I've been replaying Suikoden 1 since a friend also picked it up.
Even as someone who primarily plays old games, whew that is a pretty rough experience. Not unplayable or anything but it definitely feels more like a slog than anything approaching fun.
I played Suikoden 1 for the first time a few years ago.
While I enjoyed most of my time with that game, I don't think I've ever swore at a game as much as I did during that one dungeon where you have to step on the spinning wheel and hope RNG lets you go forward. Legit over an hour of my life wasted just cause the damn game wouldn't give me the right dice roll.
I've been having a good time playing Tales of Abyss on a NG++ save recently. 10x XP means that it's basically a very simple point-and-click adventure interrupted by ocassionally hitting X rapidly, and I like it. Compared to the other Tales games I've played it's sticking pretty confidently to a plot, and I appreciate that it immediately introduces mid-bosses to harry the party whenever instead of leaving them for obvious climaxes. I also like the party cast, I just wish they had voiced skits!
Also I thought Guy sounded familiar and then looked him up and realized he's been in 1,000 things so no wonder. He was Vash in Trigun!
I've been having a good time playing Tales of Abyss on a NG++ save recently. 10x XP means that it's basically a very simple point-and-click adventure interrupted by ocassionally hitting X rapidly, and I like it. Compared to the other Tales games I've played it's sticking pretty confidently to a plot, and I appreciate that it immediately introduces mid-bosses to harry the party whenever instead of leaving them for obvious climaxes. I also like the party cast, I just wish they had voiced skits!
Also I thought Guy sounded familiar and then looked him up and realized he's been in 1,000 things so no wonder. He was Vash in Trigun!
I think Destiny*, Abyss, and Vesperia are the standouts of the ones I've played. Symphonia, Eternia, Phantasia*, and Arise are fine if you want more Tales.
Legendia is terrible.
Still have to try Zestiria.
Probably won't play Berseria or Xillia.
I hear they're real downers.
*I last played Tales of Destiny and Tales of Phantasia (on SNES with a fan translation) when I was ~10 years old, so...
The Tales of Destiny PS2 remake has a complete fan translation out and is really charming and fun to play
Tales of Rebirth also has a fan translation in the works and I've been wanting to play for years
Tales of Hearts R is probably the most well-rounded one and is super-underrated. Probably because it's (still) a Vita exclusive
A lot of people complain about Graces F's story and characters but mechanically the battle system is super cool
I never beat Legendia. Every aspect about is is just misguided(?)
I love and adore Vesperia but combat feels really slow and awkward after playing later entries.
Abyss is probably my favorite of all time for it's story and characters alone. I really,REALLY hate the Field of Fonons system
Symphonia was ok to play but it's probably aged the most awkwardly out of all of them.
I got Eternia on PSP but I've yet to crack it open
Xillia, Xillia 2, and Zestiria were all so incredibly bland and disappointing that I was pretty much convinced that the franchise was in a rut that it could never get out of.
Until Berseria came and just utterly wowed me with it's story. Though I really like the combat mechanics, I also think that it's the most demanding in the franchise.
Graces F has really good combat yeah. It does some interesting things like how Pascal has super long range attacks but mostly short range spells. Its use of titles for character growth was cool (and comes back in Arise, actually). I liked the ability in the epilogue chapter to be able to turn people into each other in combat so you could do nonsense teams like 4x Pascal.
But unfortunately yes, the story is a bit of a disaster.
Berseria is definitely a bit of a downer overall but I really enjoyed it, probably my series favorite. Arise was very fun but felt a bit light, combat got very samey by the back half, and it was a bit underdone in terms of actual character growth. Vesperia is delightful but overwhelming, just way too big. Like three games in a row. Symphonia is my partner's favorite game basically ever, and I find it charming but yeah a bit rough to actually play.
I've only played Vesperia, Berseria, and Arise and out of those three Berseria is my favorite due to the characters and story. Also the English voice actors did a great job, especially Velvet and Magilou who basically needed good voice actors to make those characters work and they knocked it out of the park.
I bought Zestria on the strength of Berseria but haven't played it yet.
Symphonia just needed free run rather than its janky 3D engine.
