Thank you so much!!!!!!! DId i tell you how much i love you? lol jk

No probs. :)

 YES!!!!!!!!!!

Your HP gets recovered after battle, and if you die you can retry? Fail

I love when the battles almost drain all my HP and I'll have to use my last bit of MP to heal my party, and from there on beat 20 battles before getting to an inn. First we get the Save Points recover your health and now this? :\

Basically, a lot of JRPGs have easy normal battles because the challenge for the player is supposed to be managing their resources so that they can get through the dungeon. It's kind of like survival-horror, but with Chocobos.

By making sure players will always have full resources, and making sure death isn't too heavily punished, they seem to be designing a game that will require a lot more live-or-die strategy in each regular battle. Basically, every battle can be like a boss, and won't have to be easy enough that players only expend a small percentage of their resources in it.

If they can follow through with this, it could be great.

Only controlling one character sounds really lame, but I've read a couple of interviews where they suggest there are ways of the controlling other characters which haven't been revealed yet.

I'd be happy with good AI and the ability to switch characters on the fly. Though if this battle system works I hope they try fitting it to more traditional ATB party control someday.

Of course there is going to be some type of penalty.

People were complaining about FFXII being too much about preparation for the battle (gambits) and to little about the actual fights.

XIII offers the opposite.

I'm actually hoping they'll making grinding less relevant and make each fight hard enough that you must think and switch tactic dramatically to win. No just the usual paper-scissors-rock I win, you lose tactic, but something deep enough to cause me to think carefully before each action to measure how they’ll effect my allies and enemy. The fact that they’re allowing strings of command to link tells me that this might be the direction the game is heading.

Great I come into this to learn more about FF XIII and get reminded that I want to have Sigma Harmonics localized. Thanks alot Soriku :(

On topic, if every NPC is going to be voiced, how many discs do you think Xbox 360 version will need?

Also, the battle system should be fine, assuming battles are not to tedious and the ally A.I. is decent.

It looks promising, there is apparently a large variety of actions that can be used, so much so that the demo's interface will actually be changed in the final product due to more action becoming availible and making what we're seeing on current screenshot looks clumsy and unwieldy. One of the great thing about Valkyria Chronicles (Which is my current favourite RPG this gen) was that level was less relevant than the correct tactic, the exact opposite of game like Disgaea. I'll accept certain amount of grinding but I'm hopping XIII will provide me with something more interesting and less tedious.