I know that I am not alone in feeling a certain ennui when it comes to Japanese RPGs. I may have loved the genre whole-heartedly at one time, staying up until the wee hours to delight in the Final Fantasys, the Chrono Triggers, the Mana series; but it's become hard over the last few years to get excited about yet another expertly produced, good-looking game with random battles, turn-based combat, an overlong and entirely cliched story, and characters cut out of the back of a cereal box. After a while, it hurts to care because you end up being disappointed.
So it was with this wariness that I began Grandia III, steeling myself against the cheesy voice acting that was sure to come. But Grandia III opens...well, grandly, superbly, with a breathtaking wordless cinema that is part dream and part vision, part flashback and part prophecy, and which rivals anything that Final Fantasy has done. The world, too, pushes the PS2 to the limit, with autumnal leaves cascading to the forest floor, and the morning sun filtering through the mist, every scene evincing a depth of detail that really brings to life the visionary art direction and stands as perhaps the pinnacle of the aesthetic possibilities of this generation's consoles.
But it takes more than fancy graphics to seduce me anymore. I waited until the main characters were introduced. A boy with a dream, a will to see it through, and spiky hair -- check. A spunky, no-nonsense young woman who bosses him around -- check. An innocent girl fleeing some nasty-looking soldiers because she's fated to have a power no one really understands -- oh, how often have we seen this before? But hold on -- the young woman treating our hero like a kid is, in fact, his mother. That's new -- I've never played a videogame that explored so deeply the relationship between mother and son before. And indeed the scene in which she realizes she can't protect him anymore and must let him go is genuinely moving, in a much more real way than the manufactured, manipulative death of Aeris. (I still maintain that Aeris's death seemed like something you should be able to prevent, and it was supremely frustrating that there was nothing you could do.) By contrast, Miranda can't prevent her son from growing up, and that's a universal truth.
Ludologists and narratologists may debate until the end of time whether storytelling belongs in games or not; and as much as I have railed against the overuse of in-game cinematics to shove the plot forward, Grandia III manages to fold its many, many cinemas into the game so gracefully that each cut-scene is a treat, not a torture. True, the voice acting is a bit stretched thin, but once again the sheer high quality of the CG serves to highlight key important and emotional moments, rather than to interrupt the game.
[click the image to check out all Grandia III screens]After the initial burst of character-driven plot, however, the storyline does fall into place as a more standard quest tale, with orbs to collect and boss fights to endure, and a girl with a mysterious power to protect. But because of the initial investment in the plight of those involved, I found myself continuing to care about every one of the playable characters, even when wince-inducing wooden humor was painfully extracted from them. Much is made of the fact, for example, that Alfina can't cook; as royalty, she's never had to. The scene is embarrassingly long. Another moment that is meant to express a high point in the slowly blossoming romance between Alfina and Yuki is a straight-up rip off of Titanic. And still, in spite of all that, the care with which each character is drawn, animated, and given life in the game grew on me.
Another feature of RPGs that feeds my need to obsess over every detail is of course the character customization possibilities, which, after playing twenty-three hours of the game, I feel I've only begun to explore. In addition to the usual weapons, armors, and accessories, there are skills and magic abilities to distribute, as well as mana eggs that enhance magical abilities. Fusing various mana eggs together will generate more powerful eggs with upgraded properties. If you have spare eggs, you can also decide to extract spells from them, in which case the eggs will be used up. (Fuse the eggs first to generate even more powerful, rare spells.) Skills are another set of possibilities, and skill books are sort of the equivalent of mana eggs. You can extract special skills from books you find during the course of your adventures, or you can carry them as accessories to enhance the skills you already have.
I also found the battles -- yes, even those mundane leveling-up battles -- to be consistently fun and exciting, thanks to the much-vaunted combat system that the series has been able to perfect. The "command wheel" at first may seem like an over-complication of combat, but it turns out to be a clever way of pacing turn-based combat to make it as action-packed as it is real-time fighting; strategy develops quite differently from battle to battle depending on who's got the faster initiative and speed. Moreover, the player is encouraged to refine combat style to achieve massive multi-hit combos, including the aerial combo in which you knock an opponent into the air and let the other characters smack him around while he's on his way down. Finishing off an enemy like that will increase the chance of them dropping a rare item. The game will advise you during combat if you wish, in a way that doesn't break the fiction -- the characters will shout things like, "Quick! Alfina's being targeted! Stop him now, Yuki!" But to increase the challenge for yourself, you can turn this advice off.
For preview purposes Square Enix sent us only the first disc of what will ship as two discs. It's not an exaggeration to say that the first disc restored my faith and love of Japanese RPGs.
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Check out the intro. and gameplay footage from the U.S. version!
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