Almost done with Chapter 4 I believe. My thoughts, observations, and opinions:
Lightning and Sazh still rock.
Vanille still lacking backstory and any indication as to what her prerogative is other than that she just wants to help people. I've been suspecting she's from Pulse since shortly after meeting her, which I suppose will be used to explain her apparent airheadedness.
The entire physics and geography of the whole Cocoon/Pulse thing are not well-explained. They can get away with this because they don't use a world map, but I've found it occasionally distracting when trying to figure out where the action is taking place relative to other places in the game.
I don't mind the Crystarium. The inability or inefficiency of selecting individual combat abilities in this game makes a high level of character customization unnecessary anyway. And it effectively, even if artificially, limits the character progression to keep it in line with the story. It's not how I typically like my RPGs, but for an interactive story experience like we've been getting so far it's fine.
One of the things I would change is the balance of the abilities and stat boosts. Because effective combat is based almost entirely on Paradigm shifting, spending the CP to get spells and combat abilities seems way too preferable to spending it on some measly stat boosts instead. Had they been more balanced, you could have created real short-term tradeoffs between being significantly better in one role vs. giving you more Paradigm flexibility.
The Paradigm system is, from a programming standpoint, dynamic selection of pre-defined AI scripts. The AI is selecting the abilities for you by executing the script you determined for each character. When you select a Paradigm, you are telling the game what script(s) to use. The role bonuses add additional tactical considerations.
I personally don't like that the execution of individual abilities is under the control of the AI, or that I am better off still spamming the Auto button for my party leader, but I think Paradigm "jobs" and "job" switching are the start of an interesting system that deserves some more exploration in other games.
I personally like the puzzle of matching up my characters' spells and abilities with my enemies' weaknesses, and this game takes that out of my hands (I select Ravager and the AI will take care of the rest
). I'm not happy with it overall, but I am glad they tried something that offered some relatively fresh ideas for RPG combat in the future.