Knowing who attacks when just makes battle nothing more than a game of choosing which enemies to kill first. Its rare to get nailed by monsters that are weak to a particular parties attack, usually its big enemies no one in your party can't one hit kill. The only time you really used the system to plan ahead. and use real skills beyond attack to pull a victory, were in a few boss battles or if you chose to not bother using the summons. The thing is, the system just allowed the player to waltz through combat and frankly I felt it made it more of a chore cause I had to be bothered to switch out party members where in earlier games if I was this powerful, I could probably just mash X while reading a book.

The only time the CTB system really shined was when your party couldn't waltz through it and for the most part, that's exclusive to the monster arena and a very few boss fights. I found this annoying, cause the arena doesn't even open up until 30 hours into the game, and in the end, it doesn't net you anything worthwhile. Its built to feed on itself. You fight strong monsters and get items to make you stronger, so you can fight tougher monsters in the arena. This sounds fine and dandy, but to even be able to stand a chance in the arena, you have to be at least strong enough to beat the game already, so its just getting itself off at this point.