The Shrine

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).

I just finished it as well.

I ended up on level 44 with close to 48 hours of gameplay into it. Some of the time was spent gambling so I could get the master skill book, but I realized that force attack didn't really fit into my strategy. Basically I took the approach of trying to aerial finish every enemy I could. With flash, bersker, attack speed, and ninja slippers on Yuki I can do anywhere from a 25-30 attack aerial finish and could end up with upwards of 6-7k damage. The dolphin guardian's orb is definitely the best, you can freeze an enemy for nearly 4-5 of your character's turns. It was horrible fighting Xorn though because I had used my orb on a lucky minx to kill it right before I fought him. It took me over an hour and most of my healing items were consumed. At a couple points in time I had only one guy alive.

I do agree that G2 had the better story, but G3 had so many things in the gameplay that made it interesting, like the way you could combine skills, magic, and equipment to come up with the best combos. One thing that really disappointed me was not getting to use Raven though. I thought for sure that I'd be able utilize his powers before the end of the game.

About the flying part, that was just ridiculous. I mean they made a whole island on the map for racing and there was no airplane race. They should've ATLEAST had one of those. The best thing about skies of arcadia was fighting in the airborne battles with the cannons and such. There should've been something like that in this game.

I think I died about 5 times in that game, it wasn't overly difficult and I understand how this could be considered a major flaw in the game. With the amount of save points, there's no reason why they couldn't make the enemies harder. I didn't try to level up at all, and in fact if I felt that the enemy on the road or path would just annoy me, I'd hit it with my sword and go around it.

Dispite it's flaws though, this game was very enjoyable to me. I hope they make a GrandiaIV and expand on what they did in this game.

G3 had a lot of possible combinations but the game's difficulty coupled with how magic absolutely dominates limits what you can actually do in the game. Why use Dragon Slash (the signature move of the Grandia series) when stuff like Astral Zap, Ba-Boom, Absolute Zero, or Crackle Fang does the same thing and consumes less resources? Heck you even get a free paralyze from Astral Zap. I think the moves with elemental damage gets improved by mana eggs which makes non elemental moves like Dragon Slash really weak.

I think the save point limitation is really stupid, both the fact that most save points don't restore your HP/MP (and never SP) and that you can only change magic/skills at a save point, especially considering once you get meditation you always have infinite HP/MP as long as just keep on skip turns defending when you get to the last enemy in a fight, so the lack of HP/MP restoring just prolongs the game for no good reason. I think a system like Shining Force Neo where you're always one step away from a save point/full HP and the fights range from trivial to insanely difficult. But it's okay to die in one hit to a XYZ Force because you're always just one fight away from getting back in (assuming you save aggressively).

I do enjoy the game, but I think they could've a good system to build from but did not. While Grandia 2 erred on the side of too easy (Tio's Lotus Flower can stop enemies indefinitely, and I've heard Milennia's Paralyzing Eye works on even bosses), Grandia 3 leaned a bit on too hard, and it's not only hard, it's cheesy hard. When you die in Grandia 3 you often wonder what the heck you're supposed to do because that fast enemy moved 3 times before you got to move. Compare this to say Shining Force Neo where the Avatar of the Stars can kill you in one hit before you even know what happened, and yet you can actually beat a boss that can kill you in one hit with the right combination of skills (not very easy, of course).