I think we are once again just going to have to toss FFX into one of those agree to disagree piles.

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I think the 'well why didn't you just not use gambits' arguments to be extremely shallow. All I did was set my gambits up to buff my characters, and attack enemies, and heal when needed. These are the most repetitive actions, and sure automating them might have been a good idea. My problem is that after automating the redundant actions, there was nothing else left. So what, I turn my gambits off and start doing the mundane tasks myself? I am a control freak also, and for the first 10 hour of the game I didn't use them at all. I only put them in to alleviate the drudgery of the system. Turns out a boring system (if you get down to it it really is an ATB game with 'wait' turned off)

But I digress, this is something for the FFXII forum, which incidentally I don't visit because I don't see the point in dwelling on games I don't like.

(For the record, I've done all the mark hunts except whatever the last pre-yazmat one is, and they were all cake. Only difference is I had to manually select when to use cure instead of having the computer do it. I think part of what makes the game so difficult is people insisting in making classes. Immediately after starting the game I saw that having 3x sword+shield with heals was by far the most powerful combo. My friends tried to use magic/other setups, ect and it was much more difficult for them. Once again, not my fault if the game is unbalanced.)

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Now to scan back through the thread to find something else to respond to so this isn't an exclusively FFXII bashing post...

Variable difficulty was mentioned earlier, and the way the industry is now it is a little difficult to implement. When I see a game ask me for difficulty, there are usually three options. I'll be damed if I chose easy (any really, who choses easy right of the back), and hard is just about always tunned to be impossible for someone who hasn't played the game (FPS games excluded). So such an easily implementable model isn't really practical.

One easy way to do it was level grinding. In old school games it is automatically hard mode unless you chose to spend time lowering the difficulty. From a game balance perspective this is a fascinating idea (I doubt many of us have looked at it this way before), however we all know how much fans appreciate level grinding in practice.

I have more kicking around in my head, but I think this topic could deserve its own thread in the future.