Captain wrote:PSIII...
There are two sides to this game, really:
-The combat, which is one of the worst examples out there.
-The rest of the game. The story is a masterpiece with many subtle little things you won't notice until you play the other PS games or think logically (connect the dots). The concept of many different endings and characters is also very appealing and alluring, making you want to try every outcome out. The progression I can compare to Metroid in RPG form, you repeatedly find new interests and paths from old areas, revisiting them is hardly ever annoying too.
Overall the single negative aspect - the combat system - makes this game seem horrible, but take it out and you have a solid 9/10 game. Sadly combat is pretty much the core of RPGs.
If you want to properly enjoy the game, much grinding and repetition is involved.
If you want to fully enjoy the game, use some cheats to make yourself invincible and/or disable random battles, and focus on the other brilliant aspects of the game.
The game is unbalanced, full of greatness but outweighed by the horrible core system, unlike PSII which has okay story and okay combat, and is a better game overall, and PSIV which has superb combat and mediocre story.
I owned PS3 as a kid and unlocked several of the endings. I take the opposite view.
I think PS3 had some original ideas to the combat that added a layer of tactics that weren't there in PS2 or 4. Monsters were arranged in two rows, and different weapons or spells had different areas of effect, and while the equipment characters could use in PS2 seemed entirely arbitrary at times, PS3 had clear distinctions between what Orakian and Layan men and women used. However grating the quality, having music that changed depending on how you were doing in battle was a forward-looking approach. I'd say the terrible graphics and ridiculous enemy designs were what ruined the combat for many, the one that sticks the most in my mind being the giant smiling face in the back row that attacks by wiggling its eyebrows at you.
But not only was the plot weak, it directly contradicted PS2:
In Phantasy Star 2, the idea of the story was that Earthlings, colluding somehow with Dark Force, were destroying Algol insidiously by making its populace completely dependent on their Mother Brain computer, and the planet most strongly under the thumb of Mother Brain was the government center at Palm. In fact, all the robots that are chasing the party in Act 2 were sent by the Palm government after Mother Brain framed you. After the party is captured, Mother Brain sends the prison space station Gaira wildly off course and smashes it into Palm, destroying it.
Yet Phantasy Star 3 says that this same Palm government not only knew that Mother Brain was plotting their destruction, they also took the incredible time and resources to construct multiple gigantic biosphere colony ships and send them away right before Gaira malfunctioned and crashed into them! Garbage.
There were a lot more characters and a lot more talking in PS3 than 2, but as Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the Soul of Wit," and while PS2 had an oppressive atmosphere of depression and doom hanging over it, PS3 added up to little more than a soap opera. The main place I'd say PS3 had "atmosphere" was the first time you traveled between spheres and after all that medieval fantasy context suddenly you're in a high tech engine room with the machinery glowing and pulsing in time with the music.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.
An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.
Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
MD2 left. 
At some point I was going to re-stock a number of both models, keep the good ones and mod them, but even the shittiest full of dust and spider webs is like 50€ now, even in 2nd hand shops, people are insane.
