Tried to give this one the benefit of the doubt but it really just has nothing going on for me. I don't even particularly take issue with it being "grindy", I barely grinded anything up to the point where I decided to drop the game, which according to the guide I checked afterwards ended up being only 2 or so dungeons out from the final boss, and ran into pretty much no issues with my characters aside from deciding to grind a little after running into some tough creeps in the later parts of the game's overworld that were giving me some trouble. Needless to say, I played enough of the game to gain a pretty good grasp of the scope of it's combat systems, and as someone who usually plays these games for the battle systems, and wasn't getting much out of the story either it seemed like a pretty straightforward conclusion that the game wasn't my style and to just drop the game and maybe come back if ever there came a world where I had literally no other JRPGs left to play. I really don't even want the "vindication" that may or may not come from having actually finished the game; had it maybe been a short, 4-6 hour affair that I could have burned through in a day l may have given the end credits a go, but as it is it's really just not up my alley

I wasn't really having fun with this one so I'm leaving it unfinished. Got to the final boss and had to close the game before I could clear it, the negative progress from having to redo those stages + get the gold armour again was kind of the nail in the coffin. I would like to come back to this one at a later time but I just don't want to sweat it, especially when I've been marathon-ing through these games pretty quickly and having to redo the final stages of this one again would be a real pace-killer.

As for the overall game itself, it's pretty hard. Everything shaves off chunks from your life and the body armour is tough to get. Most of the common enemies don't just fall over, and pickups feel a lot more sparse, so even if you grab a bunch of health upgrades you're just getting destroyed by everything - it very much encourages going for a more cautious, no-hit playstyle. I don't really take issue with games being hard and I feel like the difficulty of this one would almost give it more replay value than the other SNES X games for the people looking for a more considerable challenge, but it definitely feels much more mean spirited in its difficulty.

I certainly wouldn't say that it's bad, but maybe just not quite my style? Like with the previous X games, I didn't worry about going for boss weaknesses and used the Buster's charge shot for nearly everyone - while I didn't have much issues with this approach in X and X2, I feel like this is a mistake in X3; most of these bosses have mean attack patterns, many of which are locked out or trivialized if you use the boss' weakness. It's very NES Megaman in that you're meant to exploit their weaknesses to succeed. If you aren't privy to said weaknesses and aren't going through a proper boss chain, the bosses feel significantly harder. Thankfully, the health upgrades and sub-tanks are far easier to come by in this game, although the scarce health and ammo drops kind of make having full sub-tanks a reward for doing well in a stage rather than something you may feel the need to go out of your way to grind up.

I really don't know how to feel about this one. I'll probably do a full replay revenge run when I come back to it rather than jumping right back to the final stages.