Sad to say, but get used too it man...nothing is sacred anymore. People have a fear of anything that is left untouched no matter how good it is.

Final Fantasy XII is ok...i forced myself to learn to like it, but its not anywhere near the final fantasy i grew up with and came to love after 20 years here.

As i said, nothing is sacred anymore. People care more about innovation than they do a solid game, thats all its about anymore. If per say Final Fantasy XIII turns out to be like old school and awesome, guess what...FFXIV would have to change it up because people have the attention span of a gnewt anymore and the idea of a series staying the same is complete and utter destruction in their minds, as if the world is about to blow up is how people act towards anything that might stay the same.

So i just learned to go with it with FFXII. Inside of it there is a somewhat decent game but heres the key...its not final fantasy to me. It feels like a new series therefore final fantasy is dead to me to be honest, because its not the same. And people will say "but why do you want it to be the same?"...and my rebuttal to that is that with each older final fantasy there was brand new characters, storyline, weapons, a world to see, new friendships, betrayals, new musical score...all of this combined into an awesome configuration that worked perfect with random battles and classic final fantasy combat...i grew to love it, i grew to love the fact that its roots were still intact from the very first one i played back in 1987.

But that is all over now...we are in the era of gaming in which no one is happy for longer than a few weeks until its 'old' or 'repetitive' or the fact that so many kids these days have ADD and need everything to run at the speed of light to have their interest level up.

Having a seperate battle screen in which you plan out your attack isnt fast enough, it isnt cool enough...so devs cater to these ones and therefore you have what you have right now, and that is the slow but sure death to 'classic' turn based combat in games.

Dragon Quest, the other beast in true classic rpg greatness will now be a simple hack n slash type game in light of Ys or gauntlet or old school Zelda...totally ending the one true aspec that defines the series and that was classic turn based combat...sad day when i see this happening.

But meh...ive learned to just give up. Give it time and all youll see people say is "come on man, get with the times...blah blah" or "why do you want it to stay the same?!" etc....instead of just like i said, taking something and making it sacred to them.

For some reason, turn based combat is being snubbed away from classic RPG gaming, instead of letting it still be its own entity.

I dont mind games to be real time action, infact i love kingdom hearts and dark cloud etc...because those games werent turn based to begin with.

But when you take a turn based game, and make it into a real time action game...thats when its just a huge shame.

Edit: As ive said before too...people would sh*t a massive brick if say Disgaea went from a strategy game to an action oriented game, or if God of War went from action to turn based...people would cry like little girls. Yet, us fans of classic turn based rpg games have to 'get with the times'.