This game has to have the best battle system in a RPG. The Grandia series has always been strong on the battle system, but this one is simply the best. Up until the first CD, it looks like your standard Grandia 'max out your cancel techs and procede to own', which is already more strategic to any non Grandia RPGs, but still somewhat lacking. If you have never played Grandia before, everything in Grandia can be canceled: attack, specials, magic, super moves, or anything else. In the earlier Grandia games the cancel moves have nearly instantaneously charge time, do good damage, and are pretty cheap which results battles where you four guys chain their cancel moves and beat boss down to submission. The last battle on CD 1 against Kornell and Violetta might require you to play a little bit more carefully, but for the most part if you follow the game's auto-suggest you'll be pretty set.
That's until you go to the Verse Realm on CD2. If you're not significantly leveled (the enemies before the portal to Verse Realm are great to do that. I wish I had leveled on them), you'll find out how hard this game gets when you run into the your first Excise Psi, which is an enemy that gets at least 3 turns for every turn you get, and its attack can do well over 50% of your entire party's health. Since your 4 characters get their turn at roughly the same time on the battle grid, and cancel move sets you back about 1 turn after you use it, if you just happily use cancel moves 4 times, you'll find that Excise Psi gets about 3 turns to do whatever it wants while you're waiting for your next character's turn to come up (because it's 3 times as fast as you).
You have to be real creative with using defend (bonus to next turn), cancel moves (1 turn penalty), and big spell/moves (more than 1 turn penalty) to space your people out on the active time grid so that there is always someone to cancel out the 3rd turn Excise Psi gets (it will get 2 turns back to back at some point no matter how clever you are). This one enemy alone requires more thinking than just about any boss I have ran into in a RPG. You've to know what which big attacks/spells it's okay to purposely let it go through, because enemies also have the same penalty to their turn for using big moves, and defend has significant strategic value since defending against a succesful attack means a huge gain in time (you get +time to next turn, while the enemy gets -time for using a big move, and you take less damage).
Actually, most random encounters in Verse Realm require more thinking than the average RPG put together. The enemies hit hard and are fast, and you do not have the ability to cancel every move with your cancel moves, so you've to get good at using critical cancels, which doesn't use SP or have a time penalty to your next turn, but is not instant like the cancel moves. Beyond that, critical cancels can be delayed if your character is hit while running up to the enemy so you've to know exactly who will get to what first. The auto-suggest can tell you that if A uses critical cancel on B, it will always succeed. However it will not factor in that C is going to use a normal attack on A which will stop A's movement for 2 seconds, giving enough time for B to get his big spells off before A gets there. Of course, you can always run away from every non boss easily, including Excise Psis, and the Verse Realm enemies don't even give very much XP except Titan Thetas (which are surprisingly easy), so killing any random enemy is more for the challenge.
I'm currently on the first boss in the 2nd CD, which is just past 3 X 1 Excise Psis (I wimped out on the last one which had 2 friends too). This boss kicks out an extra Pico Gamma or Alton Delta or Titan Theta every turn, and starts with 1 Delta and 2 Gammas. While your RPG gamer impulse would be to kill the 3 little guys and then interrupt the spawning process (after all everything in Grandia can be interrupted), you'll quickly find that the big guy is actually much faster than you so you'll never be able to interrupt his turns completely (similar to the Excise Psis) and you'll not be able to do enough damage to overcome the new guys spawning, since Grandia 3 is fairly stingy on hit-all abilities.
So, you got to focus on the big guy while fighting an increasingly large number of little guys. I ended up having one guy chain cast Confuse while 3 guy focus on the boss while avoiding AE attacks like Time Bombs from the Gammas which will pretty much instantly kill you if you don't move out of the way when the Gammas get to about 4+. You also still have to interrupt the really dangerous attacks, like Death Waltz, while burning down the leader. I killed the boss roughly half a turn before my remaining 2 characters are about to get totally overwhelmed by the 10 guys that are in the battle. Now that's a boss battle.
