Grandia III

Written in 2019

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Stepping out

Grandia III

Grandia III is a mixed bag. Although I am a big fan of the series, I reviewed it with a score of 72%, which is one of the lower scores we grant here on rpg-o-mania. So it is still a good game, don't think that it is a horrible game.

Yet, there are many things that are strange in Grandia III. It is short, the story is weird and has both strange (albeit likeable) characters, story arcs that end suddenly with characters simply disappearing and a oftentimes annoying brother-sister-relationship. Yet there are some really strong points in the game.

When players first leave the initial village, they enter a lush forest with a rising sun in front of them. The music is calm and smooth, and immediately there is this feeling of starting a journey - one of the aspects I liked so much in the first Grandia.

When Grandia III was released, the seventh generation of game consoles (PlayStation 3, XBox 360) had just started and what Grandia 3 presented was the pinnacle of what old consoles were able to deliver.

Everything in this moment played so well together and was so atmospheric that I loved to step out on a new adventure. But it didn't stop there.

Grandia III is visual enjoyment over and over. There are so many locations that just look gorgeous, even today (2019). The quality of a scenery is not necessarily tied to the amount of polygons on the screen or the quality of shaders, no, often enough it's just a smart combination of visual impact and music.

I think that if it weren't for these moments and the battle system, I would have never been able to play through this game. So chapeau to the designers that were able to pull off such nice scenery!

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