Gran Turismo 3 - Playthrough Part 1 - Sunday Cup, FF Cup and Vitz Cup

Gran Turismo 7 is expected to come out in the first half of 2021 for PS5, so I want to try to do a full playthrough of all the previous Gran Turismo games until then. Here you can see me completing the Sunday Cup, FF Cup and Vitz Cup (Yaris Cup) in the simulation mode of Gran Turismo 3.

Timeline:
0:00 Video Start
0:13 Gran Turismo 3 Game Intro
4:01 Buying my first car
5:24 Sunday Cup Race 1 - Super Speedway with Toyota Vitz (Toyota Yaris)
9:39 Sunday Cup Race 2 - Midfield Raceway with Toyota Vitz
14:30 Sunday Cup Race 3 - Trial Mountain with Toyota Vitz
19:35 Reward Car
21:16 FF Cup Race 1 - Deep Forest with Toyota Vitz
25:49 FF Cup Race 2 - Special Stage R5 with Toyota Vitz
30:57 FF Cup Race 3 - Rome Circuit with Toyota Vitz
35:49 Reward Car
38:08 Vitz Cup Race 1 - Rome Circuit
43:11 Vitz Cup Race 2 - Laguna Seca
48:07 Qualifying
52:55 Vitz Cup Race 3 - Tokyo R246
58:35 Qualifying
1:04:27 Vitz Cup Race 4 - Trial Mountain
1:09:26 [skip!] Qualifying
1:13:46 [skip!] Vitz Cup Race 5 - Special Stage R5 reverse
1:19:41 Reward Car
1:20:35 Game Completion Status after Vitz Cup

Gran Turismo has always been one of my favorite racing game franchises and I played the first 3 games of the series when they first came out. After that I moved to PC though, so I never got to play GT 4-6. Before GT7 I want to try to revisit GT 1-3 and also play through GT 4-6 for the first time. I am not sure if I will manage to get all of it done but I will see how far I can get.

Time to start my playthrough of Gran Turismo 3! I don't remember this game very well but I remember liking it a lot when I played it as a kid, so let's see if it holds up. :)

This is also the first PS2 game that I am ever showing on my channel. Just like the PS1 games I will also play PS2 games on PC via emulator. I am playing the NTSC (US) version of the game, which sadly means that I am missing out on some of the awesome music from the PAL soundtrack but the NTSC version has a few interesting songs as well, which I am only now discovering for the first time.

In this game it would be possible to start with the arcade mode but most people are probably a lot more interested in the simulation mode, so I will jump straight into that one.

The races in simulation mode are split into the categories Beginner, Amateur, Professional, Rally and Endurance. I have already made a full plan for the Beginner category and it should take me about 10 or 11 videos to complete it, so I will definitely finish that category this month and maybe also a few races from the Amateur category before I then move on to Gran Turismo 4 in March. Eventually I do want to finish GT3 100% though, just like I did with GT1 and still plan to do with GT2.

In this first video I am completing the 3 beginner cups that can be done with the Toyota Vitz, known as Toyota Yaris in some versions of the game. These are the Sunday Cup, the FF Cup and the Vitz Cup.

The Sunday Cup can be done with the stock version and you get a Toyota AE86 as a reward. For the FF Cup you already need a bit of an upgrade and you win a special pink version of the Vitz as a reward. I was thinking of switching to that one for the Vitz Cup just for fun but it turns out that performance parts don't actually carry over to other copies of the same car in GT3, so I had to stick with the yellow one.

The Vitz Cup is actually pretty difficult if you want to win all of the races. I wasn't able to win the Tokyo race from the back in multiple attempts, so eventually I had to do it with qualifying. As a reward I got yet another Vitz, this time in orange.

In terms of tracks we mostly saw returning tracks from GT1 and GT2 here, although they all got a big graphical upgrade of course. We also saw one brand new track though with Tokyo R246, which is actually based on some real life roads in Tokyo, as you can see in this comparison video:    • Gran Turismo 6 vs Real Life - Tokyo R246  

In the next video I will be completing 3 more cups in the Beginner League.

Note: Unfortunately the PS2 is a difficult console to emulate and the PS2 emulator can't run every game perfectly. In GT3 there are major slowdowns during the night races and occasionally some small ones on other tracks. Please do not focus on this issue in the comments. Ideally do not comment on it at all. I am aware of it and it is unfortunate but for me personally it is not a big deal at all and it shouldn't be for you either, since it only affects a small part of the video.

In this video I fixed the first night race by manually editing the speed of every single second but this process takes more than an hour for a single race, so I won't be doing it for every race, since it's just way too much work. Just skip the races that I marked accordingly in the timeline.

Also I have a much better feel for my car with first person view in this game, at least with the Vitz, so unless this changes with other cars I will mostly be using first person view here.