I'm with Velo and Del on this, except unlike the rest of you, I will freely admit I didn't like XIII's battle system cause it lacked control and is not as strategic as people like to treat it. I'm kind of sad that SE has forsaken fully controllable ATB to cater to fans who want more action style battle systems that look like cutscenes. I still feel there are ideas that can be used to expand turn base combat *cough* Insert broken record reference to MegaTen and the Press Turn combat system whereas I find the newer iterations have no real means of expanding without basically just becoming action games.

Besides, I find actually controlling the badass combos and moves I pull off to be much more satisfactory. Why watch a canned stock footage of whoop ass when you can play games like God of War and Devil May Cry and manually do it all and know your character is a badass cause of your skill? Its fine for Limit Breaks and special moves, but building a combat system to make all combat like this, not only diminishes the awesome factor of seeing such moves, but its pretty annoying when the developers don't trust the player to have the skill to pull it off themselves, so they automate it. Watching your party juggle a big ass Behemoth was pretty cool when you first saw it, by end game, its lost all its luster, and you just wish he enemy would finally die so you can get your loot and get to where you want to go.

On topic, I'm not surprised they are keeping the combat system, and I actually like the monster party member idea cause its rare that I see a game botch it up. Course I didn't think XIII would suck as much as I thought it would, but some things like to overachieve. Still, the changes made so far are promising, and even what gameplay I've seen on videos has made this sequel look much more promising than its predecessor. Will I buy it on day 1? No, I pretty much have no plans of ever picking the game up. I might borrow it from a friend, and even that is unlikely. I've already moved onto new shores, and hoping Type-0 gets a Western release, so I can have something FF to play while I watch Versus XIII finally get released when everyone is more interested in finding out what Microsoft and Sony's next gen consoles are going to be released.