Quote Originally Posted by Lone Wolf Leonhart View Post
Oh, I've got another one.

Final Fantasy XIII doesn't "play itself".

Yeah, I get it. There's an "auto-battle" button. But you have a lot more attacks to queue, as well. In terms of button presses, it doesn't matter if you hit "attack" and you swing your sword one time, or if you hit "auto-battle" and attack six times. There's more action going on on the screen, but player input is the same.

Instead of flipping through attack and magic menus, you change your job class on the fly, and frequently. So again, whether you open a magic menu, and choose fire. Or click on "Paradigm Shift" and change to "Ravager" and use fire six times. The amount of button presses is comparable.

I think I could make a solid case for an article titled "Reasons you think you hate Final Fantasy XIII but you shouldn't".
I don't know of anyone saying FFXIII plays itself (usually that criticism is leveled at FFXII), but I definitely don't see how your argument counters the notion. The fact that it "doesn't matter" whether you hit "auto-battle" or not is surely why people make that criticism. Lots of games have an auto-battle option, but in most cases it bloody well does matter whether you use it or not, because the AI can't be trusted too well to make good decisions. Now, I didn't get too far in FFXIII, because both the gameplay and story were both disappointing to me, but I'd say at least by a good 9-10 hours in, you're still limited to such a dearth of options in battle that really it seems like the only bad choice you can make is taking time to decide what you're going to do. I've heard it gets better, but it's pretty inexcusable to let the game go on that long with such lame gameplay that you might as well just constantly hit auto-battle. I imagine the "plays itself" idea comes from that, though I would rather think of it as I wish it played itself, because I don't want to be bothered if my options are so limited.