Battles still feel really slow and drawn out for me. Again, the second video has too many obvious edits within it, and the Let's Play video watching that fight with the Sweeper makes me a bit concerned that this game is going to simply be long because everything is forced to be as excruciatingly slow as possible. At least when Ifrit finally showed up, the boss finally started taking serious damage to the life bar. I'm in disagreement with fat_moogle because I really hate the fact the awful Stagger mechanic from XIII is in this game, as I feel it's pretty much the main culprit of my issues here. Why can't I just beat the monsters face in and exploit elemental damage to get big gains in DPS? Why are we adding a second step if only draw the fight out longer than necessary?

I will say that I like some of the interesting design choices here such as Aerith's Limit Break creating a field effect that allows you to double cast magic. That's actually pretty clever, though it's going to make it worse when she's gone unless they give another party member a similar ability. Still, I like the fact that she'll make magic a more viable option despite the questionable mechanics the game imposes on it.

I'm liking the way Summons are being utilized here as I've always preferred treating them as a party member over being just a glorified spell. It also looks like they hit that nice balance between being actually useful on the field, but with enough handicaps to keep them from being a game breaker.

I'm feeling like I'm going to wait on this and probably buy it used. I'm way too particular about my action-rpg combat mechanics I'm afraid. Despite having a Classic mode, I'm not big enough of a fan of VII to warrant a day one purchase.