Well, it wouldn't have gone awry to have like 3-4 fewer main characters either.
It and Abyss remain my favorites. Abyss actually handled its large cast well and had great antagonists. Just some poor pacing in the later going compounded by holy fuck the PS2 technical issues out the fucking ass.
I've ranted enough here about my issues with Berseria and Xilia. I haven't gotten any urge to touch Arise yet still since people seem to have soured on it quite quickly, and it wasn't a move in any way at all back to the things I loved about the earlier Tales games anyway.
While I own several Tales games, I've only played Eternia and Symphonia 2. I liked the characters and story of Eternia but not the battle system. I'm thinking of playing through Abyss or Hearts R during 2022.
Xillia 2 was pretty good. The cast was better the second time around and I'll always respect a game that lets you actually pick no to 'Fate'.
the fact you can choose to tell your team to fuck off when they want to sacrifice your bro and you end up having to kill them all and get a bad end is pretty damn great.
Also had a dumb joke ending.
The combat was pretty solid and being able to swap between weapons was cool.
I might have held a higher opinion of Tales of Arise if I weren't coming to it shortly after Scarlet Nexus, which I feel outclasses it in every metric I care about (Arise looks great and has better environments, but eh) despite feeling like it had a fraction of the budget (and having obvious 'we cut this gameplay section because we ran out of money' sections).
I liked Tales of Arise quite a bit, though the story started to fall apart for me once (end of game spoilers)
they find out that the people who had been enslaving them weren't the real threat and started talking about how they were just as much a victim as the people who had literally been enslaved for generations.
That last bit had my eyes rolling out of my head while I did the most exaggerated wank off motion possible.
The characters in your party and the relationships between them was the real story to me and I enjoyed how that played out.
My god, there really is a completely pointless sewer level in every Tales game isn't there? Just, we need a dungeon here, but the plot is happening in a city, so go through an enormous dungeon full of monsters/puzzles/both to go six feet to 'sneak past' 2-3 generic guards. Exactly that plot, every time.
The one I just did in Symphonia might be the worst of the three. Vesperia's was relatively inoffensive, just having a weird lighting mechanic. Arise's had the super annoying slime enemies. But Symphonia has like 20 minutes of trash-block pushing. Which took me like 20 minutes to do despite never at any point not knowing exactly what to do next. It just took that long, physically, to push all the blocks around.
Sewers have...
- A large number of small corridors all mutually interconnected
- Poor lighting
- Toxic substances
- Creatures normal people don't want to deal with
Ideal dungeon conditions!
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
Didn't complete it, I just got to a point to where I was done. I'd spent the better part of an hour tweaking my team, getting prepped for a boss fight. Got my equipment all sorted, got gambits programmed out for my main team and my backup, had everything just about perfect, and then the game crashed. And the idea of redoing all of that, of spending another near-hour just to prepare for a fight, was just too unappealing. I was near the end of the game, too - I was cleaning out the last of some sidequests before heading to Bahamut. But I just couldn't be fuckin' bothered.
I thought the game started out quite strong. I admired the double-fakeout opening, the party seemed like it had some fun characters, it initially felt like everyone had a fair bit of emotional heft to unpack and explore. And then the story just... Didn't. It would gesture in the direction of pathos, but the characters were so thinly-sketched that they couldn't pull off the emo moments.
It's a shame. I quite like Ivalice, the visual design of the world was cool, I even dug parts of the gameplay. But there was just not enough depth anywhere for me to really sink me teeth into anything. Ah, well.
I'm now into 13. I'd heard this game was linear, but I'm used to that being at least slightly metaphorical. But no, I'm quite literally walking in a straight line for most of this game.
Lightning fuckin' rules, though. The whole cast is pretty fun, and with some of the best visual designs this side of X-2. And the structure of the story (thus far, anyway), intercutting the modern adventures with slices of life in the before time, is really working for me. I got 50-ish hours into FF12, and only six hours in 13 has me caring infinitely more about the characters. Hope's kind of annoying, but I have very little affection for his character archetype generally so I'm accustomed to tuning little twerps like him out. And I wish they'd dim the neon on the flashing "I am a god" sign hovering about Vanille's head, but there are enough weird wrinkles in the actor's performance that I find her more interesting than annoying.
