script is. that would be pretty funny.
the gameplay is, i suppose, the least offensive thing in this game. it's Grandia, but the first two Grandia games have this same style of combat and also don't make me want to explode, so what reason is there to even play this game? the aerial juggling that's almost entirely irrelevant because of how iffy the ATB system is for setting up multiple characters' turns to happen in that quick of succession? the Mana Eggs being like Xtreme's--which were one of the more interesting mechanics in that game--but more streamlined? everything else about Grandia III is just so horrendous i could not in good conscience recommend it just for the combat and RPG mechanics. i have seen something of a consensus opinion that this game sucks but the gameplay makes it possible (or even worth it!) to see through, but i can not go with people there; it just sounds like trying to justify sunk cost. there are so many RPGs out there that have better gameplay, while not being shit in every other respect.
speaking of gameplay systems, why is there a flying mechanic for the world map? it's so, so boneless. like they looked at Eternal Arcadia, thought "oh, that's cool, we should do that" and then proceeded to smash their dicks in the door before they even got anywhere. a lot of the shitty underutilized skyfaring aesthetic in this game really feels like these people looked at Eternal Arcadia and wanted to try making it themselves... but had no understanding of what makes that such a wonderful game. so it ends up being insulting to that game, too, not just Grandia. awesome. if there's any one single non-Grandia game i would say that you should play instead of this, it's Eternal Arcadia. it has all the color, whimsy, and excellent character writing of an actual Grandia game, and the world map exploration is astoundingly complex and full of delightful little secrets. it's everything Grandia III isn't!
the music sucks too. i can only assume that Iwadare Noriyuki was paid a pittance to work on this game, because there's just no soul to be found. there are enjoyable elements reminiscent of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Dream Theater in some of the battle themes, but most of the soundtrack is the same few reused area and dungeon themes that i have frankly already forgotten despite hearing them repeatedly. except for that desert town theme. if you've played Grandia III, you know the one--the desert town theme. that one is awesome. i wish i could replace every song in the game with it, because then it would be a lot more fun. it was a nice time to step away from the game and make some tea while idling in that town and leaving my best friend to listen to it without me. i dunno, maybe they shouldn't've spent so much money on that licensed pop song for the opening that has no business being in a Grandia game? maybe then they could have given Iwadare the funds and space required for him to make a decent soundtrack. Xtreme's music was pretty decent, and that game sucked, so there's really no excuse. (not on Iwadare's part, to be perfectly clear--on management's part. i'm sure he did what he could.)
the only reason why this game is two discs is because like half of the cutscenes are FMVs, by the way. it's a 28-ish hour long game. i can't even imagine how much of their budget was used in order to accommodate that kind of cutscene scale and direction. maybe if they laid off of the graphics they might have made a game that's a bit less shit? basically every dungeon is like two screens, three at most, with a linear path that has small branches with treasure. you don't even need the minimap in this game, because there's like nothing going on here. getting to the random deserted island jungle dungeon that took about 10 minutes just made me sad because i thought about how complex the jungle dungeon was in the first Grandia, and how much story and character development happens there. Grandia III just trucks you from dungeon to dungeon interspersed with the stupidest shiny FMV cutscenes i've ever seen in my life accompanied by some of the worst voice acting i've ever heard in my life.
truly, every single decision made with developing this video game seems like the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do. but, well, this game was published by Square Enix--i wouldn't be surprised if some of their chronic idiocy rubbed off on Game Arts during development. and then resulted in the death of the Grandia franchise. wow. incredible stuff. at the time of writing i'm playing Choro Q 2 for the first time, which is a really fun and cute game. unlike Grandia III.