(*) 04/14/2014 - wingsoffire.fandom.com - The Brightest Night: ACHIEVED! But...

Hello world!

Way back on Saturday, we - meaning Mom/Dad/Meh - decided to get ourselves the fifth Wings of Fire book - The Brightest Night. What's unfortunate is that we live an hour and a half away from the "errands place". So we got into our car, and drove. And drove some more. And kept on driving.

FINALLY, we got to the Town of Errands. Turns out we had a bunch more Errands than I anticipated. First we had to go to Wal-mart, then we had to go to the Library (no, not Chapters, the 1-hour-and-a-half-local library,) and I got a book there, Fire Star, but that wasn't TBN, so yeah. Then we had to go to Costco for A: Lunch and B: other food supplies. I unfortunately spilled mustard all OVER my pants, which were actually inside-out.. Then, when we finally got into the parking lot (Costco is really really busy on weekends), we had to wait forever and a million years to get out of the parking lot. By then I was completely overwhelmed by the NOISE of Costco, so it was really tiring to wait so long. But eventually we got to Chapters, so that was awesome.

And The Brightest Night wasn't there.

.. or so I thought. I headed over to the area with Wings of Fire, and it wasn't there! I got all upset for a moment, thinking "NO NO IT SHOULD BE HERE NO NO NOT FAIR!!!", so I ended up going to the place with the indigo person who was at the computer. I asked her if they had book 5, and she looked it up on her computer. Turns out there was supposedly 7 copies available, but I had NO idea where. I asked where, and she said that they were still in the back area for books that didn't have room on the shelf. Honestly, I thought that they should have MADE room for it, being such an awesome book, but anywho. She went back and got it for me, and yeah. That was awesome. :)

Turns out I accidentally complained on the way back, though, so now I've lost it for an indefinete amount of time until I can speak better, so I'm going to try hard to speak nicely. :|

Anywho, now I own the book, so woot. :P


(*) 09/01/2015 - wingsoffire.fandom.com - Art Collab with LittleLynx (We drew Clay)

Me and a friend on Scratch, LittleLynx , worked together to draw a really nice picture of Clay. I'll get into the details and stuff in a moment, but I'm sure that you guys would all like to see the picture, so.. here it is!

[ Art Collab with LittleLynx - Clay ]

So there it is! :) Do you like it? Comment below if you do!

At this point, if you don't like reading, I suppose you may as well quit. I've got a bit to say but it's nothing terribly important so if you don't want to read it, you won't miss out on something like Escaping Peril. ;)

Still here? Cool stuff.

A couple weeks ago or so, my friend LittleLynx on Scratch came back from sort of a point where she wasn't using Scratch, I'm not totally sure why, I can't remember because I have the most terrible memory around.. Anywho she got back and I felt like I hadn't done anything to greet her, so I decided that it would be fun to draw together! After all, that's one of her favourite things to do.

So, I asked if we could draw the characters from Wings of Fire, since it's one of her favourite book series.

[ LittleLynx's non-modified version of Clay ]

The idea was LittleLynx would draw the dragon, and the background if she wanted to.

After that, I'd import the dragon and background (they'd be separate images) into GIMP and add special effects.

Turns out it worked pretty well!

On the right is the picture that LittleLynx drew.. it's quite incredible in my opinion! :)


(*) 01/08/2017 - wingsoffire.fandom.com - Seasons, Weather, and Time

SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY.

I haven't seen much mention of seasons (you know, spring/summer/autumn/winter) in the WoF universe. There's weather, to some extent (I think I remember it raining at one point in THK, and maybe some snowstorms in WT), but no seasons. A lot of time has passed across the books and generally the weather there has been defined by the biome, not the time of the year.

Some evidence of how time works would be nice, too. There's been some mention of hatching days (equivalent to birthdays, obviously!), but I don't think there's been anything that definitively states how long a year is (not in the books, anyways).

References to time in the WoF series

One of the lines in The Dragonet Prophecy (the prophecy, not the book) tells time: "When the war has lasted twenty years... the dragonets will come."

Many of the prologues happen before the main story in the books:

    The prologue of The Dragonet Prophecy happens six years before the main book.
    The prologue of The Brightest Night happens twenty years before the main book.
    The epilogue of The Brightest Night happens one month after the main book.
    The prologue of Moon Rising happens four years before the main book.
    The prologue of Winter Turning happens two years before the main book.
    The prologue of Escaping Peril happens seven years before the main book.
    The prologue of Talons of Power happens three years before the main book.

(It could be noted that all of the books in the second arc - 4 to 9 - so far have all focused on introducing the main character through their backstory.)

