Guess I'll spend the night playing FFXIII.
Oh, who am I kidding? I'll be watching as FFXIII plays itself. That's all it ever does anyway.
(Seriously; most people hated the Gambit system in FFXII, so they replaced it with one that's even more restrictive? At least I don't need a special license to wear a hat anymore. Of course, that's because they eliminated hats, and armor, and choice, and fun...)
Sorry about the cancellation, Rick, but looking back on it I'm convinced it was the right call. My voice didn't really recover until Sunday, but I'm still getting questions from people at work of, "Why are you still here?"
Personally, I like the paradigm system a *lot* more than gambits, and I'm digging FFXIII more than any final fantasy game to come along in a while. Here are what I think are the biggest strengths:
- Cut scenes are well-paced and feel less intrusive than previous FF games.
- Codex summaries are short and sweet and really keep me up to date with what's happening in the ludicrous story.
- Characters are significantly less annoying than previous FF games. Even the bad ones (Hope and Vanille) aren't nearly as terrible as characters like Penello and Vaan.
Problems with the game include:
- Really long introduction/tutorial section. Good lord. I don't know why they drew it out so much.
- Few choices to make initially, as you said. It takes forever before you can begin forming your own party and make meaningful equipment/upgrade choices.
Personally, I think the paradigm system works well but during the game's long introduction combat can be kind of a drag. It's not until your characters get more meaningful abilities and access to a variety of roles and the enemies require more strategy to defeat that the combat system starts to cook. For me I think that was about the 8 to 10 hour mark (!!).
I'm not convinced that the paradigm system is somehow better than a more traditional menu system (FFX probably implemented this best), but it *is* punchy and action-packed. The real problem with the system in my mind is there's no way to quickly select a single ability and use it on an appropriate target. I came across this problem last night. Lightning has ATB four and can script four actions. One of my party members (let's say it's Snow) has a bad status ailment. I want to use esuna to cure him, and esuna takes two actions.
If I let Lightning auto-heal, she'll usually get everyone in the party up to something like 90% of their max hit points before ever scripting an esuna. The same thing with her raise, I've found. However, if I want to manually script a single esuna in there, I can't simply use half of Lightning's actions to script...I need to fill the whole ATB bar *before* the game lets me pick my target. If I press the button to immediately execute the actions in the ATB bar, Lightning will go to the last target she had. In my case, Lightning had been auto-healing Hope when Snow got Dazed or something. I scripted an esuna and immediately punched the execute button, but Lightning then dropped her esuna on the non-status-affected Hope. I had to script 4 ATB actions worth of junk to get my esuna on Snow, so I just went with Esuna-esuna.
I suppose you can try to esuna-esuna, cancel after the first esuna hits with an immediate paradigm shift or manual cancel, then go to a different role and lay some beatdown, but I don't like the fact that I have to script a full ATB bar worth of actions to pick my target. Guess it's a minor complaint.
The real fun in the combat system is effectively timing your paradigm shifts for maximum efficiency, which does indeed mean switching roles in the middle of a set of ATB actions.
