Recently I had the pleasure of taking the first disc of the North American version of Game Arts' and Square Enix's Grandia III for a lengthy test drive. My impressions so far? Grandia looks to be a very promising role-playing game experience with a nice mix of cinematically driven story, beautifully rendered graphics, interesting characters, a pretty solid character development system and a combat system that does a grand job of combining real-time combat with turn-based planning. Basically Grandia II melds the best features from previous games in the series and adds a slick cinematic layer that shiould have fans of the series and newcomers flying on gossamer wings. But let's not get ahead or ourselves - a little bit of story background is in order first.

The Tale So Far..

Grandia III tells the story of an aspiring aviator named Yuuki who dreams of someday being as great a pilot as the legendary Schmidt. Yuuki is well into fulfilling his dream as the game opens, building and testing plane designs on a regular basis. During a test flight with plane number 19 Yuuki crash lands (thanks to his mother, who decides to secretly tag along and exceeds the craft's weight limit) not far from his isolated village and stumbles upon the beautiful Alfina, who is being pursued for unknown reasons by a group of warriors. After intervening on Alfina's behalf (backed up by his mother, of course) Yuuki and this mysterious girl head back to the village and plan for what becomes a journey that will change the world forever.

Combat System

Grandia III's combat system is tight. It's probably the most exciting and innovative part of the game you'll find, unless you find cutscenes exciting (of which there's plenty of). The combat system uses a stop watch like meter which every character on the field has a small icon on. Each section of this circle has points - there's the section where each unit is preparing, and then there's the section where combat, magic and the use of skills is initiated. But it's not quite that cut and dried. Players and enemies "prepare" special attacks but as they advance on this circle other characters can initiate an attack that can interrupt or cancel that attack, sending that character back on the circle to start over. It all sounds very complicated but it's really quite simple as you play it out. Simple attacks are usually initiated immediately but don't offer that same magical canceling affect you get from critical attacks and some skills.

Of course there are many other cool aspects to combat. Let's say one team member attacks an enemy and sends it upward - if you time it just right with another character you can initiate a devastating attack in the air the can do profoundly more damage than just a normal attack. Naturally there's a lot more to combat than these simple facets but you get the general idea. The combat system may sound slightly familiar to old school Grandia series players - Grandia III takes out all the bad parts of combat and vastly improves on all the good things.

Skills and Magic

Grandia III has a pretty deep skill and magic system that gives players a lot of variety. Some skills are there from the start but as the player uses these skills frequently in battle they improve upon them and make them more powerful. Sometimes players can learn new skills simply by attacking. The other way players can learn new skills is by buying them from a skill shop or extracting them from books at skills shops. Not all skills work as well for some characters, and equipping the right books can help in further improving a character's performance.

Magic can also be purchased at Magic stores and equipped as you see fit. Equipping certain items like rings can help further your affinity with certain types of elemental magics like earth, water, fire, wind etc. Much like skills, magics can be extracted from items called mana eggs - which like books can also be equipped to further improve a school of magic. The game also offers the ability to combine multiple mana eggs to reveal even stronger magics.

There are all kinds of magics and skills to choose from that can buff you or your entire group, heal or cure you or target a single enemy or the entire battle field for devastating affects. These components of the game really compliment the game's combat, which I've already said, is pretty damn solid.

Exploring

Grandia III's world is beautiful, vibrant and animated. Much like Radiata Stories, Grandia III's environments are very narrow and almost path-like. This makes for exploration that is very limited and linear. Instead of the object kicking feature in Radiata Stories players use the circle button to push objects, break things etc. to uncover secrets and solve minor puzzles.

Despite the narrow pathways there's plenty of world to explore and what's there is very diversified and unique. In the early parts of the game this is the case, but hopefully disc 2 (which we haven't had the pleasure of playing yet) opens the world up a bit. It should also be noted that that is not the case in the big cities where there's plenty to explore and plenty of people to talk to and interact with.

A small note on the world map as well - as you progress through the game and Yuuki gets access to a plane you'll be able to fly over the world map and explore a little more. While the early stages of this are very linear things open up a bit more as you explore. The idea of using a plane as opposed to traversing a world map on foot is a novel idea that works pretty well.