Darkstalker (Legends) happens roughly 2000 years before the main series.

Moon Rising happens six months after the end of The Brightest Night. Quoting Moonwatcher (MR, chapter 9): "There was a comet six months ago – as it passed by, there were a lot of earthquakes and strange weather."

I'll leave this here incase I (or somebody else) decides to make a timeline....

The moons have phases. As Darkstalker explained (MR, chapter 11): "Of course our power comes from the moons. One full moon at hatching gives a dragonet either mind reading or prophecy. Two gives them both. [..] We think the third moon makes the first two powers even stronger." –– so the moons must have phases, like Earth's own moon.

A brightest night happens every hundred years. That's when all three moons are full. I'm not a scientist, but knowing that there's three moons, and that they're timed to all be full once a hundred years, there must be something that we can do to say that the planet moves around its sun, I imagine..

Since we "know" that the planet orbits around its sun, there should be some sense of seasons going on, right? As the planet orbits, Pyrrhia (the island/continent where most of Wings of Fire has taken place) would be less and more covered in sunlight, which should cause seasons, right? And years have passed across the series, so why haven't we noticed very different seasons?

Just raising discussion, you know? :)


(*) 04/08/2018 - grandia.fandom.com - To access Grandia III's debug mode...

This doesn't really fit a wiki page, but it's still useful information, so as a blog post...

Enabling Grandia III's debug mode on PCSX2

I assume you are already emulating Grandia III, and are using PCSX2 to do so. This section of my guide is not, for the most part, going to be helpful to you if you aren't.

Inside your PCSX2 folder (the one with "memcards" and such), create a folder called "cheats". Inside it, create a file called "5B657DAD.pnach"; this is the file that contains the actual cheat code. Paste this into the file:

    gametitle=Grandia III
    comment=Debug mode for Grandia III
    patch=1,EE,202186A8,extended,00000001

Credits to PCSX2 forum user dhillel for posting this code.
https://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Post-your-PCSX2-cheats-patches-here?pid=573316#pid573316

(A quick explanation of that file: 5B657DAD is the CRC code of Grandia 3 - basically a unique code that refers to Grandia 3 and Grandia 3 alone. Note that both discs have this same code, so the cheat should work whether you're running Disc 1 or 2. The gametitle and comment parts are both decorative things; they don't actually make the cheat do anything. patch is the important part; it contains the specific code that enables debug mode. Again, thanks to dhillel for contributing that code.)

The cheat file won't do anything until you enable cheats, though. Open the System menu in the toolbar, then make sure "Enable Cheats" is toggled on.

Once you've enabled the cheat, I recommend rebooting the game; I have no idea how reliably it'll work if you don't reboot.

Besides actually testing the cheat (which I'll cover in a moment!), you can verify that the cheat is loaded by checking the console ("Misc" menu -> "Show Console"); once you've (re)booted the game, "Found Cheats file: '5B657DAD.pnach'" and "comment: Debug mode for Grandia III" should appear in the there. 

Using debug mode

I don't intend to write a full guide to debug mode here and now, but I'll cover some pointer tips to get you started..
Debug mode requires a second controller

If you're using PCSX2, it's not terribly difficult to set up the second controller. (I had to use a Windows computer - i.e. the LilyPad plugin instead of OnePad - before the second controller would work. Wine works too.) To configure the second controller, choose "Pad 2" instead of "Pad 1" in the controller plugin settings. My configuration was based on using the number key-pad as the second controller, which I'll list below:

    I bound 2, 4, 6, and 8 to the D-pad. The D-pad is extensively used in debug mode. The joysticks are not used.
    I bound slash, asterisk, and minus to cross, circle, and square, respectively. These three buttons are used a lot.
    I bound plus to triangle. This is definitely not necessary; the only use I found for the triangle button was hiding (but keeping the state of) the battle debug menu.
    I bound period/dot/delete to the start button, and 0/insert to the select key. (I would have bound return to start key, of course, but I couldn't get PCSX2 to distinguish between the numpad-return and the main keyboard-return, which I was already using for the first controller's start button, of course.)
    I bound the left- and right- square bracket keys to L1 and R1. As far as I've found, these are only used in the battle debug screen for navigating between pages of character data.

As far as I've seen, these are the only buttons used for navigating debug mode.

Don't break your game!

I'm not kidding! Make a backup of your memory card - seriously. (It's in your PCSX2's memcards folder, right alongside the cheats folder you made earlier.) Use save states frequently, especially before warping to different maps or using the flight-from-anywhere tool; if you warp somewhere you aren't supposed to be while half-way through a cutscene, there's a fair chance you will mess things up. This is only bad if you don't have a save state or file to return to.

