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Runa216 said:

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4 - Random weapon/accessory upgrade system.  I understand that there's apparently a method to its madness, but after 60 hours of playing this game, as well as looking at countless faq's and testing for myself, I saw no patterns and what worked one time wouldn't work another time.   Too much reliance on random chance and too little explanation to give you a hint. 

5 - Unavoidable instant kill attacks.  I know there are items to prevent these attacks somewhere in the game, but I didn't get them.  your ability to survive should NOT be entirely reliant on chance (did you find the item?  did you equip it? did you even know it was an issue?).  the final boss had a move that would kill one of your members in one hit.  It was 100% effective unless you had a certain item equipped and had a 1/3 chance of hitting your leader, resulting in a game over.  it wouldn't be so bad except he waits until I think his second or third stage (after 15-20 minutes of battle) to do it, then he does it almost constantly and of all the FAQ's I read, I found no defense against it that I had at my disposal.  

6 - To make it worse, a lot of enemies had attacks like this.  the game literally demands you either be clairvoyant or persistent (keep playing and dying to learn the boss's patterns).  Many bosses and even some regular enemies would change stances or attack relentlessly without any foreseeable warning, often instantly killing you.  Yeah, sometimes they give a warning, such as flashing lights or a stance change, but you have to know exactly when something's about to happen and how to counter it or you will die, and reacting often isn't enough due to the fact that attack patterns change so quickly you're dead before your paradigm shift animation is complete.  This happens entirely too honest, and unless you're psychic and fast, you will die.  a lot. 

7 - Above all else, you die a lot.  In fact one could argue that a game mechanic is trial and error by death.  there's no way a reasonable person could beat 90% of this game without dozens of needless deaths, and that is a flawed mechanic in an RPG.  sure, if you wanna reserve these instakill moves for hidden bosses or hunts, then by all means go wild.  Some of the world's best hidden secrets had to be found during trial and error, but when almost every battle has a combination of random chance and trial and error like that, it's a flaw. This could have easily been fixed by tweaking the damage the enemies did or how much health you had or even making it so you had more warning or you didn't instantly get game over when your one character died.

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To me, a battle system like this would be like playing fallout three and there was say a 1 in 100 chance a bullet would backfire and instantly kill you, or like if you were playing mario and some mystery blocks exploded, sending you back to the beginning of the level.

4. There are patterns... You just have to find them, probably by trial and error. But it should be pretty easy to find that organic components increase the exp multiplier but don't give much exp while more advanced components lower the exp multiplier but give tons of exp. It's not as bad as you make it sound but this is something that should definitely be better.

5. I've played the final battle two times without any accessories to protect against death, and I haven't had my party leader killed once by it. In fact, I could probably count the times the death strike killed someone with my fingers (from one hand, mind you). It's an issue but not as big as you say it is.

6. I didn't have a problem with this very often. There were a couple of enemies that had particularly powerful moves but overall, pretty much none of them were unavoidable. There are battles you know you have to be prepared for anything and in such battles, you should always be ready to switch to a defensive/restorative paradigm until you know what to expect. That way, I never had too much trouble with anything.

7. Have we played the same game? Most battles had the chance to turn ugly if I wasn't careful but you can prevent almost all deaths simply by being careful.

Personally I enjoyed how any battle could turn bad, how every encounter could be deadly and how careful I had to be at times. Too often I play games where I have no trouble unless I go completely reckless or where there are only a few boss fights that give me any trouble. It was refreshing to actually die because of my own mistakes.

Your Fallout/Mario examples are totally random. FFXIII doesn't have such moments.