Quote Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Mirage View Post
It's a strict turn based battle system, with AI control over three out of four party members. The developers stopped being retarded around the time of the PSP version, and let you control all four manually.
Except the A.I. is actually really good.

For HP: It works like FFXIII's system where encountering a new enemy, if you have your navigator scan the enemy for you, the party A.I. will know exactly what to do. Despite this, you can still give orders to your party or individuals, like telling them to concentrate on healing, or exploiting enemy weakness, or even prioritize a specific target. The scanning option also has the amusing side effect of helping you in boss battles, because the game won't reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a boss to the player, but the A.I. party will know, so it saves you from doing a silly physical attack that will backfire and kill your party instead. It a clever elements that makes the game far more noob friendly than P4.

The A.I. party also served a story purpose because the designers wanted the player to really feel like the other characters were their own people. This is the reason why in the console versions, you have to actually give your party members equipment by talking to them in dungeons, instead of just opening the menu screen and fiddling (you can still do fiddle afterwards if they try to equip something you don't want them to) it's little touches like this that make the game pretty interesting as the gameplay and story overlap. I dare say the A.I. in this game is actually one of the best in the genre outside of using Gambits. Despite that, all the real action comes from your main and fully controllable main character who gets more options than the basic party anyway and is the one who sets the pace and strategy of battle anyway.
I didn't think I would ever see someone defending "talk to character to change gear", but here we are. Developers can use AI to make me feel like the characters are real people when I can talk to these "real persons" and plan an elaborate strategy with them. Until then, screw that tit.

If the AI was so good, why did they change it to manual control in Portable and P4?

As for best AI, I don't think it's really on the level of the AI used in Tales of Symphonia (using that game because that's the most recent tales of game I have played), and the battles in that game requires more complex control than P3 as well. That's a game where I could actually rely fully on an AI healer during a boss battle, and it would only very rarely perform actions that were less optimal than what I would have done myself.