Quote Originally Posted by Forsaken Lover View Post

1. What is this combat system? I did not expect this. I was picturing FF combat with everyone just politely staring at each other across a field. The "tutorial fight" I guess you can call it against Gato was an eye-opener. His always counteattacking you and only being able to hit you when he was close enough seemed to be telling me that the enemies moving about will be highly significant. Does them being closer to you increase the damage you and they can output? That would make sense. So basically time all your hits when they are close for maximum damage.
No, with the timing though you have probably figured that out by now but several attacks in the game including your own deal with proximity so its about making sure to make the most of moves by waiting to let the enemies line up right or prioritizing enemies that have close range attacks. It's a pretty novel system.

5 oh yeah, police. What time IS this? Robots, matter transporters stolen from The Fly, yet they have a kingdom and a king and I just don't know. Maybe there are no police in this time period.
It's kind of a quasi -modern/medieval/20 minutes into the future time.


6. I know it sounds like I'm ribbing on the game but truth be told I'm enjoying it. It looks surprisingly good on my TV, the battle system is not quite what I expected and then there's that music. I've heard like five tracks so far and they've all been really good. I need to hear more of that song that played when Gato was talking before and after the tutorial fight.
It's called Gonzales Theme (Gato's Japanese name) and if you pay attention his "singing" actually syncs up to the music. He was Sakaguchi's favorite contribution to the game.

Quote Originally Posted by Forsaken Lover View Post
I did like that everything I did in the Fair was brought up though. That's pretty interesting. I have no idea if it changed anything or if my selection of dialogue during the "trial" affected anything either but it was still an unexpected and pleasant surprise. And i didn't mean to eat that one dude's food. I was just mashing X in tried-and-true video game tradition.
This was apparently Hiroyuki's Itpo's idea to have your actions in the beginning affect the story and it syncs up nicely with gameplay them of replay value.

That first boss, Yakra, wasn't a pushover either. I'm guessing spamming Double Techs is a no-no for boss fights since it looks like that dude always used his attack-all move in response to that. I would guess a lot of bosses will have that gimmick. Lucca died my first attempt before I learned not to just spam DTs. Well that and also I didn't use Frog's healing magic. I didn't think I'd need healing for the first boss of the game.
Yeah some of the bosses can be brutal in this game if you're not prepared or over-leveled. Sounds like you're taking notice of the counter commands though so I feel you should be okay. Hope you're enjoying it so far.