I do find it fucking hysterical that Squeenix seemingly went, "You know the problem with 12? The combat was too challenging."
+5
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Didn't complete it, I just got to a point to where I was done. I'd spent the better part of an hour tweaking my team, getting prepped for a boss fight. Got my equipment all sorted, got gambits programmed out for my main team and my backup, had everything just about perfect, and then the game crashed. And the idea of redoing all of that, of spending another near-hour just to prepare for a fight, was just too unappealing. I was near the end of the game, too - I was cleaning out the last of some sidequests before heading to Bahamut. But I just couldn't be fuckin' bothered.
I thought the game started out quite strong. I admired the double-fakeout opening, the party seemed like it had some fun characters, it initially felt like everyone had a fair bit of emotional heft to unpack and explore. And then the story just... Didn't. It would gesture in the direction of pathos, but the characters were so thinly-sketched that they couldn't pull off the emo moments.
It's a shame. I quite like Ivalice, the visual design of the world was cool, I even dug parts of the gameplay. But there was just not enough depth anywhere for me to really sink me teeth into anything. Ah, well.
I'm now into 13. I'd heard this game was linear, but I'm used to that being at least slightly metaphorical. But no, I'm quite literally walking in a straight line for most of this game.
Lightning fuckin' rules, though. The whole cast is pretty fun, and with some of the best visual designs this side of X-2. And the structure of the story (thus far, anyway), intercutting the modern adventures with slices of life in the before time, is really working for me. I got 50-ish hours into FF12, and only six hours in 13 has me caring infinitely more about the characters. Hope's kind of annoying, but I have very little affection for his character archetype generally so I'm accustomed to tuning little twerps like him out. And I wish they'd dim the neon on the flashing "I am a god" sign hovering about Vanille's head, but there are enough weird wrinkles in the actor's performance that I find her more interesting than annoying.
I do find it fucking hysterical that Squeenix seemingly went, "You know the problem with 12? The combat was too challenging."
13 has a great difficulty curve, and the cast is way more likeable than 12's. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
(The OST is phenomenal, too.)
Didn't complete it, I just got to a point to where I was done. I'd spent the better part of an hour tweaking my team, getting prepped for a boss fight. Got my equipment all sorted, got gambits programmed out for my main team and my backup, had everything just about perfect, and then the game crashed. And the idea of redoing all of that, of spending another near-hour just to prepare for a fight, was just too unappealing. I was near the end of the game, too - I was cleaning out the last of some sidequests before heading to Bahamut. But I just couldn't be fuckin' bothered.
I thought the game started out quite strong. I admired the double-fakeout opening, the party seemed like it had some fun characters, it initially felt like everyone had a fair bit of emotional heft to unpack and explore. And then the story just... Didn't. It would gesture in the direction of pathos, but the characters were so thinly-sketched that they couldn't pull off the emo moments.
It's a shame. I quite like Ivalice, the visual design of the world was cool, I even dug parts of the gameplay. But there was just not enough depth anywhere for me to really sink me teeth into anything. Ah, well.
I'm now into 13. I'd heard this game was linear, but I'm used to that being at least slightly metaphorical. But no, I'm quite literally walking in a straight line for most of this game.
Lightning fuckin' rules, though. The whole cast is pretty fun, and with some of the best visual designs this side of X-2. And the structure of the story (thus far, anyway), intercutting the modern adventures with slices of life in the before time, is really working for me. I got 50-ish hours into FF12, and only six hours in 13 has me caring infinitely more about the characters. Hope's kind of annoying, but I have very little affection for his character archetype generally so I'm accustomed to tuning little twerps like him out. And I wish they'd dim the neon on the flashing "I am a god" sign hovering about Vanille's head, but there are enough weird wrinkles in the actor's performance that I find her more interesting than annoying.
I do find it fucking hysterical that Squeenix seemingly went, "You know the problem with 12? The combat was too challenging."
13 has a great difficulty curve, and the cast is way more likeable than 12's. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
(The OST is phenomenal, too.)
