I liked it for what it was, but Spectral Force 3 was about 10 years to late to keep up with the tactic games out now.
GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay is simple and as basic to the tactics genre as it gets. You pick up to 8 characters, place them on a chessboard like map, add magic and super abilities, and have them fight to the death in a turn based system against overwhelming odds. Perhaps because of these limitations Spectral Force 3 is very challenging as the player is forced to use his or her brain over power leveling, with each fight taking up to half an hour each. Most of the characters are recruited as former enemies from nations you destroy and each one is capable of different moves, unfortunately after a while many of them will be useless to you as time goes on because the benched fighters don't gain experience and you've like have your favorite squad of 8 by then anyway. If nothing else the sheer number of achievement badges you can get by unlocking them will give you the collectors' itch, but otherwise, there not much point in seeking these extra troops out.
STORYLINE:
The story is badly written and badly displayed on the screen through character portraits over bland backgrounds. I found the main plot an interesting concept, but poorly carried out. It's about a group of mercenaries that unintentionally get involved with an odd series of missions involving a mysterious boy cursed to be followed by what appear to be two very overprotective demons. After a while (A LONG while) it becomes obvious that the boy himself hold the key to destroying the world, but by the time the plot moves to that point, you've probably stopped caring. You see, the story usually waits until you've accomplished an untold amount of side missions before it forces you to continue and as I've said before the missions can be time consuming. Because of this, you'll find yourself actually forgetting what was going on by the time you get to the next interval.
GRAPHICS
I don't know who was in charge of the graphics, but as someone who done some 3D modeling I can tell you that some of those models probably took less than an hour each to make including texturing. This is fine if you like it simple, but I expect a little more detail than that from an XBOX360 game. The portraits were detailed enough, but other than the opening sequence the 2D stuff didn't move.
SOUND
There were only a few noticeably different songs in the game, which were pretty nice, but too repetitive for a game that long. The English dubbing was pretty bad, but I have a feeling that it wasn't really the voice actors' fault as it was whoever gave them their cheesy dialogue.