| arcelonious said: I think Final Fantasy XIII's problem wasn't that the battle system was repetitive or boring, but that most of the encounters in the game were designed to be easy enough for most people to defeat, regardless of how well they utilized the system. For example, trying to defeat the Adamantoises required specific paradigms, manual spell casting like Bravera, Faithra, etc., staggering the enemy's legs, debuffing, maximizing chain bonus for damage, and so on, so it required a certain amount of planning and real-time strategy to kill them efficiently. In contrast, much of the story could be progressed without having to rely on such advanced uses of the battle system. Obviously Square-Enix has to balance the difficulty of the game to make it accesible for the fans who play the game more for the story, but I think that the story needed more encounters that forced players to actually learn the battle system. Instead, you could get through most of the content with simple paradigm shifting and auto-battle, where some of the criticism was understandably leveled at. In my opinion, it wasn't so much the battle system, but the encounter difficulty and design that hurt its combat. |
That's the problem with the battle system. You can't have only a string of boss battles. It's just not a very good battle system when you combine the fact that you actually have to have normal battles in there as well. Even with the boss battles though, like I mentioned a few posts above, putting the game on manual, you're only going to use a specific amount of attacks per class.
Sentinel youl'l only use two to three, Commando only one or two, Ravager possibly just a single attack, Medic one or two, and only Saboteur and Synergist are the ones where you're going to cast spells like Haste first, then the other useful buffs, while Saboteur you'll probably have as the other two characters since by the time they're done casting, you'll have the Synergist spells that are useful for that battle.
Boss battles that have no elemental weakness or strength, thunder is the fastest spell, so as a ravager, casting nothing but thunder gets you quick access to filling your ATB again, making it far more efficient to use than other spells. Kind of breaking the reason to even bother with other spells and skills in the ravager line up in a single enemy boss battle.
