The battle system!

[Wolf Kanno]

Sorry, I replayed it a few months ago to help my GF. The game just infuriates me to no end even thought months have passed and listening to people talk how much FF should always be like X gets annoying...

I will try my best to tone it down though; cause even I'm noticing how annoying I am.

Meh, I do adore X but I can't argue that it's incredibly easy outside of one or two bosses. Then again, how many RPGs aren't like that?

Persona and the other MegaTen games

I would have to say that (for me), FFX's battle system was the only redeeming feature of a game which I felt was flawed in just about every other way. (but that’s another story). Sure you could kill most random encounters in one turn, but as soon as you entered a fight you were faced with a dilemma of looking at what characters you had out, looking what type enemies were out, looking at the turn list and finding a way of rotating in all your characters so that they would all get experience from the battle, all the enemies would be killed with overkill’s and you would take as little damage as possible. In doing that the battle system engaged you and made random battles part of the game.

My problem is that I found all that very tedious, the one hit kills transformed strategy into getting the right character into battle at the right time but even if you didn't, the monster couldn't necessarily do enough damage to make this terribly important thus destroying the need for strategy or urgency. The system only shined when you fought big creatures that no one was effective against (I won't go into the overpowered Summons) or bosses that didn't have cinematic options that crippled the boss in your favor.

For me, the gameplay doesn't pick up until almost the very end of the game and by then I didn't care anymore. I like the idea of the CTB system but I feel nerfing the enemy's and giving characters the ability to 1-hit-kill them destroyed the cool strategy elements and reduced battles to tedious affairs. Random encounters have not been major threats for years but at least in previous games it went by faster since you could just mash X. In FFX, you had to stop and switch around people making a boring encounter last unnecessarily longer than it should. It just didn't work for my taste and I feel what bothers me the most was that the system has so much potential cause when you throw out the tedious elements and fight something hard, the battle system shines and is awesome... I just didn't appreciate having to wait 30 hours for it to start being good.

Take the polar opposite of this, FFXII where battles were so un-involving that they had to make your characters bots to make it tolerable. With a system like that random encounters were nothing more than time sinks to keep people from completing the game to quickly.

Given the choice I would say battles that are an enjoyable element of the game to battles that are a time sink any day of the week.

I am not going to say the XII system is flawless or wonderful but it worked for me cause random encounters have been so nerfed in years that leaving it to A.I. didin't bother me cause generally my strategy for most RPGs in random encounters is to just mash X until its over. I did appreciate the ability to explore and I felt the Gambits made this easier since it stopped the boring charade of step, step, SMASH, Load, random encounter, mash X, load victory screen, accept XP,AP, and Items, load, back to stepping. Rinse, repeat, ad naseum.

Granted the Gambit system has the same damn problem the CTB system has (makes random encounters irrelevant, only shines in tougher encounters) but I feel XII's direction to exploration (something that has been seriously missing in the JRPG genre for years) allows me to forgive it, cause I enjoyed exploring and seeing new horizons and not have to stop every few minutes for a battle that required no thinking. Yet, I feel this is more about personal taste.

As for FFX being too easy, well RPGs in general have been getting too easy for a number of years, and anyone who breaks the trend stands to lose a big chunk of market share. So I won't really get my hopes up for more challenging games any time soon.

Yes, the market is considerably easy nowadays but actually Persona 3 and 4 have proven that a difficult RPG is still welcomed. P3 was a dark horse smash hit and P4 has been doing surprisingly well. They offer enough difficulty to be rewarding experiences but they are simple enough to not really alienate newbies to the genre. The entire MegaTen franchise has become an exception to the rule as their games have been doing exceptionally well in the western markets. I feel that the nerfed difficulty of RPGs is a misconception from the developers side. They only think they will sell if the games are dirt easy but the recent Persona games have proven this to be false.

I'm not asking for XIII to be really hard, but I feel the battle system seriously empowers the player like never before and I just want the enemies to be strong enough to justify the battle system. X didn't do it for me and though I feel XII did a bit better, it does suffer from similar issues. I just don't want you getting into a combo and being able to have everyone dead by the second attack or just start the battle off with a powerful AoE Firaga spell that takes them out. I just want to be able to really experiment and use the combat system.

I feel XIII has potential but SE needs to learn to stop treating us like we don't have frontal lobes. We play these games for the story and characters but we have to remember that they are still fundamentally games. Let the player actually earn that new story sequence. Make dungeons more empowering cause you walked away and actually survived that tough place. Make me actually look forward to combat and in general, the gaming side of the title.