Oh jeez. I think Star Ocean 3 is a good example of everything wrong with RPGs today. It's so full of stupidity and silliness that it completely ruins the game. *SPOILERS FOLLOW*
1. The two main characters are boring and one-dimensional. Fayt is the typical optimistic 18-year-old with blue hair and a sword "always do whatever is Right, regardless of the risks or realities of the situation" character. Sophia actually says the line "We just have to believe what we feel in our hearts. Let's choose to believe, Fayt, okay?" Both characters are so goody goody that you always know how they'll react to every situation before it happens. In addition, all the characters have enormous eyes and freakishly huge foreheads. It looks like a very poor attempt to translate anime style into 3D.
2. The dialogue is terrible. Most conversations consist of other people dumping info on Fayt, then Fayt will repeat some word as a question, then they will elaborate, Fayt repeats another word in the form of a question, and so on. Hearing Fayt ask one-word questions in his whiny, stupid voice gets old very quickly. Also, there are awkward pauses in all of the recorded dialogue, making it sound nothing like a real conversation.
3. The dungeon designs are lazy and boring. Pretty much every single dungeon is just a bunch of rectangular hallways and empty rectangular rooms, with no rhyme or reason to their layout, all painted with the same texture everywhere. It never once feels like you're in a real place. The worst offender is the Sphere 211 building. It's supposed to be a high rise office building. All it is is a whole bunch of "futuristic-looking" hallways and rooms strewn about at random, with no employees, desks, papers, computers, bathrooms, computers, stairwells, break rooms, or even windows. SO3 also has the requisite "magical forest maze made out of walls of impenetrable trees and brush."
Finally, it has the "lava dungeon where you get a little bit hurt if you step on the lava." In this dungeon, you almost get to the end, only to find a rock blocking your path. The game makes you go all the way back to one of the first dungeons in the game to get a magic ring that can blow up this rock. All this is for no apparent reason whatsoever.
4. The first 30+ hours of the story are slow and meaningless. SO3 tries to create a sense of urgency while at the same time dragging every little part out so long it puts you to sleep. The first half of the story is as follows:
Airyglyph and Aquaria are on the brink of war. Nel rescues Fayt and convinces him to help Aquaria with his advanced technology. Time is running out and it is imperative that you get to Aquaria as soon as possible! Thousands of lives hang in the balance. Nel's assistants are even willing to let themselves get captured just so that you and Nel can escape safely.
Nel goes back to rescue her assistants and urges you to move forward, because time is running out. So what do you do? You turn right back around and follow Nel! After going through the Kirlsa training facility (the most convoluted school ever designed), you finally resume your journey.
Along the journey, Fayt talks briefly with a girl named Feena. It's obvious she has serious health problems. Right when you're about to leave in the morning you find out that OH NO Feena has gone missing! She went out to go pick flowers and didn't come back. Forget the thousands of lives that depend on you, it's time to set them all aside and go find Feena. Despite her health problems, she somehow made it alone through a huge forest maze/mountain pass, filled with witches, armed bandits, and giant killer trees that block your path and you have to kill them to pass. Whew, you saved Feena, now on with your main quest again.
You finally reach Aquios and they ask you to go find some copper. Oh goody, a fetch quest where you have to go find copper in a mine! When you return with the copper, they tell you "sorry, but we didn't get the copper in time to use it in our weapons." OOPS! Maybe you shouldn't have wasted 30 freaking hours solving other people's personal problems!
5. There are a few other parts where it seems like Tri Ace purposely made you feel like all your hard work was meaningless. For example, you have to go through a quest to enlist the help of Crossell the dragon in order to fight against the airships. You finally get to a cool cutscene where it looks like you get to bust some heads, and then out of nowhere some laser beams blow up the airships for you! The explanation was that "those laser beams were headed towards Earth." Not only is that completely insane, but it made your whole "get Crossell to help" sidequest meaningless.
6. The item creation system is so massive and cryptic, and costs so much, that your only options are to either use a strategy guide, or to spend countless hours of experimenting and reloading until you manage to make something useful.
7. *MAJOR SPOILERS* You finally find out that you are all in a Matrix-like simulation world. Although many people hated this plot twist, I thought it was pretty much the only interesting part of the entire plot. Unfortunately, the way it was handled was ridiculous. When going from the "Matrix" to the "real world" your characters just pop right out of a computer screen! Also, while I never finished the game, I hear that at the end, the computer system running the "Matrix" gets destroyed. However, the simulated world somehow lives on because those people believe in themselves or something like that. Lame.
AHH well that was a little bit bigger than I intended. Sorry for the huge rant, and thanks for reading all that if you did! It just bothered me to no end that pretty much everybody said that Star Ocean 3 is "pretty good." SO3 has so many inexcusably bad elements to it, I can't see how anybody could even stand that piece of trash.
