understands that designing a game around a score attack system based on replaying levels requires designing levels worth replaying in the first place.

moon of mahaa kalaa should be a technique rather than an accessory.

alraune is a toku villain and cutie j is the rider we deserve.

had an annoying bug where the person in first would lag when choosing to go left or right at the bunki, so the game wouldn't load either option for anyone else, resulting in the rest of us driving off into a blue nothingness until the game crashed. other than that, it was fun as hell. towards the end of the active online scene, everyone was racing 15 stage continuous and getting about the same 14 minute times, so every corner had 5 or 6 of us drifting in tandem. bunch of boomer arcade racing game nerds celebrating what we thought would be the last we'd ever see from Sega AM2. good times.

the cruelty of grandia 3 is that it baits you with a fantastic story hook. you're introduced miranda, a super endearing former adventurer who left her old life behind to care for her newborn son, now old enough to be taking pilot lessons. she meets up with a cool gambling fisherman guy with his own boat and a dream of charting a map of the whole world. miranda struggles with leaving her son for the first time in their lives, but embraces the chance to explore the world all the same, and sails off into the unknown with the only other interesting character in grandia 3. we never see them again.

i would have loved a game about a single mom rediscovering her youth and that sense of adventure with her gambling addict fishmonger boyfriend. instead we get her shit kid and some anime stand-in characters.

i think grandia 3 is the pinnacle of jrpg combat systems, and all it needed was one character and a world to care about to make it perfect. we could have had a classic.