squid830: Paco's best is actually better than everyone else's best, so his second-best is fine as that's on par with everyone else's. And it wouldn't surprise me to find that the most irritating weapon to get would not be available in shops anywhere at any time - if someone DOES find Paco's best somewhere in shops I definitely want to know about it... ;)
Charon121: "Excellent" weapons are hidden in the game as if to reward only the most persistent of players, that's why it would be a cop-out if you could simply buy them in a store. Besides, where inferior weapons are found in new locations in the course of the main quest, excellent weapons are obtained in old, revisited locations. Paco gets his excellent weapons from the TACO and Red Bipidri quests (and he's the only one to get two), PAL gets his by idling for several real-time hours, with Stiletto you have to find a pretty obscure loonie slot etc.
However, in the end-game phase those weapons become really necessary due to the amount of HP enemies have. Still, if you missed everyone's, you can delegate the characters who lack them to support or MysTech functions instead of leaving them to struggle with inferior weapons.
Well I know for a fact I've never actually played the Moon Burger to get PAL's weapon - even with the speedup it was too painful. And now that I think about it, I'm almost certain now that I WAS able to get PAL's Excellent weapon in one of the shops - either that, or I'm totally imagining it. If the latter, then both PAL and Paco would have had less than the best weapons for the final battle(s).
Luckily Paco's second-best is equivalent to everyone else's best, so only PAL would have been noticeably weaker than everyone else - which wouldn't have been a huge issue since he's one of the slowest characters anyway. Plus he can always use Mystech, and his Bogue skills still pack a punch, even if it's less of a punch than before. If all characters only had the second-best weapon, it would mainly just mean the battles take longer and/or you'd be using more healgrease plus/complete(which you'd have in spades by the end).
Besides, you can always just use your Mystech while you wait for your Bogue to charge, then just use your Bogue skills. It's not like you'll be short of glodents by the end game either.
Charon121: But the difficulty of finding weapons without strategy guides isn't what bothers me about this game, it's the backtracking. I find it difficult to imagine how the Red Light District can be so booming when patrons who wish to spend their money there have to walk miles of ledges, pipes and platforms in the Routubes, not mention mad Gorians, drug dealers and those weird pipe creatures. :)
The back-tracking can get pretty annoying.
And I always wondered that about the RLD too. Maybe the RLD also has "security" escorts in addition to the regular kind? :)