Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
Nah, XIII is the only game in the single player series that you literally can't rely on smashing X to win for 99% of battles, because they cap your level and force you into situations that you have to consider what three jobs are best suited to the situation, and have to alter between those job sets. People who are blind ignorant to this baffle me, and I can only assume it's because they don't like the game so are trying hard to find ways to trash it.

You could argue that you can do a lot more variety in moves by smashing X because the game puts in the generally best patterns, basically a gambit system set up for each job, but in the end you are having to do marginally more than you have to in all the other games unless you're doing a low-level run (and you can do that in FFXIII, too).
Oh BoB, you and your defense of XIII's combat system.

The issue is that you're stuck with six classes, as opposed to XII where you could build your party around weapon and magic types which gave you over twelve different options with character builds.

Of the six classes, half have great synergy with each other and the other half have great synergy with themselves. Due to bonuses you get for having certain classes together, it's usually better to group these classes in this way to maximize yourself. Tactics basically falls into the player building three variations of the same paradigm sets. You'll have one offensive mage focuses set for breaking the enemy guard, and a physical one for when it breaks. Then you'll have a sentinel with a two medics, a medic and a Synergist, or a sentinel with a medic and Saboteur if your staying offensive focused. Battles devolve quickly into using the first combat set to break the enemy, switch to the second combat mode when they do break, occasionally switch to one of the three defensive sets mentioned above if the enemy happens to actually survive a break and you need to keep the troops alive. Then you rinse and repeat until you win.

With the lack of variation among the cast, the auto-attack option making your own in-battle contribution meaningless outside of paradigm shifting, and the more difficult battles often just involve getting around the game's overly simplistic A.I. that you can never directly control; battles are pretty boring after awhile cause this setup works on just about everything. Not to mention the level cap means nothing when that stigma doesn't apply to your equipment and you can often make a hard battle super easy by just actually leveling up some of your gear to compensate. The grade scale is just the game trying to punish you for being pragmatic, so honestly the game is pretty easy if you don't care about S Ranking every battle. The only battles I found hard were usually solved by either leveling up my gear, dealing with the stupid A.I. for the Sentinel and Synergist classes, and funny enough, actually level grinding once you unlock the full Crysterium for a few meager extra stats.

I could honestly build a better version of every class in XIII with XII's mechanics and have more control to boot. Not to mention XII has skills like Darkness and Horology to add variety, and enemies who force you to actually think outside of the box to defeat them like the Esper battles and higher marks. XIII's combat is too streamlined for my taste and sucks the joy out of the combat cause there is no real variety in it. It's only fun for people who probably find combat a chore in the series to begin with and likely never used anything more than Fight and Cure for everything.