Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
Okay, if you're including boss fights, there are a lot of boss fights in other games that just go on a bit too long, too. It's just for the sake of difficulty levels. For people who aren't completley leveled up, these fights become difficult, too.
Name one long fight in the older games that isn't an optional boss creature. Barthandelus is just a ridiculously long fight, all three of them.


Doing this when you have other enemies out there that are still alive can end badly depending on the enemy, but oh well. You're right, I suppose, that it is a strategy that works well for most enemies. But then, if you look at almost every other FF, there is a familiar strategy that works on all enemies, too. For me, it went like this: Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, victory.
Except I could also choose to pelt it with magic or the whole group, I could steal from it, I could use a special technique that sometimes required additional special inputs, I could use a Summon for quick damage, switch out a party member, change some of my characters equipment, draw magic from it, actually play a real defensive role for my party, haste my whole party with one spell cast, hell, in wait mode of FFX, I could blankly stare at the screen and thing about the meaning of life between trying to remember if I did my laundry and what I want for breakfast in the morning. In XIII, I just hit auto battle cause 9 out of 10 times the computer chooses exactly what I want to do, playing sentinel/medic/buffer is incredibly boring, and in some fights, I watch my A.I. party wipe the enemy before I even choose my third command for Ravager. My only role is to babysit the A.I. and make sure it goes into a defensive paradigm shift when they get beat up too much. Even in XII, I was at least given full control of my party's A.I. script, not just canned A.I.

Ooh, that sounds great. Where did you hear that, out of curiosity? I've not seen any info about this outside of the magazine. Not sure if I missed something in there... but yeah, that sounds pretty cool =]
This was the explanation I heard during some live E3 coverage of the game when a SE rep was trying to describe the monsters role. They had one of the Jelly monsters as a third player, playing a Ravager role in the battle they demoed. Granted, I was only half paying attention, and this was a demo, so there is a good chance I could be mistaken.