[quote]1: 'Good Music'
4: 'Good Music'[/quote]

	Yeah, agreed.

[quote]The combat system is tactical while being [b]fast paced[/b] and tooled around individual playstyles.[/quote]

	It's not, but I'd like you to explain [b]why[/b] you think it is in more detail.

[quote]Though every character can eventually get every role, characters are unique and make for better roles than others.[/quote]

	They're not. I mean, you pretty much invalidate this statement in your next sentence.

[quote]This makes it way more viable to use whichever character you want and still be able to clear the game [b]which is just good game design[/b].[/quote]

	Explain how this is good game design.

[quote] The crux of the combat being to find ways to ultimately breakthrough an enemy's defenses and hit them like a truck is incredibly satisfying especially against the bigger enemies and the series staples like a Behemoth. Knowing how and when to interrupt and boost your attack without waiting for the bar to fill as well as being able to swap class setups on the fly makes for a satisfying and constant gameplay loop that is tactical and turn based without having the slower pace of both.[/quote]

	I disagree. FF XIII's fights never gave me an issue, nor did they evoke any thought, [b]nor were they fun[/b]. Once I discovered the dominant strategy, [i]which took all of maybe two seconds after gaining access to paradigm shift,[/i] the fights immediately became a grind. Here's my [b]EXTREMELY ACCURATE[/b] recap of how combat went up until I stopped playing, which was roughly 2/3rds of the way through, around the the time that you get access to the free-roaming section.

	Step 1: Mash A
	Step 2: Is it working?
		If no > Step 2a: Switch stances and then return to step 1.
		If yes > Repeat step 1 until it stops working.

	This is not an interesting or engaging feedback loop. It's genre confusion at its finest, and marks the point where Final fantasy completely abandoned the core principals of its combat system. The game was about as mechanically complex as a spinning top. Even my father, who was well into his fourties and couldn't handle any sort of strategy game at the time, was able to breeze through XIII almost as easily as I could. The game being 'easy' is not a criticism, but there's nothing satisfying about watching 30 second cut-scenes, mashing A, and going through pseudo-epic boss-fights that don't have many - if [i]any[/i] - unique mechanics to set them apart from one another. If games like FFVI, FFXII, and FFXIV were the best combat experiences the series had to offer, FFXIII is at the bottom, not accounting for the very first entries in the series.

	The entire game is a slog of the exact same combat routine, recycled over and over, which is not all that different from other games in the series. The key difference between XIII's combat, and the slower paced combat of other games, is how automated everything is. You don't make choices as much as you sit back and revel in your ability to mash A while things explode in front of you. The amount of decisions made are minimal, and by extension, the game fails to be engaging.

	The paradigm system is a terrible malformation of the gambit system introduced in FF XII, a game with a more polished battle system where you actually have control over the [b]automated actions[/b] that your party members take.

	FFXIII's Combat plays itself, and that's not a good thing.

[quote] The story is, up until around chapter 11/12, a significant and nice change of pace from the norm of a Final Fantasy game. The Final Fantasy games have always centered around saving the world from some calamity and the characters are united in this goal regardless of their own personal histories. It always boils down to friendship and love and the same standard tools of the genre trade. It is because the back quarter of the game devolves into this that the game ultimately suffers from it since before the game turns into "let's be friends and kill God through the power of friendship and lesbians" it is very much a journey of personal stakes. The game is built around three central narratives that eventually culminate in the 'twist' that the deities are actually super bad people harvesting humans for nefarious purposes, sure, but up til then it's the story of Lightning/Hope and their parallel journey of how ultimately empty their single minded obsession is, Snow and his unceasing optimism and general naivety being the catalyst for so many pointless deaths, and Sazh doing whatever it takes to save his son from ultimately the same fate as him. They aren't united by a common goal until they're forced to by literally the antagonist telling them to be and this leads to a game's narrative working in collaboration with its own gameplay systems. There's a reason the subtitle for the game is 'the battle within begins' because the character development is much more personal and introspective rather than being based around big events and characters sitting around and talking about them. Each character is fundamentally flawed and spends the first three quarters of the game learning from their respective travel partners and the experience of the journey that ultimately leads them to Pulse where they have to bond or else they'll die. [/quote]

	So basically:

[quote]"The story is good because it's different"
"The story being forced is great, because the game play is also being forced"[/quote]

	I... Disagree immensely.

[quote]5: The game has a wonderfully happy ending that wasn't at all ruined and undermined by the sequels that are shit games. [/quote]

	I don't know what the ending is, but based on your approach to the story, I'd likely be one to disagree. But Final fantasy has always been pretty good at tying up its games with satisfying endings.

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	Narrative is bad, gameplay is bad, characters are bad, everything is contrived garbage to that point that I could probably argue FF XII's story to be better, even if that game's characters are just as terrible.