Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
Well, if you're looking to beat things through unusual methods, you can opt to not use the auto button on the battles in FFXIII and just do it manually. Nobody is stopping you. The entire series can always be won through ineffcient ways if you're just looking to do it some way different, and XIII is no different in that manner.
I have, and it's boring. Non-mage classes have few options, due to ravager functioning differently than a traditional black mage in purpose, they're pretty underwhelming to use, and I've frankly never cared for buff/debuff classes. I honestly feel just auto-battling is less taxing on my patience, because at least I can pretend the roles have more to offer me than they really do. It's ultimately the issue I have with the combat, the classes are so streamlined to be boring to use and battles need to go by so fast it's often just easier to let the computer do all the work for you. I don't even get the satisfaction of customization either cause everything is so simplified to make any effort feel pointless.

But for me, that's just something I'm really not that interested in, as it's mostly just a different graphic I get to see and otherwise slowing down the battle for no real fun factor (again, this is for me - the fun factor for me is in the accomplishment of winning a fight, not in doing silly things because the fight is incredibly basic in the first place). I think we just have completely different interests in the battle content for this and I can understand why random peculiar things might interest you in that regard, but for me I want the initial game to be interesting without me having to force it down that road by having to be creative. I mean I may as well sit down and create my own game (also something that I simply don't have the patience for).
See for me, a victory from a boring battle doesn't interest me. I prefer having options cause winning with the same strategy is just uninteresting, especially in something like an RPG where you're expected to be playing for 30 to 70 hours. Even fun battle systems can't survive that long of a playtime without getting a bit repetitive. I enjoy having classes like Thief and Blue Mage to change the battle by giving me sub-objectives like stealing a certain piece of loot or obtaining a certain spell. Those change ups in the dynamics of battle add a lot of interesting elements to keep battles fresh, even if I could just mash X to win. I enjoy playing with characters and classes and trying to learn how to min/max them but I'll get really bored if it's way too straightforward like the Crystarium is. When victory is the only objective and the game expects you to use the same tactics for every fight, it just makes combat boring to me, and because of the dumb paradigm system, XIII forces me to pay attention to the monotonous battles which just dragged the whole experience down for me cause at least combat in a vanilla RPG like FFI and Lunar gives me the ability to just zone out or multi-task instead of having to sit their and watch my party health bar/Enemy break gauge until something happens. XIII's battle system just takes the worst aspects of RPG combat and forces you to confront and deal with it with little to no reprieve or excitement.

I prefer gameplay to give me something more to do than just win, so we'll likely have to agree to disagree.

Regarding the Zodiac: I can only say I bought and played FFXII and everyone was pretty much the same. Yes, Zodiac is different, but I don't buy games just for a new battle system. I bought FFXII as it was, and played it as it was, and for me the Zodiac system is just not something I can justify spending my money on. I don't count it as the original game, though, because it's not the original game...
Does this mean you bought FFX HD so you could play the original FFX cause the Master Sphere Grid wasn't in the "original" game? I jest, but honestly, I feel the Zodiac Jobs really change-up the overall experience of FFXII in some interesting ways to make the game feel fresh. Honestly, I wish more "director's cut" style games did such good jobs on changing up the gameplay experience like TZA does.