LogFAQs > #876637740

Eh, I'm actually gonna go against the majority on this one and say I hated XIII's combat, and that the story has more merit than the gameplay, and that's taking into account how horrific the storytelling is presented.

Here's the thing: your role in FFXIII is that of a tactical adviser. You have a passive role in the actions your party takes because what you essentially do is hand out general commands and watch the ai take over. It's no different than, say, The Last Remnant. Anyone that says there's depth to the combat is grossly overestimating just how much input the player has.

Yes, there are times where you will constantly switch between paradigms, but don't fool yourself into thinking that means there's depth to the system. There isn't. You will always cycle through the same 3 paradigms for the most part. One for attacking, one for healing, and one for buffing/debuffing. Since you can't control your teammates, you're at the mercy of the ai, which you cannot alter like you could in a series like the Tales games. You only have direct control over one party member at a time, ever. And because combat is so fast paced, you will generally use auto-battle most of the time because the ai for your controlling character is very good at determining what the optimal dps rotation is. They will exploit the enemies weaknesses easily.

So what role do you have aside from monitoring your health bars, and making sure your buffs are up? Tossing out the occasional item and summoning your eidolons. Oh, but only one eidolon per character, so you don't even get a choice of determining what you wanna summon for any given situation.

I played through the entire thing twice with absolutely no issues, because you have to try to be bad at combat. Each chapter is designed to give you a specific amount of experience needed to get through with minimal difficulty. You are REQUIRED to progress through the crystarium in a certain order for each role. There is no customization there whatsoever. You can't even grind. You literally cannot play the game differently for the first 9 chapters. So for the last several chapters, you get a bit more leeway in arranging paradigms, so maybe you switch between several more sets than you otherwise would have. That is so insignificant that it's not even worth mentioning, because for paradigms that characters don't naturally tend towards, you have to invest a titanic amount of CP to unlock abilities, to the point where you'll never use those jobs until you hit the post game.

Even if you try to say that you enjoy directly inputting each command for your lead character, my rebuttal is this: you will generally only do so for boss fights, and you're still only controlling one character. I point to FFs 1 through 10, where you can control every single one of them, and 12, where you can fine-tune the ai with up to 12 gambits each, placing priority on certain actions over others. The ai in 13? Select a paradigm and pray.

The combat is such a huge low point that it is the only reason why I never desire to play through the game again. It is almost quite literally "press X to win" for the first half, and the second half is just "attack...aaaaand switch to heal....aaaand switch to attack...aaand switch to heal...." You're basically watching a movie. Don't get me wrong, FFX isn't the pinnacle of depth, but you at least had the option to switch every member in and out of combat at will to utilize their unique abilities... at least until you max the sphere grids during the postgame. It wasn't just watching your party members use optimal moves to get through every encounter.