What I did in the game: Game beaten with party at LV50.
The One Picture I have taken: Status Screen for Rei.
Just got done with all the grinding needed to reach the Level Cap in this game, and it was as painful as reaching LV50 in Phantasy Star II. So now that it's done, I can give my opinion on it. This third entry of this sci-fi JRPG series is in my opinion worst than the previous two. Not that the first 2 games were stellar JRPG (the classic Phantasy Star series, which is my favorite series of all time, did the whole sci-fi JRPG way better), but they were functionning basic old-school JRPG with great anime cutscenes, and the second game in particular had some good twists.
Now this one feels like a chore. The game is awfully short and to pad out the length, they put a random battle every 5-6 steps. Battle system had some innovations, like the co-op attacks and the characters portrait, but they felt drier than the previous game with its black screen. What's worst is that even at LV50, you're still missing 50% of your attack except if you're using magic. So it's all about spamming magic attacks and having lot of MP restoration items. And there's no world map, everything is like an open world where you go out of town and directly to the wilderness, except that the map design outside of town is atrocious to find your way around. Even more with all those random battles mentionned above.
There's also a clear lack of polish, both in this game and the collection. For the game itself, lot of the menu items just stay on the screen while navigating said menus until you close them all. There was also a time where a character left my party for just a few minutes and when he came back, his level and items got reseted. As for the collection, many texts were just untranslated. It mostly happenned when there was dialog during a big boss fight. But there was one time where an entire town was fully speaking in Japanese, until I reseted the game. Having grown in the 80s/90s, with a lot of badly translated JRPG, I can almost laugh at it, like it's making the experience more "authentic". But it's still a problem that I hope will get patched.
For the good things though, like 2, there's some good plot-twist linking every games together even more before the big finale in 4, and the voiced anime cutscenes are still really incredible. You're playing the game only to see the next one. But when finally you think the REAL story is about to begin...the credits roll. The first two games were not really long games, but this one barely had the time to start anything. I'm still wondering why I wasted my time grinding to level cap for a game I didnt liked much. But that's my completionist problem for you. Now that it's done, I can finally focus more on 4, which I've started a little and seems to be a MASSIVE improvement over all previous games. Lot of polish in 4 from what I've seen so far, but more opinions on it will have to wait until I have finished it.
As I did with 1 and 2, I took a video showing the final battle at LV50 along the ending of the game. You can watch it here:
That's it for my opinion on Cosmic Fantasy 3. To conclude this post, I will also show my previous two completion in the series as I work toward fully completing all 5 games:
Cosmic Fantasy: Adventure Boy Yu
What I did in the game: Game beaten with LV50 Yu and LV35 Saya.
Cosmic Fantasy 2: Adventure Boy Van
What I did in the game: Game beaten with full party at LV50.
If you want to see the completion video for the first 2 games, I'm regrouping them all into one playlist here:
Cosmic Fantasy - All Final Battle at Level Cap and all Endings
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