The field debug mode menu is a handy tool for anyone
GIII Field Debug Menu.png

If you aren't especially interested in messing around with the rather technical debug mode, here's a brief guide to enabling field debug mode, which gives access to a very useful menu:

1. Once you've loaded a save, open the debug screen by pressing start on the second controller.

2. Use the D-pad on the second controller to navigate to "Field" ("+05 0x2f3d80 Field").

3. Press square to select it. (I know, it's ridiculous. Worse, cross means back. You'd think they would have used the in-game UI controls for debug mode! Oh well.)

4. You should be greeted with a screen titled "Field Sub Menu". You'll already have "Debug Mode OFF" selected. Press right on the D-pad; it should change to "Debug Mode ON".

5. Press cross twice to exit the menu.

Now that you've got debug mode enabled, you can press select on the first, ordinary controller to open a handy debug menu. This lets you sell items, set your party up, extract magic and skills, fuse mana eggs, access the plane's "flight" menu, and so on, from anywhere in the game. Neat!

You do need to reload field debug mode whenever you reboot the game.

Battle debug mode lets you view and modify enemy and player stats

By using the battle system's dedicated debug mode, you can view and modify the stats of both players and enemies. This is particularly fun for customizing battles to be more interesting - do you find Xorn too easy to defeat? Try increasing his attack power! Want to make Kornell scarier? Boost his ACT! (ACT is equivalent to INI, and increasing it means the character will progress the IP gauge faster.)

As far as I've tested, battle debug mode only works if you've also got field debug mode enabled. So make sure you've followed the steps in the last section, if you haven't already.

Once you've gotten into a battle, press select on the second controller to open the battle debug menu. Controls in the battle debug menu work the same as in the main debug menu used earlier, but with circle as the "select" button instead of square. You can immediately change things such as the system speed, or view character data: navigate to "Char" (the first option), press square to select it, then select and press "Param".

Once you select "Param", you'll be greeted with a colossal list of stats; likely you'll have Yuki selected. To view a different character's stats, select "Char No." and use the left and right D-pad buttons to pick the one you want; numbers zero through three are your party members, and four and beyond are actual character data. (Since you can't see the name of the character you have selected in the debug screen, I like to briefly change the Icon; this updates that character's picture on the IP gauge, making it easy to see who I have selected.)

Once you've got a character selected, you can navigate to any of the other options to change them; if you want to boost the attack of a Baabaa, this is the screen to do it on. You can use the L1 and R1 buttons to navigate between pages; the various pages contain the selected character's status (poison, sleep, etc), resistances ("Fire 1.50" means the character takes 150% damage from fire moves), and other miscellaneous stats. (Funnily enough, I couldn't find the amount of gold an enemy drops anywhere.)

Some brief notes on the stats: ACT is called INI in the game, and it's the speed a character moves along the IP gauge. MGP and MGR probably refer to magic power and resistance, or MAG and RES, respectively, but I haven't actually tested them. Sway WT refers to the chance a character has at dodging; the Excise Sigma, for example, has a Sway WT of 0.30, which means a 30% chance at dodging attacks coming at it. Enemies apparently also have Lv values, which clearly refer to level, but I don't think these values actually have any effect in the game. Oh well; saying "Lv. 18 Excise Sigma" sounds cooler than just "Excise Sigma" anyhow.

I've been putting together a bestiary of this available data; maybe at some point, if it's ever completed, I'll work on adding it here to the wiki. We've already got impressive bestiaries for Grandia I and II!


(*) 07/02/2018 - grandia.fandom.com - Grandia III damage formulas

I've been poking around with Grandia III's debug mode a bit, looking for damage formulas. (Formulae?) So far I've only focused on spells, and through testing, I've found this to be the general magic formula (tested on Burn!, Crackle, and Hellburner):

Damage = (Spell-specific base quantity) + 4.5 * (Caster's MAG) - 3.0 * (Target's RES)

You also have to apply the damage ratio multiplier and the general randomness modifier. The damage ratio is that "X%" you see beside the orb. It's significant in spells like Crackle and Galactic Bang, where damage is dealt to the target multiple times, increasing their chain multiplier each time. The game also has some RNG; I'm not totally sure what the rules are on this (probably something like +/- 5%), but it's worth noting, because it means the formula won't yield the exact amount of damage dealt.

