A few nice changes, but this installment is generally the same...
You once again pick up where the second game left off and you've defeated 4 of the 8 enemies you needed to kill to save your friend Orca from being a vegetable for the rest of his life. You'll start to recognize that the events in the game are starting to cause blackouts, power outages, and general electrical failures throughout the real world. You have to stop all of the 8 enemies to save the world from being plunged into the stone age.
The graphics have been polished a little bit, but not that much. The special effects in the game do have recognizable improvements, but the rest of it is generally the same. The game does attempt to smooth most of the game out and pulls off a decent job as the environments look less generic and bland this time around, but it forgot a few spots. The NPCs in the game are still the same, right down to the name, but some of the characters from the anime series make cameos here and there. This is a nice addition, and it offers up some variety, but it doesn't make that big of an impact.
There's a wider selection of things to do in the game, including racing critters around the towns and some new minigames, which distract you from the fact that you're playing the same game for a little while, but the rewards are sub-par.
The gameplay has remained the same. Everything you'd expect from the series is there and counted for...except for originality. You have a few new draining abilities, weapons, attacks, and spells to choose from, but it makes a minor impact on the core gameplay. You get a few new allies and they do offer up their own brand of badness, but most of them are not needed as you can choose the same allies you've chosen in the last 2 games and do just fine. The difficulty is slightly better as enemies are a little harder to beat, but they still fell of the short bus and can just simply get in the way later in the game. There are some subtle puzzle elements to the game, but they still boil down to killing, killing, and yes, killing.
Some optional events are present, which can be accessed if you did some tasks in the second game, which I'm not going to spoil for you. This adds some much needed value as most of the tasks have a decent difficulty to them and they take quite a while to complete.
The menu is the same as always, you have the unlockable backgrounds and music, and the rest of the interface is the exact same thing as the last 2 game, but you get a larger amount of e-mails from your allies, and it's a nice distraction from all the killing and repetitive elements, but it only throws you off for a few minutes and you'll soon be cast back into the main game.
Overall, this game shows a small amount of improvement, which is a hopeful sign, but most will still be playing this game to progress through the story or simply becuase they like the anime series. If you still haven't played 1 of these up to this point, you won't be missing out on much.