I went back to play Grandia 3 again to finish maxing out levels/stats, and it's surprising how good the battle system is. It pretty much addresses everything that is usually a problem in a RPG system, which is probably why Grandia 3 plays well despite having no plot and no one you could possibly care about as a party member.
First, let's talk about how the game is easy. This game, if played a certain way, is very very hard, which is why they give you a ton of 'easy mode' options in case you might not be able to actually beat it. On Wikipedia someone claim they got killed by Xorn at level 99, and a guide somewhere says it only takes 30 minutes to beat Xorn if you're appropriately leveled, even though I think I dropped him in 5 minutes and I barely had enough HP to survive his strongest attack hit one target (in fact pretty sure I didn't). So clearly no matter how much you suck, the game finds a way to bail you out. Let's look at the ways:
1. Miranda and Alonso. These two characters are your tutorial characters. Alonso is your standard pretty powerful character whose stats is probably a bit higher than rest of the party (he starts out higher level). Miranda has the highest movement, initative, and her attack animation has priority on virtually any attack in the game. A common scenario you find in Grandia 3 is that it's your turn to attack but another enemy has you targetted with a normal attack. Generally the guy who gets the first move has priority, so if you try to attack the enemy, you get hit with a 130% counter bonus because it hits you first, and then you might also miss the enemy as it tries to run away after it's done attacking. But Miranda's regular attack has priority over just about everything, which means you can attack through just about everything and get a 130% damage bonus to set up further combos.
Her launcher attack has a high priority as well. Her cancel move is multi-hit like Dahna but it actually hits hard. All Grandia characters attempt to use up all their mobility at the end of their attack and attempt to get as far as possible from the enemy. Miranda, who has by far the highest movement, is able to get away from enemy counterattack range, and her strong attack, which is fan-based, has a better targetting arc the further away she is. If you look at your future characters, Dahna is the only one with a multi-hit cancel, but her attack power is nonexistent. Alfina and Ulf has good line/fan attacks, but both are slower than dirt in terms of movement and it is very difficult to move them to a spot to set up for a good line/fan attack. In short, your starting party of Yuki/Alfina/Miranda/Alonso is the strongest party you'll ever get, and that's good because you need some extra help to deal with the game's considerable difficulty curve.
2. The timing advice. If you just listen to the in game advice on when to cancel, it'll work out *pretty well*. It won't help you for anything advanced like how to manipulate the time wheel against something like an Excise Psi or an Excise Omega, but it'll be enough to get you through most of stuff.
3. The Orbs. They're your standard 'summon powerful guardians to do stuf', and once you get Unama's Orb, you can probably go through half of a boss's health during the time freeze. Most FAQs heavily rely on Unama's Orb because it's very hard to fight the tough bosses the normal way.
4. The big MP spells. Early on, some of the enemy are quite vulnerable to spells. You might not have a clue how to deal with an Excise Psi (which might as well be a boss by itself) but you can always cast Galactic Bang and kill it in one shot, even if it uses up 80 or so MP. This stops working somewhere after the first boss in the 2nd CD when enemies/bosses no longer have significant spell weakness. Sure you can't cast a 99 MP spell for long, but the standard 'hug the save point that restores all MP' method works well for clearing out regular enemies in a hurry.
So overall, Grandia 3 is not a very hard game if you use all the help the game gives you. In fact it might be pretty easy until Galactic Bang stops working as an instant kill mechanism.
Now let's go to why the game is hard.
If you turn off the advice, or when you start getting to the enemy who are MUCH faster than you, it becomes difficult to determine which kind of attack you want to use to cancel. Also the game will never advise you on a delayed cancel (Stun Force for example) so you have to use experience to figure out if you can cancel something with a Stun Force when the normal methods don't work. The cancel timer based on critical attacks also do not factor into movement obstacles, or getting hit on the way. Back when you have Miranda, if it says Miranda can cancel with a critical she will always get there on time because she will outrun anything trying to hit her, and her critical comes out faster than just about anything. But once you lose Miranda, you basically have to know the framerate and movement speed of all your characters. Ulf's critical can be canceled out in mid-swing due to its huge animation sequence, and to a lesser extent Yuki and Alfina as well. Dahna has the best critical cancel, but again her cancel is only good for cancel and not damage.
Unlike most games, the tough enemies in this game are a lot faster than you. Generally speaking most RPGs, the enemy is only at best as fast as you even though you get 3-4 turns while they get only 1, and often they're actually slower than you. Not so in Grandia 3. The fastest enemies, like Excise Psis, are probably 3-4 times as fast you. The average tough boss is probably about twice as fast, and even the regular enemies are generally faster. This means you're never safe just because the enemy just went. Since they are faster than you, that means if you use your turn to cancel their attack, that guy will still get his turn back well before whoever canceled his attack did. This means if you just try to cancel everything, you could end up having no one left to cancel and have to let a strong attack slip through. So it becomes very important to learn which attacks the enemy use are strong/cancel moves versu not, and sometimes you want to purposely let them succeed and let the enemy pay the extra recovery time for using a big move, assuming it's one you can reasonably defend against.