Definitely loving the OST, yeah. I've got the game running but paused as I type this, it's just very nice to listen to
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
XIII is completely linear until it suddenly isn’t
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I really didn't mind that all that much. Sometimes it's okay to have a linear story when that's the kind of experience you have in mind, lots of visual novels have kinetic routes without any branching. It was kind of refreshing to have a straight forward RPG without having to run around or worry I was missing stuff for once.
13 has one of my favorite combat systems in the series. Unfortunately it takes way too long before you get a full three person party, which is when the combat really clicked for me.
Plus I'm a huge fan of the dumb-ass summons in that game.
what if all the summons were also transformers is such a great and also stupid idea that I can't help but love it.
Sewers have...
- A large number of small corridors all mutually interconnected
- Poor lighting
- Toxic substances
- Creatures normal people don't want to deal with
Ideal dungeon conditions!
Don't forget all these things below a very populated city with often no real protections against things inside getting out besides regular unlocked grates or doors
13 has one of my favorite combat systems in the series. Unfortunately it takes way too long before you get a full three person party, which is when the combat really clicked for me.
Plus I'm a huge fan of the dumb-ass summons in that game.
what if all the summons were also transformers is such a great and also stupid idea that I can't help but love it.
I had to play for five hours before encountering even a single fight where I had to do anything but press X
It still hasn't completely unfurled itself as a system yet, but I've hit a couple of boss fights that had interesting rhythms. It's a neat flow to battle, feeling like you're up against something truly titanic and impressive, feeling like you're barely making a dent, not sure if you can pull this off. And then you hit a stagger, and your damage starts soaring, and it's like you're turning the tables on a powerful foe. It's really satisfying, and leads to a tasty bit of risk/reward evaluation. Do you try to get those last couple of licks in, hoping you get your hits in before the enemy finishes you off with theirs? Or do you play it safe, heal up, let the window close and risk a lower battle rating? I can see the potential in it, which is a relief after the deeply underwhelming opening hours with it
+1
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
13 has one of my favorite combat systems in the series. Unfortunately it takes way too long before you get a full three person party, which is when the combat really clicked for me.
Plus I'm a huge fan of the dumb-ass summons in that game.
what if all the summons were also transformers is such a great and also stupid idea that I can't help but love it.
I had to play for five hours before encountering even a single fight where I had to do anything but press X
It still hasn't completely unfurled itself as a system yet, but I've hit a couple of boss fights that had interesting rhythms. It's a neat flow to battle, feeling like you're up against something truly titanic and impressive, feeling like you're barely making a dent, not sure if you can pull this off. And then you hit a stagger, and your damage starts soaring, and it's like you're turning the tables on a powerful foe. It's really satisfying, and leads to a tasty bit of risk/reward evaluation. Do you try to get those last couple of licks in, hoping you get your hits in before the enemy finishes you off with theirs? Or do you play it safe, heal up, let the window close and risk a lower battle rating? I can see the potential in it, which is a relief after the deeply underwhelming opening hours with it
Wait'll you see some of the late game fights, they really have some vicious fangs.
Ya it for sure takes a long time to open up. A lot of people criticize it as just hitting auto constantly instead of picking your attacks to use. Which ya, but the combat isn't so much about picking the correct individual actions as it is managing your team as a whole.
Using paradigm shifts to constantly adjust your party member roles to adapt to what was happening in the fight was a bunch of fun for me and stretched different brain muscles than typical turn based or ATB systems did.
FFXIV: Agran Trask
+4
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
I love the battle system in ff13, you get to be a coach instead of a micro-manager and the characters take care of doing all the minutiae of probing/remembering the weakness and resistance of every enemy and using atb efficiently
It does take for ev er to fully open up though
+4
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I love the battle system in ff13, you get to be a coach instead of a micro-manager and the characters take care of doing all the minutiae of probing/remembering the weakness and resistance of every enemy and using atb efficiently
It does take for ev er to fully open up though
13-2 fixes this, but the fights are a lot easier, sadly.
