Quote Originally Posted by Skyblade View Post
And hopefully the Paradigms will keep things interesting in the meantime.
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.