Why were techniques in PSIII mostly useless?

Physical attacks always did more damage than foi, etc. And even buffs and revival spells could miss. I defeated Dark Force without using any buffs and the only magic that is useful is res and sar. (I meant "gires") If there is ever a remake to III does anyone believe that the technique system will be radically changed like it needs to?

PSIII is a pretty fun game, but it is seriously, seriously flawed. I, too, rarely use anything but the healing techniques, though I've heard that the melee techs can be effective if you play around with the distribution. I just don't have the patience for it, nor do I see the need since, as you said, the physical attacks usually do more anyway.

If there ever is a remake (which people have talked about for YEARS and nothing's happened yet, so I'm not too hopeful), I do hope that is one of the things that is addressed. Especially since, as you pointed out, a character can be maxed out on Anti or Rever and still "miss" for no reason whatsoever.

Personally, I blame the distribution concept for the ineffectiveness of techs in this game. It's a neat idea, but for a technique group to be effective you have to put all the power into it, weakening the others. I think the devs wanted to try something new, instead of the old "learn spells as you level up" approach. But then they let us customize the power of techs by distribution and tried to increase difficulty by letting healing techs miss. They took on too much at once with the new system and it backfired.

I used them a lot on bosses. Apart from that, I never used any non-cure technique in any PS game because all the chars always had pathetic tp, even in PSIV where they had a bit more TP than the other games.

It was a very cool system because it let you to customize your chars according to your needs. The spells were very cheap making them much more usable than in PSII, for example.

Speaking of techniques is it true that Lutz invented them? Considering how expensive using techniques was they could have been more powerful. In PSII spamming techniques grinding outside of Shir's town on the headrots was a good way to train At least in PS mobs are hard to outrun unless one is very overleveled.

Supposedly, according to one of the manga stories made by the PS creative team in the SPEC magazine, Lutz and Alis went on a trip to another solar system after PSI. When they came back, Lutz introduced techniques to Algo. It's not clear if he invented them himself or just learned them from someone else and passed on that knowledge.

The techniques in PSIII are rather odd compared to the rest of the series. There are a couple that are extremely powerful if used correctly...

Fanbi: This increases the attack power of a single character. If you cast it multiple times on the same character it can result in them doing immense damage. For example, if you ever want to do something crazy like fight Dark Force with a knife you can kill him in a couple of hits using Fanbi.

Forsa: If you want to do something even crazier like a solo quest then Forsa is one you may want to max out. A weaker character can defeat the most powerful 3rd generation monsters quickly using it.

I will admit that the melee techs (Foi, Gra, Tsu, Zan) are useless.

The only melee tech I found remotely useful was Lyle's Zan when used with Wren's Ceram Shot. That would pretty much take out the front row of 6 monsters that Wren was unable to do solo.

Tsu technique with Lyle for me, paired with Laser Needles for Rhys. Lyle has enough TP to use only techs. Mieu has good techs, but her double claw make her surely the best direct fighter of the game (with Sari). For the rest... Res, Gires and Rever only. Antidote instead of Anti.

When I was playing Phantasy Star III, the only times I used Techniques was when I was playing as Rhys in the beginning where I would use Anti, Res, or Rever whenever necessary and Gires when I was fighting the final boss. Aside from that, I stopped using Techniques once I was able to purchase or find a ForceEmel or ForceShld to cast Res, and a Force Clw or ForceVest to cast Rever. Basically, I heavily rely on items to cast the Techniques for me.