In an announcement on the official Star Ocean site, Enix has stated that the recent failures within Star Ocean 3 can be traced to some of the original SCPH-10000 models of PlayStation 2. These machines were among the first ever manufactured, and since their creation, Sony has changed its software library. However, Star Ocean 3 was coded using features from the updated library which have caused a number of major problems, the most common of which has been an inability to enter some battle sequences.

Since the problem is theoretically limited to a select set of owners who purchased their PlayStations before the model change, Enix has stated that they have no plans for a recall of the game. In addition, due to the fact that this problem is being blamed on the PlayStation 2 hardware, Enix has advised those players which experience the errors to contact Sony directly and ask for compensation or replacement.