Maybe the game doesn't get better or even keep the same level of challenge. Still, the Verse Realm battles alone are enough reason to play the game. Actually, there isn't much other reason to get the game. The music is standard, and the plot is boring if not rediculous (random boy saves the world, and for some reason everyone listens to him, including your own mother). But the plot of a Grandia game is always just an excuse to have the battle system, and this one is no different.
That's until you go to the Verse Realm on CD2. If you're not significantly leveled (the enemies before the portal to Verse Realm are great to do that. I wish I had leveled on them), you'll find out how hard this game gets when you run into the your first Excise Psi, which is an enemy that gets at least 3 turns for every turn you get, and its attack can do well over 50% of your entire party's health. Since your 4 characters get their turn at roughly the same time on the battle grid, and cancel move sets you back about 1 turn after you use it, if you just happily use cancel moves 4 times, you'll find that Excise Psi gets about 3 turns to do whatever it wants while you're waiting for your next character's turn to come up (because it's 3 times as fast as you).
You have to be real creative with using defend (bonus to next turn), cancel moves (1 turn penalty), and big spell/moves (more than 1 turn penalty) to space your people out on the active time grid so that there is always someone to cancel out the 3rd turn Excise Psi gets (it will get 2 turns back to back at some point no matter how clever you are). This one enemy alone requires more thinking than just about any boss I have ran into in a RPG. You've to know what which big attacks/spells it's okay to purposely let it go through, because enemies also have the same penalty to their turn for using big moves, and defend has significant strategic value since defending against a succesful attack means a huge gain in time (you get +time to next turn, while the enemy gets -time for using a big move, and you take less damage).
Actually, most random encounters in Verse Realm require more thinking than the average RPG put together. The enemies hit hard and are fast, and you do not have the ability to cancel every move with your cancel moves, so you've to get good at using critical cancels, which doesn't use SP or have a time penalty to your next turn, but is not instant like the cancel moves. Beyond that, critical cancels can be delayed if your character is hit while running up to the enemy so you've to know exactly who will get to what first. The auto-suggest can tell you that if A uses critical cancel on B, it will always succeed. However it will not factor in that C is going to use a normal attack on A which will stop A's movement for 2 seconds, giving enough time for B to get his big spells off before A gets there. Of course, you can always run away from every non boss easily, including Excise Psis, and the Verse Realm enemies don't even give very much XP except Titan Thetas (which are surprisingly easy), so killing any random enemy is more for the challenge.
I'm currently on the first boss in the 2nd CD, which is just past 3 X 1 Excise Psis (I wimped out on the last one which had 2 friends too). This boss kicks out an extra Pico Gamma or Alton Delta or Titan Theta every turn, and starts with 1 Delta and 2 Gammas. While your RPG gamer impulse would be to kill the 3 little guys and then interrupt the spawning process (after all everything in Grandia can be interrupted), you'll quickly find that the big guy is actually much faster than you so you'll never be able to interrupt his turns completely (similar to the Excise Psis) and you'll not be able to do enough damage to overcome the new guys spawning, since Grandia 3 is fairly stingy on hit-all abilities.
So, you got to focus on the big guy while fighting an increasingly large number of little guys. I ended up having one guy chain cast Confuse while 3 guy focus on the boss while avoiding AE attacks like Time Bombs from the Gammas which will pretty much instantly kill you if you don't move out of the way when the Gammas get to about 4+. You also still have to interrupt the really dangerous attacks, like Death Waltz, while burning down the leader. I killed the boss roughly half a turn before my remaining 2 characters are about to get totally overwhelmed by the 10 guys that are in the battle. Now that's a boss battle.
Maybe the game doesn't get better or even keep the same level of challenge. Still, the Verse Realm battles alone are enough reason to play the game. Actually, there isn't much other reason to get the game. The music is standard, and the plot is boring if not rediculous (random boy saves the world, and for some reason everyone listens to him, including your own mother). But the plot of a Grandia game is always just an excuse to have the battle system, and this one is no different.
