Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
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.
This part right there is where I just can't agree. First off, Auto-Battle doesn't make the optimal choices.
In Commando it doesn't make good judgment on when to use Blitz and before analyzing opponents you end up throwing in a Ruin when Attack would clearly be the better option, and vice versa.
In Ravager it completely ignores your Strength and Magic stat and just alternates between magic and strikes for the minimal extra chain boost as opposed to the extra damage. It does choose the correct element at least, but it's still suboptimal. And yeah, elemental weaknesses DO matter, since they still increase your damage output just as significantly as they always did, maybe more so. Which is what makes Imperil as vital as it is.
In Sentinel it always tries to Provoke enemies first, which can be very counterproductive. Often times I found myself quickly wanting damage reduction and not caring about Provoking.
In Medic it uses single Cures when everyone is in the green. Granted you might not want to have a Medic out at that point, but a Cura or Curaga would be far more efficient.
In Synergist and Saboteur alike, it makes poor judgments on what statuses to inflict. You really want to control those manually almost always.

So basically, the only reasons you wouldn't want to pick abilities yourself is A. your chosen abilities happen to be identical to Auto-Battle's. B. you feel like you wouldn't be fast enough to enter the commands to get the efficiency you'd like. C. you just don't care. If it's A, fair enough, but as you may have noticed, I don't think that's the case very often. It works but picking yourself would be better. If it's B, that's something you can get used to pretty quickly, in my experience. You do have enough time to pick your skills while ATB is still charging, unless you're somehow completely clueless on what to do. Are you ever? And if it's C, well that's fine for you but then don't just go calling the combat system that shallow, just because it is POSSIBLE to beat it that way. The same goes for many other games in the series and... now we're just repeating the argument.

@Wolf Kanno: Other Final Fantasy games do have that same kind of "if you put in more effort to be more efficient, you notice more of the combat system's depth" style of battling, but I would argue that XIII is actually among the series' best in that regard.