My only complaint against FF13 is that the Paradigm Shifts arbitrarily (for my purposes) decide to either occur quickly, or with one of those long transition scenes. And while all your characters are doing silly poses and showing off what new role they changed into, the boss is merrily beating all their faces in, still. Which, when you're like me and tend not to Paradigm Shift except in cases of "oh shit, I need to heal now", leaving whether the battle is going to be saved or lost to a dice roll is immensely frustrating.
I know the speedrunners somehow manage whether or not the Paradigm Shift will actually do the extended transition scene, but I'd just rather it swapped everyone over without making a big deal out of it consistently.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
+1
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Unfortunately the pokemon aspect of 13-2 kinda caused that game to bounce right off me.
Would have much rather had a 3rd actual character
Thankfully by late game, once you have your established party(and most of the DLC cast), you can basically play it like 13 proper. By endgame, I was basically using an FF13 cast, Sazh never left my team.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Because of ATB refilling upon shifting, you should be spending like 99% of the game shifting back and forth between Aggression and Relentless Assault
Posts
Even as someone who primarily plays old games, whew that is a pretty rough experience. Not unplayable or anything but it definitely feels more like a slog than anything approaching fun.
While I enjoyed most of my time with that game, I don't think I've ever swore at a game as much as I did during that one dungeon where you have to step on the spinning wheel and hope RNG lets you go forward. Legit over an hour of my life wasted just cause the damn game wouldn't give me the right dice roll.
Final Fantasy XIV has, embedded in it, a better FFXII than FFXII, wherein Fran is a cunning resistance commander fighting an imperial offshoot faction
Also I thought Guy sounded familiar and then looked him up and realized he's been in 1,000 things so no wonder. He was Vash in Trigun!
Also I thought Guy sounded familiar and then looked him up and realized he's been in 1,000 things so no wonder. He was Vash in Trigun!
Legendia is terrible.
Still have to try Zestiria.
Probably won't play Berseria or Xillia.
*I last played Tales of Destiny and Tales of Phantasia (on SNES with a fan translation) when I was ~10 years old, so...
Tales of Rebirth also has a fan translation in the works and I've been wanting to play for years
Tales of Hearts R is probably the most well-rounded one and is super-underrated. Probably because it's (still) a Vita exclusive
A lot of people complain about Graces F's story and characters but mechanically the battle system is super cool
I never beat Legendia. Every aspect about is is just misguided(?)
I love and adore Vesperia but combat feels really slow and awkward after playing later entries.
Abyss is probably my favorite of all time for it's story and characters alone. I really,REALLY hate the Field of Fonons system
Symphonia was ok to play but it's probably aged the most awkwardly out of all of them.
I got Eternia on PSP but I've yet to crack it open
Xillia, Xillia 2, and Zestiria were all so incredibly bland and disappointing that I was pretty much convinced that the franchise was in a rut that it could never get out of.
Until Berseria came and just utterly wowed me with it's story. Though I really like the combat mechanics, I also think that it's the most demanding in the franchise.
But unfortunately yes, the story is a bit of a disaster.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
I bought Zestria on the strength of Berseria but haven't played it yet.
Well, it wouldn't have gone awry to have like 3-4 fewer main characters either.
It and Abyss remain my favorites. Abyss actually handled its large cast well and had great antagonists. Just some poor pacing in the later going compounded by holy fuck the PS2 technical issues out the fucking ass.
I've ranted enough here about my issues with Berseria and Xilia. I haven't gotten any urge to touch Arise yet still since people seem to have soured on it quite quickly, and it wasn't a move in any way at all back to the things I loved about the earlier Tales games anyway.
I gotta stop falling for it and buying them.
Also had a dumb joke ending.
The combat was pretty solid and being able to swap between weapons was cool.
That last bit had my eyes rolling out of my head while I did the most exaggerated wank off motion possible.
The characters in your party and the relationships between them was the real story to me and I enjoyed how that played out.
The one I just did in Symphonia might be the worst of the three. Vesperia's was relatively inoffensive, just having a weird lighting mechanic. Arise's had the super annoying slime enemies. But Symphonia has like 20 minutes of trash-block pushing. Which took me like 20 minutes to do despite never at any point not knowing exactly what to do next. It just took that long, physically, to push all the blocks around.
