Star Ocean 3: Mega-Spoilers and one final question

The Game Room
#1

I want you all to know I will never finish Star Ocean 3.

Basically, when the stupid bloody idiot game got to the point where they decided I was playing a video game within a video game. Except that the video game within the video game indluded Earth, so it was a video game within a video game within real life (which was the past of the video game). Ok, my head hurts. That just pissed me off. I played Star Ocean 1 and 2. That really pissed me off. Even within the context of the game there’s no telling which characters are real or not, or even to what degree the “video game characters” are supposed to be independant creatures and not blind slave programs. Whatever.

OK, so the game takes a really obnoxious pissant turn. Fine.

Oh wait, in order to get the game’s best weapons I have to effin’ race bunnies for the next 30 hours? A mini-game where they explicitly avow that you have no options to improve your odds and cannot help but have a 1 in 4 chance of victory? So it’s a blind waste of time and money instead of letting sucker-punch the attendant and just grab the item you need?

Ok, so I won’t do that. Fine.

I head in, quite overlevelled and over-equipped, and take on a boss in the “real world”. Azazer’s very rude but oddly not that shocked that video game characters just appeared quite fully real. I kill him. I make my way upstairs. Now two bosses pop up. I go to kill Belial and Belzaber. They destroy me. This repeats itself nine times in a row.

What. The. Frag?! Sure, I had some surprises and had to go in for round two against some bosses. I just got beat ten times by two twits. I look up strategy. Apparently no one in the world had any trouble with him except me. Screw it.

I stop playing, as by now I’ve been going for well over 40 hours and the end is nowhere in sight. In fact, the game apparently keeps going for a very, very long time more.

Whatever. But someone tell me what happens from then on out.

PS: Abnel and Peppita RULE!

#2

I beat this game a few years ago, and I must unfortunately say that my mind completely turned off and did not record a single thing after the occurrence of one of the absolutely worst plot twists in a game. This game was very, very good up 'till that point, and I was looking forward to replaying it with the harder difficulty once it was unlocked, but as soon as that happened… UGH.

#3

The funny part was the game literally had an entire galaxy worth of stuff to play with, fantasy and sci-fi tropes out the wazoo… but they had to break even that! And it royally pissed all over the predecessor games, both of which were much more fun than SO3.

#4

I’ve never understood why SO3 “pissed all over the predecessor games.” The entire POINT of SO3 is that even if the protagonists were MMORPG characters, they were still REAL and ALIVE in all the ways that mattered, and their lives still had meaning. By saying that the events of SO1 and 2 were somehow rendered moot by SO3, you’re actually agreeing with the villains.

#5

Problem is it’s never clear whether they even existed in the context of S01 and 2. For example, were they supposed to be being played by people in Gemity? Were they “real” and independant? Or not? That’s not really clear in the game. Heck, can they just erase people or things from the game, and if so do they just die or vanish or what?

This was a HUGE plot issue and deserved to have an antire game around it, not be tossed in some hours before the finale.