Although the game has a strong focus on canceling, with the exception of Miranda, none of your cancel moves are strong damage dealers. This means if you concentrate on canceling, you might not be taking very much damage but you also won't be dealing very much damage either. This is probably why there are people who need 30 minutes to beat Xorn. Assuming one is not infinitely patient, there is reward, namely shorter battle time, for not going with a defensive cancel based strategy. The combo attacks when in combination with Flash/Shadow Warrior and Berserker is probably the strongest attack in the game, but it eats up a huge amount of time due to the animation time. So to set one up you absolutely need to have rest of your party to make sure your 20 swing animation doesn't get interrupted. Of course if you use Unama's Orb you can do a 20 hit combo without any possibility of being interrupted, which is why it's easy to escape from difficult fights.
Some of the time, you must attack to defend. If you see Alfina or Dahna being targetted by something like say, Buster Horn, you know this attack does about 3000 damage if not defended, which is probably more HP than either will have period. Assuming you want to keep them alive, you absolutely have to attack to cancel the attack because it doesn't matter how much you heal, you will never have enough HP to survive it on your weak characters. Another good example would be Xorn's Dimensional Gate, which is enough to drop one of the girls from full to 0 if not defended.
Or let's say Alfina's turn came up, and a bunch of your characters are low at HP. In a normal RPG this calls for some kind of healing spell, but you can't do it if you're being targetted by a cancel attack (or rather a cancel attack that would hit you before you're done casting). In fact you can't even cast a heal if you're being targetted by a pushback attack, like Omega Vulcan, even though it does not cancel, because taking multiple hits while casting delays the casting by a very significant amount. If you go against say 5 Pico Omegas, and you take 3 Omega Vulcans while you're casting a heal, that heal isn't going to be done for another 15 seconds and you'd be better off defending through the Omega Vulcans, and then casting when it's over. In this game you're not able to cast heals whenever you want, because it is very easy for an enemy to delay/cancel your spells, and further some attacks are strong enough that you can't risk letting them slip through. When I fought Violetta I think she had one attack that was a fan-based cancel that also did like 70% of the HP I had in one shot. Even if all your guys are at 40%, you still can't stop to heal if she picks that attack.
It's unfortunate that the Grandia series don't have much besides gameplay. It seems like Game Arts are the only one who actually care about making a good RPG system.
First, let's talk about how the game is easy. This game, if played a certain way, is very very hard, which is why they give you a ton of 'easy mode' options in case you might not be able to actually beat it. On Wikipedia someone claim they got killed by Xorn at level 99, and a guide somewhere says it only takes 30 minutes to beat Xorn if you're appropriately leveled, even though I think I dropped him in 5 minutes and I barely had enough HP to survive his strongest attack hit one target (in fact pretty sure I didn't). So clearly no matter how much you suck, the game finds a way to bail you out. Let's look at the ways:
1. Miranda and Alonso. These two characters are your tutorial characters. Alonso is your standard pretty powerful character whose stats is probably a bit higher than rest of the party (he starts out higher level). Miranda has the highest movement, initative, and her attack animation has priority on virtually any attack in the game. A common scenario you find in Grandia 3 is that it's your turn to attack but another enemy has you targetted with a normal attack. Generally the guy who gets the first move has priority, so if you try to attack the enemy, you get hit with a 130% counter bonus because it hits you first, and then you might also miss the enemy as it tries to run away after it's done attacking. But Miranda's regular attack has priority over just about everything, which means you can attack through just about everything and get a 130% damage bonus to set up further combos.
Her launcher attack has a high priority as well. Her cancel move is multi-hit like Dahna but it actually hits hard. All Grandia characters attempt to use up all their mobility at the end of their attack and attempt to get as far as possible from the enemy. Miranda, who has by far the highest movement, is able to get away from enemy counterattack range, and her strong attack, which is fan-based, has a better targetting arc the further away she is. If you look at your future characters, Dahna is the only one with a multi-hit cancel, but her attack power is nonexistent. Alfina and Ulf has good line/fan attacks, but both are slower than dirt in terms of movement and it is very difficult to move them to a spot to set up for a good line/fan attack. In short, your starting party of Yuki/Alfina/Miranda/Alonso is the strongest party you'll ever get, and that's good because you need some extra help to deal with the game's considerable difficulty curve.
2. The timing advice. If you just listen to the in game advice on when to cancel, it'll work out *pretty well*. It won't help you for anything advanced like how to manipulate the time wheel against something like an Excise Psi or an Excise Omega, but it'll be enough to get you through most of stuff.