- A large number of small corridors all mutually interconnected
- Poor lighting
- Toxic substances
- Creatures normal people don't want to deal with
Ideal dungeon conditions!
Didn't complete it, I just got to a point to where I was done. I'd spent the better part of an hour tweaking my team, getting prepped for a boss fight. Got my equipment all sorted, got gambits programmed out for my main team and my backup, had everything just about perfect, and then the game crashed. And the idea of redoing all of that, of spending another near-hour just to prepare for a fight, was just too unappealing. I was near the end of the game, too - I was cleaning out the last of some sidequests before heading to Bahamut. But I just couldn't be fuckin' bothered.
I thought the game started out quite strong. I admired the double-fakeout opening, the party seemed like it had some fun characters, it initially felt like everyone had a fair bit of emotional heft to unpack and explore. And then the story just... Didn't. It would gesture in the direction of pathos, but the characters were so thinly-sketched that they couldn't pull off the emo moments.
It's a shame. I quite like Ivalice, the visual design of the world was cool, I even dug parts of the gameplay. But there was just not enough depth anywhere for me to really sink me teeth into anything. Ah, well.
I'm now into 13. I'd heard this game was linear, but I'm used to that being at least slightly metaphorical. But no, I'm quite literally walking in a straight line for most of this game.
Lightning fuckin' rules, though. The whole cast is pretty fun, and with some of the best visual designs this side of X-2. And the structure of the story (thus far, anyway), intercutting the modern adventures with slices of life in the before time, is really working for me. I got 50-ish hours into FF12, and only six hours in 13 has me caring infinitely more about the characters. Hope's kind of annoying, but I have very little affection for his character archetype generally so I'm accustomed to tuning little twerps like him out. And I wish they'd dim the neon on the flashing "I am a god" sign hovering about Vanille's head, but there are enough weird wrinkles in the actor's performance that I find her more interesting than annoying.
I do find it fucking hysterical that Squeenix seemingly went, "You know the problem with 12? The combat was too challenging."
13 has a great difficulty curve, and the cast is way more likeable than 12's. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
(The OST is phenomenal, too.)
Definitely loving the OST, yeah. I've got the game running but paused as I type this, it's just very nice to listen to
I really didn't mind that all that much. Sometimes it's okay to have a linear story when that's the kind of experience you have in mind, lots of visual novels have kinetic routes without any branching. It was kind of refreshing to have a straight forward RPG without having to run around or worry I was missing stuff for once.
Plus I'm a huge fan of the dumb-ass summons in that game.
Don't forget all these things below a very populated city with often no real protections against things inside getting out besides regular unlocked grates or doors
I had to play for five hours before encountering even a single fight where I had to do anything but press X
It still hasn't completely unfurled itself as a system yet, but I've hit a couple of boss fights that had interesting rhythms. It's a neat flow to battle, feeling like you're up against something truly titanic and impressive, feeling like you're barely making a dent, not sure if you can pull this off. And then you hit a stagger, and your damage starts soaring, and it's like you're turning the tables on a powerful foe. It's really satisfying, and leads to a tasty bit of risk/reward evaluation. Do you try to get those last couple of licks in, hoping you get your hits in before the enemy finishes you off with theirs? Or do you play it safe, heal up, let the window close and risk a lower battle rating? I can see the potential in it, which is a relief after the deeply underwhelming opening hours with it
Wait'll you see some of the late game fights, they really have some vicious fangs.
Using paradigm shifts to constantly adjust your party member roles to adapt to what was happening in the fight was a bunch of fun for me and stretched different brain muscles than typical turn based or ATB systems did.
It does take for ev er to fully open up though
13-2 fixes this, but the fights are a lot easier, sadly.
Would have much rather had a 3rd actual character
I know the speedrunners somehow manage whether or not the Paradigm Shift will actually do the extended transition scene, but I'd just rather it swapped everyone over without making a big deal out of it consistently.
Thankfully by late game, once you have your established party(and most of the DLC cast), you can basically play it like 13 proper. By endgame, I was basically using an FF13 cast, Sazh never left my team.
Wait really?
You basically just need to wait a certain amount of time inbetween shifts and you get a free refill