icycalm wrote:At least this is one series I am somewhat interested in, after reading DeusJester's review of the second game. I wonder how the third one turned out.
http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=2441
I beat the third one some time ago and accumulated some 120 hours of gametime. Not once was I able to chat with my party's members and affect the income of the game or their proficiency during battle, at least not in an easily perceivable way.
You get to choose one among four characters to stay in your party sometime into Disc 2 (one of them asks you to permanently enter your party, if you put down its request you get to choose between the other three), but that's about as far as party cuztomization goes.
Sidequests and random, free roaming stuff are minimal (although you can go to more advanced dungeons early on, most of the time you are stuck in the non-high tech and incredibly bland, generic looking Elicoor II, in a supposedly sci-fi themed game that's a serious bummer), and the item creation element is mostly balls.
Oh, and cutscenes are horribly long, some of them clocking around half an hour or so.