3. The Orbs. They're your standard 'summon powerful guardians to do stuf', and once you get Unama's Orb, you can probably go through half of a boss's health during the time freeze. Most FAQs heavily rely on Unama's Orb because it's very hard to fight the tough bosses the normal way.
4. The big MP spells. Early on, some of the enemy are quite vulnerable to spells. You might not have a clue how to deal with an Excise Psi (which might as well be a boss by itself) but you can always cast Galactic Bang and kill it in one shot, even if it uses up 80 or so MP. This stops working somewhere after the first boss in the 2nd CD when enemies/bosses no longer have significant spell weakness. Sure you can't cast a 99 MP spell for long, but the standard 'hug the save point that restores all MP' method works well for clearing out regular enemies in a hurry.
So overall, Grandia 3 is not a very hard game if you use all the help the game gives you. In fact it might be pretty easy until Galactic Bang stops working as an instant kill mechanism.
Now let's go to why the game is hard.
If you turn off the advice, or when you start getting to the enemy who are MUCH faster than you, it becomes difficult to determine which kind of attack you want to use to cancel. Also the game will never advise you on a delayed cancel (Stun Force for example) so you have to use experience to figure out if you can cancel something with a Stun Force when the normal methods don't work. The cancel timer based on critical attacks also do not factor into movement obstacles, or getting hit on the way. Back when you have Miranda, if it says Miranda can cancel with a critical she will always get there on time because she will outrun anything trying to hit her, and her critical comes out faster than just about anything. But once you lose Miranda, you basically have to know the framerate and movement speed of all your characters. Ulf's critical can be canceled out in mid-swing due to its huge animation sequence, and to a lesser extent Yuki and Alfina as well. Dahna has the best critical cancel, but again her cancel is only good for cancel and not damage.
Unlike most games, the tough enemies in this game are a lot faster than you. Generally speaking most RPGs, the enemy is only at best as fast as you even though you get 3-4 turns while they get only 1, and often they're actually slower than you. Not so in Grandia 3. The fastest enemies, like Excise Psis, are probably 3-4 times as fast you. The average tough boss is probably about twice as fast, and even the regular enemies are generally faster. This means you're never safe just because the enemy just went. Since they are faster than you, that means if you use your turn to cancel their attack, that guy will still get his turn back well before whoever canceled his attack did. This means if you just try to cancel everything, you could end up having no one left to cancel and have to let a strong attack slip through. So it becomes very important to learn which attacks the enemy use are strong/cancel moves versu not, and sometimes you want to purposely let them succeed and let the enemy pay the extra recovery time for using a big move, assuming it's one you can reasonably defend against.
Although the game has a strong focus on canceling, with the exception of Miranda, none of your cancel moves are strong damage dealers. This means if you concentrate on canceling, you might not be taking very much damage but you also won't be dealing very much damage either. This is probably why there are people who need 30 minutes to beat Xorn. Assuming one is not infinitely patient, there is reward, namely shorter battle time, for not going with a defensive cancel based strategy. The combo attacks when in combination with Flash/Shadow Warrior and Berserker is probably the strongest attack in the game, but it eats up a huge amount of time due to the animation time. So to set one up you absolutely need to have rest of your party to make sure your 20 swing animation doesn't get interrupted. Of course if you use Unama's Orb you can do a 20 hit combo without any possibility of being interrupted, which is why it's easy to escape from difficult fights.
Some of the time, you must attack to defend. If you see Alfina or Dahna being targetted by something like say, Buster Horn, you know this attack does about 3000 damage if not defended, which is probably more HP than either will have period. Assuming you want to keep them alive, you absolutely have to attack to cancel the attack because it doesn't matter how much you heal, you will never have enough HP to survive it on your weak characters. Another good example would be Xorn's Dimensional Gate, which is enough to drop one of the girls from full to 0 if not defended.
Or let's say Alfina's turn came up, and a bunch of your characters are low at HP. In a normal RPG this calls for some kind of healing spell, but you can't do it if you're being targetted by a cancel attack (or rather a cancel attack that would hit you before you're done casting). In fact you can't even cast a heal if you're being targetted by a pushback attack, like Omega Vulcan, even though it does not cancel, because taking multiple hits while casting delays the casting by a very significant amount. If you go against say 5 Pico Omegas, and you take 3 Omega Vulcans while you're casting a heal, that heal isn't going to be done for another 15 seconds and you'd be better off defending through the Omega Vulcans, and then casting when it's over. In this game you're not able to cast heals whenever you want, because it is very easy for an enemy to delay/cancel your spells, and further some attacks are strong enough that you can't risk letting them slip through. When I fought Violetta I think she had one attack that was a fan-based cancel that also did like 70% of the HP I had in one shot. Even if all your guys are at 40%, you still can't stop to heal if she picks that attack.
It's unfortunate that the Grandia series don't have much besides gameplay. It seems like Game Arts are the only one who actually care about making a good RPG system.