The spell-specific base quantity is a value unique to each spell. Generally, if the spell's description says it has a higher power (more stars), you can expect the base quantity to be higher. It also varies depending on what level mana egg you've equipped; Hellburner does much more damage if you've got a Volcano Egg equipped.

Some enemies will also have a resistance/weakness to spells of particular elements. Demon Lords are totally invulnerable to fire-based moves, but take 1.5x damage from water-based ones, for example. If an enemy is resistant to a move, the damage number will sort of spin off of the enemy, like a coin being flipped; if an enemy is weak to a move, the damage number will have a little yellow check mark next to it.

Here are the base values for three spells:

    Burn!: Lv. 0: 48, Lv. 1: 72, Lv. 2: 120, Lv. 3: 192
    Crackle: Lv. 0: 100, Lv. 1: 200, Lv. 2: 350, Lv. 3: 560
    Hellburner: Lv. 0: 383, Lv. 1: 576, Lv. 2: 959, Lv. 3: 1535

"Lv. 0" refers to no mana egg being equipped, or no boost being given to that move's element. For example, equipping a Lake Egg means Crackle (and other water-based spells) will be considered Lv. 3, but Burn! will be Lv. 0.

I also have a complete list of (approximate) base values for spells here.

See this post for info on enabling and using debug mode. Now, for specifics regarding finding damage formulas..

Disabling DMG_RND makes your life a hundred million times easier by getting rid of the RNG factor, so definitely turn that off. (It's at the top level of Debug/Battle.)

You can manipulate stats by going to Debug/Battle/Char/Param and selecting the Char No. you want. (You have to set stats up at the start of each battle - they reset to the character's saved stats whenever you enter a battle.) MGR is "Magic Resistance" and called RES in the game; MGP is "Magic Power" and is called MAG in the game.

It's usually helpful to go to Debug/Battle/Char/IP Stop and stop monsters from moving, if you're testing the power of your own stats. (Or you can do it the other way around and stop your party members from moving if testing enemies.)

When a character is defending, the damage ratio on them doesn't go up at all. You can force an enemy to guard by first setting INPUT_ALL (at Debug/ in the battle debug menu) and then going to Debug/Battle/Char/Work and setting GUARD to On. (You can't change most of the things in .../Work if you don't have INPUT_ALL set.)

In the Field menu of the debug menu outside of battle, you can set your party to contain just Yuki (set Party Group to 0). This is just handy because it means you have to skip less character's turns / use IP stop less.

I haven't found a way to change the power of the mana egg you have equipped inside of battle, so unfortunately you need to leave battle and set up all the stats and IP stops and such again whenever you want to change what mana egg you're using.


(*) 04/02/2020 - grandia.fandom.com - Merry April Fools!

Merry April Fools' Day! It's apparently been some three and a half years since my first edit here, and since then I just keep coming back. That said, I apparently only made two edits in 2019, which... whaaaat??? Dear time travelers: please pester past me to work on the wiki more. I'm sure she'd appreciate it.

Anyway, I want to do better this year. I tweaked the styling of all tables today (just better margin), and on Grandia III's side of the wiki, replaced the old "Grandia III Characters" template with the more extensive "Grandia3" one on most pages, and added it to whatever (non-empty) pages were missing a table altogether. So navigating the III wiki should be a fair bit more fluid now.

I also wrote content for Rotts and Miranda's pages, and finally created Template:Grandia III Enemy, demonstrated on the new Gilled Pawn page. The data there is all collected from the manual effort of several-years-ago past me, who compiled a comprehensive bestiary using debug mode. Back then I meant to upload it to GameFAQs eventually, but the site's basically dead, so I'm just publishing the data here and now for anyone's convenience. The 2020s hope is to get all that data copied onto this Fandom wiki, along with moderately detailed strategy and encounter information, just like what already exists for the enemies of the other Grandia games. But I write "2020s" because it is quite a lot of work; while all the data is here now, the flair that makes the project particularly interesting to me is the photos attached with each monster, like you see on Gilled Pawn (plus a capture I have of Melc Crystal - both of those images float next to this paragraph). Thing is, grabbing moderately well composed photographs is a bit of a process, involving extensive use of debug mode, camera repositioning, and photo cropping. Multiply that across some 200 enemies and it becomes a bit of a daunting task!

So this may turn out to be an April Fools day in that I don't end up returning to this task for another half-decade; apologies in advance if that's the case. Still, I've no doubt I'll get to it eventually; III is a game very dear to my heart, and I've been striving to lift its inconsistently incomplete side of the wiki up to the same standards of the rest of the wiki...annnnd maybe push beyond those standards just a little, too, and make the wiki better all around! We shall see. :P

~Florrie