Quote Originally Posted by Karifean View Post
See this is where I partly disagree. While it is true that Heal Tank Attack gets you through the game, honestly, the same can be said for, like, every other Final Fantasy game.
Agreed, and most FF games are extremely easy. But other titles at least obfuscate the optimal choice in a lot of situations by inundating you with various options to explore. FFXIII does the opposite and removes options. You will always need a paradigm for tanking/healing, and one for attacking. Aside from that you mash auto-battle all day long. And you can argue that you don't need to use auto-battle, except there are basically zero instances in the main game where elemental weaknesses matter, and the battle speed is frequently too fast to adequately keep up without the battles feeling more stressful than enjoyable, and auto-battle will always make the optimal choices anyway, so manually selecting options is not only annoying, it's sub-optimal.

So for the entire game, from start to finish, you choose one menu option in battle over and over, and you choose between two, maybe three, paradigms, and you will always know when to choose them (and that's being generous since it takes hours before you can choose paradigms at all leaving you to only mash auto-battle). You'll never have to decide that you need to heal, but maybe Cura will suffice instead of Curaga so you can save the MP required to cast that Ultima spell on the next turn. You'll just see you need to heal, switch to the healing paradigm, and ride it out until your health is around full and switch back to attacking.

Basically XIII took the series from the strategy being obvious, but at least having to choose the best way to go about enacting it from several different options, to the strategy being the choice. I won't argue that a lot of previous FF titles aren't easy too. They absolutely are. But FFXIII took it to a whole new level by basically completely removing anything resembling decision making. I mean, people complain about FFXII's gambit system, but even if you relied entirely on that, you still had to put more thought into setting up those gambits than you put into every battle in FFXIII combined.