Yeah, it’s a Tales game, so the combos at the most complex are more like: X, X, X, Y, Y. There’s some timing issues if you want to pull of the SUper Awesome Mega Duper Combo, but it’s still basically just several seperate abilities you link together.
Pretty much. You might need to push a direction in there somewhere too, but that’s about the limit of it.
My favorite sort of thing is actually:
X,X,X,Y,Right Stick Down, Right stick left. 
It’s important to understand that yeah, this is not street fighter. A single button press can general an impressive ‘auto combo.’. Again: You are under absolutely no obligation to “deal with it” at all. But you’ll probably find you do anyway, because it’s easy and fun.
Heck, there’s even a downloadable demo so you can get a feel for the combat system - though don’t judge the story by it. It’s from a pretty tepid section of the game, overall.
I’m about 40 hours in. I think it’s really good so far. I don’t have time at the moment to post detailed thoughts, but here’s the summary version:
Second-best battle system after X. Battles are actually usually kind of fun instead of a grind.
You can die in almost any battle if you’re not careful.
Character advancement system is most similar to X’s, but a little different (can explain more if people are interested).
By far the most linear FF.
Very, very cool opening sequence / first area.
There are hardly any “towns” in the classic FF sense; it’s mostly dungeons.
Summons are kind of silly (they have modes where you ride them).
Fairly interesting characters/story. Again, not up to the level of X (my favorite), but I like it.
Enemies drop ingredients/materials that you use to upgrade weapons/accessories. Haven’t fooled around with this too much.
Great voice acting (although with how FFX turned out in English, I’m not sure how this will be…)
Feel free to ask questions / opinions about specific parts of the game, if you want. But keep in mind that I loved FFX and disliked FFXII, to see if your opinions might match up with mine
That’s good news to me Commander Keen, I loved FFX.
Airk, it was this GameFAQs review that said it was hard and expect to get killed often.
For the record I don’t have a 360 either. I’ll probably get a PS3 because I spent all that money on a full 1080p TV and need something that actually does 1080p to justify it :D.
Both consoles do 1080p. But if you’re determined to buy one just for this game, yes, PS3 it is. 
Don’t forget to pick up a copy of Valkyria Chronicles while you’re at it.
Right. So I will hate this game. Duly noted.
Oh snap! But yeah, considering we also hold opposite opinions on Tales of Vesperia, I think you might want to stay far away from FFXIII…
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love Vesperia to death in any respect, but the bar for JRPGs on current gen hardware is, as Penny Arcade once said, nearly subterranean. Vesperia gets a solid B, which is better than anything else I’ve tried so far.
But yeah. My hate for FFX is nearly unholy, whereas I found the plot of FF12 thoroughly palatable by comparison to the inane characters and nonsense plot of FFX.
Are there many games/arenas/activities to do on the side like previous FF games?
Are there any quick-time events?
Do they force you to split up in to two separate (and fully equipped) groups at some point? (might want to spoiler-box that one).
Thanks in advance!
BTW, I loved X and disliked XII too. I can’t find Tales of Vesperia second-hand for cheap, it’s must be rare because everyone is selling it at full retail price…
I get the impression of no.
All the reviews I’ve read indicated that most of the game is one huge party split, where you’ll be running with A and B for a while, and then C and D, and the A,B,D and then C,E and then B,D,E and so on. Fortunately, people who are off doing something else get full XP. But… well, here. Read this. This is one fellow who Did Not Like It.
Dunno what you feel is “cheap”, but Amazon.com has it for $30 new, which isn’t exactly what I think of as “full retail price” either.
Well, bugger. Maybe I should read some reviews before buying then. The little bits on the side are my favourite parts in previous FF games.
Tales of Vesperia goes for around £30 on Ebay over here. It retails for £35. I don’t understand why but I’m not that desperate to play it.
If there’s no blue magic in it, I’m not interested. 
All responses in spoiler boxes just in case…
Not really. The main one seems to be a thing kind of like FFXII’s monster hunting, where you have to go kill some difficult monster to get a reward. It’s pretty hard, too; I couldn’t even beat the second mission at the time, so I continued on and assume I’ll be able to come back in the future.
None that I’ve seen yet.
Airk is right on this. The first 30-35 hours are mostly spent with different parties of 2 each, with the members rotating. This is kind of irritating mostly because it makes battles that much harder.
And sorry, no blue magic!
Final Fantasy XIII is NOT an RPG, it’s basically an action game. First off, I hate Motomu Toriyama (the director of this and of FFX-2, the girly j-pop one) and I knew FF was going downhill after everyone from Squaresoft left SquareEnix, but I still had some hope until I heard he was behind this project.
But yea, it’s not an RPG. There aren’t towns, you just shop from menus at the save points. It’s entirely linear until the very, very end of the game. Basically, the game is all about the battle system, there’s no exploration or anything. My buddy just beat it the other day and I’ve been talking to him about it. He liked it a lot, but I’m definitely going to pass on this iteration
First encouraging thing I’ve heard about the game. Can you skip the cutscenes? FFX would have been much more replayable if you could have.
Yep, you can skip the cutscenes but hitting start, then select. Summon animations are skippable too, which is nice (they’re cool to see the first time, but after that…). This, combined with the ability to restart from just before a battle rather than the last save point, and the lack of random encounters, means you spend much less wasted time (or at least time spent doing stuff you don’t want to do at the moment) in this game than in previous FFs.
I wasn’t aware of this and I find it disappointing. I mean, X-2 wasn’t bad for a spinoff, but I would have been pretty unhappy if it had been its own installment. That definitely would make me hesitate.
That being said, tally me up as one who loved the storylines from 7 and 10, but much MUCH preferred 12’s battle system. The Pharos dungeon area was really, truly intense, something I wasn’t expecting from the few rpgs I’ve played and certainly not from Final Fantasy.
I look forward to hearing more about this one.
I don’t know if I agree with the characterization of FFXIII as an action game. It requires you to be quick with the controller to some extent during the difficult battles, through the use of the “optima” system (this is the role-changing system referred to earlier in the thread). For example, if you’re fighting a boss and all your characters are at >80% health, you might use a setup of Attacker + Blaster + Blaster, or maybe Attacker + Blaster + Healer. But if the boss suddenly unleashes a beatdown and your health gets in the red zone, you’d better switch your optima to something like Healer + Defender + Healer, or maybe Healer + Blaster + Healer to keep the chain gauge up (but that’s a detail for a more in-depth discussion of the battle system…). You don’t have to do it instantaneously, but if you hesitate for, say, 10 seconds, you’re probably dead.
But anyway even though it lacks the towns and shops of previous FF games, I think it still has most of the hallmarks of an RPG. Certainly its battle system is less action-oriented than, say, the Star Ocean or Tales games.
Which Hallmarks would those be? The style of storyline and the fact that your characters level up? It certainly doesn’t contain a world, by all reports.
Not following the whole “spend less time doing stuff you don’t want to do” since it sounds like the whole game is either a cutscene or a battle.
This is basically what my friend was saying. It’s like moving down a corridor with lots of fights and cinematics
And ok, it might not be an action game per se, but it’s definitely missing most of the hallmarks that make an RPG, imo