I could read about how much you hated auto-battle all day, it's so, factually, true. Which is what makes it brilliant.
I really wish they would just remove it in a sequel, there is no reason the repeat command shouldn't be there instead.
I guess I just hope this time around they do add a hard difficulty, even if they made the default difficulty more on par with what was in the original FF13 I've spent hundreds of hours between the games now that I just know all the ins and outs of the combat, the only real way to make it harder without changing core mechanics would be stat boosts to the enemies.
I know people who played the game manually and didn't know that there was a Repeat option. :lol
I think the COM Auto-Battle AI is very stupid too. Ruinx4 or Attackx4 or even Blitzx2 does a more than sufficient job. Attacking, then stopping to Ruin, then Attacking again in a situation where there is no clear winner out of the two is inefficient and it slows down the pace of battle. Why does the Auto-Battle AI think that's a good idea in a speed-based battle system? It's completely inelegant. It's like they didn't take into account the animation frames and times for characters to carry out an action when they programmed the auto-battle.
Same goes for Jammer (switching between attacks), and Enhancer (buffing stuff that you don't want immediately, or going with offensive buffs first rather than defensive buffs... or in the case of FFXIII-2 where I noticed in one of the LP videos that the Enhancer monster was putting offensive buffs on itself when it shouldn't be since it doesn't attack!). In a game where
timing is everything and mere seconds can make the difference between a 5-star and a 4-star, you don't want to be wasting your time with animations that take up too much time (particularly with the AoE spells). It's baffling how and why they programmed the auto-battle like that. I know it's supposed to be entertaining first and foremost, but it makes battles last a little longer than they should due to the attacks it picks rather than being completely fluid and quick like the system is intended to be. People generally pick Auto-Battle because they want to get the battles over and done with as soon as possible, when in reality, auto-battle just makes things inefficient.
Given that we'll be getting three FFXIII games with likely CSB in all three of them with some extensions and improvements across each new iteration, it's only natural for them to implement a hard mode for those who've platinumed FFXIII (and FFXIII-2, but moreso FFXIII). I've put in 265-ish hours across both games, so I hope I know the Command Synergy Battle System enough to conquer whatever they hand me in hard mode should they add one in. I just don't want hard mode to be just stat boosts, though. Enemies should get newer attacks and have faster gauges. Like, Ys does difficulty scaling right, so I want it like that, kind of.
I wish JRPGs went back to the times when the main character talked like that.
Me too. There are some on handhelds, but yeah, me too.
