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.

lammy has the same issue as parappa where all inputs are delayed by about a quarter note or more depending on how close they are to other inputs. the game's a timing game, but not really a rhythm game. but Taste Of Teriyaki is so good that you learn the Cool timing anyway.

i don't know what problem NanaOn-Sha was running into that made reading inputs on beat so hard. this was the same year the ps1 got ports of Bust a Groove and DDR 3rd Mix, so konami and metro had this figured out already. they finally got it right with vib ribbon a few months after lammy launched. i wish she got the parappa 2 treatment.

there is one thing about this game that bothers the shit out of me. the game is complicated. you'd think it plays like a bust a groove 2, and it should, but what you'll notice after a few songs is that sometimes both you and the CPU will miss a note at the same time. and it will always happen either right before a solo, or at the end of a song.

this is because any dance move that ends a combo (a Freeze) requires 4 beats to complete. if there are 4 or more beats before a solo, the character does their Cool/Chillin/Freeze move, does a pose in which you don't do an input for a beat, and then starts the combo over. it rules. it feels good to hit those. however, if the solo is coming up on the next beat, the move will automatically miss regardless of your timing.

so how do you get around this? unlike BaG2, BaG1 allows you to enter the input for any part of your combo any time you want. for example, say the first move of your combo is just Circle. the next move is Down Down X, the third is Down Left X. at any point, no matter where you are in the dance, you can press Down Left X and go to step 3 of your combo. why does the game let you do this? because you have to know, before the verse starts, how many beats there are between the start of the song and the first solo. a full combo is 32 beats (8 measures), and if there are 9 measures between the start of the song and the solo then you're good to go; just push your buttons. but if there are exactly measures left, you can't just do your normal combo. because if you try to hit the end of your combo on that 8th measure, the game will give you a miss.

so you need to do some manipulation here. you can kill a note by attacking or whiffing a dodge, so that on the 8th measure you end up on the 7th measure of your combo. you get less points for not getting all the way up to Freeze, but it's an easy fix. but the best thing to do is to skip one of your steps. instead of pressing Down Down X when it appears on the screen, press Down Left X instead. the game will skip the 2nd step and go straight to the 3rd. now you're one measure ahead; your combo will end in 7 measures, with the 1 extra measure the game needs to accept your Freeze move.

so far this is weird, but it's not that big a deal: just memorize what songs require you to skip a beat and remember an easy, two-button input to enter to skip one of the early steps. but then the math changes when you want to attack or dodge. say you don't skip a step, because you know you've got 9 measures before your solo and all you need are 8. but then Heat chucks a fireball at you. you gotta dodge that. but now you're one measure behind where you were initially; you're on pace to hit your Freeze on the last note before the solo. that's a miss! so you have to know what the next step of your combo is, wherever you might be in the chain. if you're 4 moves in, you need to do the input for the 6th. is it DUD Circle? is it DDRLL Circle? you have to memorize all 35 possible combinations in order to do this optimally. i've been playing this shit casually for like 20 years and I haven't done that. so usually you just attack, or whiff a dodge, or bite the bullet and watch the points from your perfectly timed Freeze slip away.

what kills me is that the game designers knew that this would happen. they designed this giant memory game that required them to unify every input in the game and give the player the freedom to choose their place on the combo chart provided they memorized all 35 possible combinations that can appear outside of a solo. they did this, when all they had to do was just let you do a cool pose at the end of the song. nothing happens during that measure anyway. Bust A Groove 2 does this. you even get a special pose if you do the timing right. it's like they identified a problem and chose to solve it by implementing a system that i bet the overwhelming majority of people playing the game never even noticed was there. they did it just to spite the literal one person on earth obsessive enough to care. they did it to spite me.

5 stars.

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.