Unlike the previous Grandia games, in G3 spell reigns supreme. If you max out spells it takes out a lot of the earlier difficulty, which is a shame because some of the earliest battles are extremely difficult without the right spells but still within the realm of beatability. After that, the game boils down to a bunch of extremely cheesy boss battles against bosses which have ridiculously high speed and are tuned with spells like Galactic Bang in mind. You don't really have any different strategy on them compared to earlier bosses but if you get unlucky and they use 2 of their biggest attacks back and back you're probably looking at an instant game over, and there's almost nothing you can do about it because they're so fast that canceling actually nets you a significant time loss.
Thankfully the AI picks its attacks rather arbitrarily so it is rare you'll actually get hit by consecutive strong attacks. Take the last battle, Xorn. It is not unusual for Xorn to get 2 attacks or 3 attacks before any of your character to go again and if he does Dimensional Gate or Death Kneel back to back you're looking at a game over unless you're about 30 levels higher than you should be. Given the number of attacks he has the likelihood of this is extremely low so and will probably cast his uselesss attacks instead. While most RPG have some element luck in it, in Grandia 3 it is very important, or rather you need to avoid having bad luck otherwise you can't win. Some of the regular enemies seem to be even harder than bosses, notably the Excise Omegas at the end.
As for the story, Grandia 2 still has the best story out of the series. The game reminds me a lot of FF8 where every person that was remotely interesting will never be in your party (at least not for long). For a game that's supposed about a guy wanting to become a pilot, there sure isn't a much about flying or planes. It's like Skies of Arcadia without the skies.
This is also one of the most frustrating game to level up because although enemies get harder, they don't give more XP. If you didn't grind on Mummy Demons on disc 1 you'll never be able to be very high level without spending an insane amount of time. The game isn't hard enough (barring bad luck) that you'd need to level up, but I really hate not even having the option to level up even if you wanted to. The only way to get levels is killing the Lucky Minks which have about 4X your speed and run away at almost every opportunity, and although they only have 12 HP they take 0 damage about 80% of the time and 1 the other 20% of the time. Again there's really no strategy to killing those. If by some miracle you actually get to cancel them while they're running away, you can do that. Otherwise you just throw as many multi-hit attack as possible and hope something good happens.
Overall I think G3 worse than G2 by far, and probably not even better than G1 in terms of gameplay system. The first half of the game, without getting the overpowered level 5 spells, could be one of the best gameplay in RPG, though I think it is still not as good as G2's event battles (Melfice and Eye of Valmar).
Thankfully the AI picks its attacks rather arbitrarily so it is rare you'll actually get hit by consecutive strong attacks. Take the last battle, Xorn. It is not unusual for Xorn to get 2 attacks or 3 attacks before any of your character to go again and if he does Dimensional Gate or Death Kneel back to back you're looking at a game over unless you're about 30 levels higher than you should be. Given the number of attacks he has the likelihood of this is extremely low so and will probably cast his uselesss attacks instead. While most RPG have some element luck in it, in Grandia 3 it is very important, or rather you need to avoid having bad luck otherwise you can't win. Some of the regular enemies seem to be even harder than bosses, notably the Excise Omegas at the end.
As for the story, Grandia 2 still has the best story out of the series. The game reminds me a lot of FF8 where every person that was remotely interesting will never be in your party (at least not for long). For a game that's supposed about a guy wanting to become a pilot, there sure isn't a much about flying or planes. It's like Skies of Arcadia without the skies.
This is also one of the most frustrating game to level up because although enemies get harder, they don't give more XP. If you didn't grind on Mummy Demons on disc 1 you'll never be able to be very high level without spending an insane amount of time. The game isn't hard enough (barring bad luck) that you'd need to level up, but I really hate not even having the option to level up even if you wanted to. The only way to get levels is killing the Lucky Minks which have about 4X your speed and run away at almost every opportunity, and although they only have 12 HP they take 0 damage about 80% of the time and 1 the other 20% of the time. Again there's really no strategy to killing those. If by some miracle you actually get to cancel them while they're running away, you can do that. Otherwise you just throw as many multi-hit attack as possible and hope something good happens.
Overall I think G3 worse than G2 by far, and probably not even better than G1 in terms of gameplay system. The first half of the game, without getting the overpowered level 5 spells, could be one of the best gameplay in RPG, though I think it is still not as good as G2's event battles (Melfice and Eye of Valmar).
