One Man Plays Final Fantasy XIII

[Runa216]

It's always fun to watch people praise XIII but criticize XII, especially over the combat system.

XII had the gambit system, which allowed you to program your characters to act certain specific ways in specific situations, assigning priority. If you didn't like the gambit system you could avoid it completely to control each and every one of your characters individually (there was an option to pause the game when looking through menus). all SIX of your team mates needed to die to give you a game over, and you could control any character at a whim.

XIII had the paradigm system, in which you were allowed to chose the jobs for each character and nothing more. You control the party leader, getting a game over if that person dies, and you have no ability to control or guide the other two members of your party. due to the speed and pace of the battles, it's unrealistic to expect to be able to control your character manually, resulting in 95% of the game having you press "auto-battle". The only real command you have is to change paradigms, everything else is automatic. this is a horrible dumbing down of what could have been an awesome battle system. a few small tweaks and it would have been fine (control your party members, manual gameplay, NOT dying when the party leader falls, better AI). Instead we get an incredibly restrictive, boring, repetitive battle system.

At least with XII you had the option to turn it off, and the battle system was, for all intents and purposes, identical to FF1-9, just with the ability to actually move. and again, at least the gambit system was deep and nuanced, giving you complete control over your characters and their actions, FFXIII had no such system.