Three Hours In, Paradigms

So, with the play timer sitting at three hours almost exactly, I've finally reached the first point in the game where you get to have some control over the battle system. Three hours. Who's genius idea was it to wait three hours into the game to introduce anything new to the combat?

Still no Sphere Grid Crystarium, but hopefully that will come before another three hour waste of time goes by. And hopefully the Paradigms will keep things interesting in the meantime.

Edit: Ah, see? Three minutes and 1 battle later, and we get the Crystarium. THAT is how new mechanics should be introduced.

And in about 20 hours you get choose which party members you wanna use !

At the 50 hour mark you will box it up and never replay it :D

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Originally Posted by Skyblade

And hopefully the Paradigms will keep things interesting in the meantime.

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I wouldn't count on it. I found I was about 14 hours in before I had enough variety in characters and their roles to find Paradigm shifts even mildly interesting. Even at almost 25 hours in (I just finished the first three missions in Chapter 11), I can sum up Paradigms as forcing you to decide between a handful of choices: All out attack, defend and heal, or buff/debuff your party and enemies or some combination of the three, though it's rare a combination is needed so long as one person keeps attacking in each of your Paradigm setups. I'm also still spending about 99% of my time selecting auto-battle. The only time I've found it beneficial to select my actions is when an enemy has a couple of weaknesses, but I have an item equipped to boost damage from one of them. The AI can't really tell that one weakness might be more advantageous than another.

I'm fine with simplifying or even automating some mundane actions, but they really overdid it in this game. They simplified it and streamlined it to the point of leaving only a few meaningful choices in battle, and can't help but get bored with it. And for all of it's flashy camera panning and zooming, the battle system is surprisingly slow when you look at how much time you have to choose the few actions you can.

And about twenty minutes in, you get two good non playable characters!!
Then you lose them >_>

I would say the real strategy relates to what you can´t do rather than what you can.

This game is very frustrating. Every time I find something good about it, I find something bad that frustrates the bajeebas out of me.

Take the Crystarium. I like the change from FFX's Sphere Grid by making it multi-job. Making stats availible across all jobs could add a lot of balancing potential. Level up one job in particular to reach a particular useful ability? Or level them all up equally in order to create a character who can perform better in more situations?

Then, the negative hits. In this case, the progression. Why do we only get access to tiny portions at a time? To stop grinders? What is the point of that? If people like to grind, let them grind. All they are doing here is preventing people from planning out how things are going to go and upsetting the people who just like to go for the high level stuff. It serves no purpose. At least with the Sphere Grid locks, you would get a couple keys early on and had to figure out which characters you wanted to advance first. This just cripples the rate at which you advance, for no good reason.

Which ties into what is currently my single biggest gripe with the game: The pacing is terrible. There is a lot of awesomeness here, but it comes sooooo slowly. Whoever designed the pacing for this game needs to lose their job. Don't dictate progression, leave it to the players! It worked in every other FF for a reason!

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This game is very frustrating. Every time I find something good about it, I find something bad that frustrates the bajeebas out of me.

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This will be a recurring thing on FFXIII,believe me.

I think this game was made to the kind of public which wouldn´t mind leveling up too much(only to complete the game of course).

Most FF's start out with you just being able to Attack and Item. This really is nothing new.

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Originally Posted by No.78

Most FF's start out with you just being able to Attack and Item. This really is nothing new.

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Yes, but none of them keep you that way for three hours. Two chapters before you get to do anything else. That is far, far slower than other FFs.

FFXIII's battle system doesn't reach it's fulliest potential until Chapter 13 (the last one). It was in an interesting way to make the game, making the party grow continually throughout the story, instead of within 3 hours you have everything and all change of tactics comes from hours of grinding. Personally, I think once I hit the (SPOILER)Odin battle the game's battle system had been fleshed out enough to be fun and engaging. Once you get to the very end, the battle system is awesome, especially as each enemy requires different Paradigms and making use of the Reloading ATB bar shift actually becomes a huge difference to your skill level.

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Originally Posted by Skyblade

Yes, but none of them keep you that way for three hours. Two chapters before you get to do anything else. That is far, far slower than other FFs.

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Indeed. And even without anything more than just attack and item in previous games, you still had item management and equipment to buy and equip, and usually not enough money to buy it all when you got to a new place. Now most of the later games were easy enough that these choices weren't as important as they were in the pre-PSX days, but they still tended to matter to some extent, and they kept the player engaged in and out of battle. Sure there's weapon customization in this game, but I've found it hasn't mattered too much (I've totally ignored upgrading the weapons for half the characters, and I use two of them no less), and you could go almost the entire game never using items except the occasional Phoenix Down. In and out of battle there's next to no real choices for the player to make in this game even when you're almost 30 hours in.

But it´s impossible (or at lest unbearable) to beat the first Barthandelus fight without upgrading weapons.
It´s too strong and would take forever even with maxed out characters.
This applies to every Barthandelus fight.

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Originally Posted by Future Esthar

But it´s impossible (or at lest unbearable) to beat the first Barthandelus fight without upgrading weapons.
It´s too strong and would take forever even with maxed out characters.
This applies to every Barthandelus fight.

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When I fought the first fight with him I had only upgraded Lightnings weapon out of the people in my party, and only to about level 6 or so I think. My characters weren't maxed out on their available Crystarium's either and the fight didn't take that long, nor was it even very hard.

Well yes, this is the game that takes 30 hours to "get started". You'll be getting introduced to the battle system for roughly half the game :)

(SPOILER)Basically until you leave Cocoon. That's when you become a butterfly, see.

This is a funny idea.An evolving battle system is what rpg needs.