Boring...

I'm beginning to see why Star Ocean only sold 235,000 copies in Japan when it was released in 1996 on the Super Famicon (SNES). The predominant aspect of gameplay is simply battle after battle after battle, super redundant, bearing no relationship whatever to puzzle, plot, ambience or even humor — once you've seen three Pretty Bells and a Magius, you've seen them all. Mash A, mash A, mash A...‡

Both SO2 and SO3 suffered from this same defect, in some degree, but by SO3 battles were optional — you could see them lurking on your screen, you could avoid them and you could still advance the game — and, if your only battle strategy was button mashing, you could expect to die hard after you'd seen Gemity.

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‡Just picked up Security Card B when the crashing brain freeze hit, in case you were wondering...