Collection essentials #482: Grandia III (PS2)

And here we have what is, to date, the last mainline entry into the Grandia series. And it’s a very interesting beast indeed. Why is that? Well, JRPGs are games that are played and enjoyed for their story and characters just as much as their gameplay, if not more. Grandia III is a game that seems at first to maybe offer a reasonable, if not very original, story and characters. But the further you play the game, the more you realize that the story is as uninspired as it gets, and is utterly forgettable. However, Grandia has always had fundamentally good gameplay, and with this iteration, the game is so goshdarn fun to play that it still manages to be, in my opinion, very good.


The battle system in this series involves an “action meter” where you can see whose turns are coming up as they slowly slide across it. And if you time your attacks just right considering where enemies are both on the meter and on the battlefield, you often have an opportunity to delay or even cancel their attacks. Grandia III mostly keeps these mechanics intact. It does add its own flare, such as the ability to launch enemies into the air and then give another character the chance to do a special move on them while they’re up there which also nets further rewards after the battle.


One thing Grandia III has that’s a bit lacking in the previous games is challenge. To me, sometimes difficulty matters, because without it you have much less incentive to engage with and master the game. Grandia III requires you to think and strategize in order to succeed, and I had a blast doing so. Now, the downside is that occasionally the game’s difficulty spikes to the point where you’ll probably need to “grind” to level up and be strong enough to win. I didn’t mind it so much in this case, but they could have smoothed the difficulty curve a little better and it probably does bother some players.


I got into Grandia and Grandia II back in early 2004 and early 2005. I made a good friend on the internet who I bonded with in part thanks to Grandia, and I joined a Grandia forum that he frequented on top of that. And so, we were excited when Grandia III was announced. The game came out in America in early 2006, and I got it soon after, the very copy shown in the photo. But the odd thing is…I only played it a few hours, then put it down. I can’t tell you precisely why. There were probably other games that were competing for my attention at the same time, and I put it on the back burner thinking “someday” I would get back to it. 


That day didn’t come for quite a few years. Almost nine of them, in fact, as it was early 2015 that I actually sat down to play it all the way through. And I soon felt stupid for waiting that long! I found the game really hard to put down. But of course, the story failed to impress. My sister Rebecca watched me play it sometimes and nicknamed one of the bland antagonists “Crazy McBigsword” as a dig. The game seemed to especially run out of ideas midway through, culminating in a final boss who spits out (what I remember as) the most cliche villain soundbites imaginable.


I can’t say that Grandia III is the best or my favorite Grandia game. It may be a little more fun to play in terms of gameplay, but its narrative shortcomings are utterly trounced by the excellent cast and storytelling of the first game. Nevertheless, as you can tell by now, I highly recommend this game if you enjoy good gameplay in your JRPGs and can put up with a bland story. Sadly this game is not included in the Granda HD Collection on modern platforms. The most accessible way to play this game remains the PS2 original, but thankfully that’s not an unreasonably expensive avenue to take even today. While it falls short of being one of my top favorite JRPGs, it’s still plenty great enough to be a PS2 essential in my book.


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