This was the worst video game experience of my life.
The battles come down to just using the strongest deathblow every time. And after the 50th or so battle, the 15-30 second animation for the attacks really start to drag.
For the one enemy that you have to heal to damage, due to the cost of defeating it, it's much simpler to just run from the battle.
As for the gear battles, outside of boss battles, I don't think I ever used a combo because just about all battles ended in one round.
Something that irked me is the back of the case says battles are menu-less. I guess if the menu options aren't in a line, then it must not be a menu, huh.
Its decision to be a pathetically easy fighting game for a brief bit of time, then a horrible platformer for a brief bit of time.
No option to skip or speed up text. This is especially annoying since the vast majority of NPCs have the same dialogue throughout the entire game. Having to slowly read the same 3 or 4 pages of dialogue is horrendous
The shop menu is horribly designed: You can't change between shopping for your character and your gear without backing completely out of the store menu. Coupled with the extremely show text, the on-ship store where the elder gentleman (kinda like an Alfred to Batman) is the shopkeeper and begins every shopping session with 2 or 3 pages of dialogue becomes extremely tedious.
The limitations on the camera angles in places is idiotic.
Some of the dungeon designs where you are going down a straight hallway and there are a series of extremely short screens with absolutely nothing to do in them had me scratching my head.
I probably spent about 5 hours doing nothing but watching my characters riding elevators and escalators. I'm guessing these were loading sequences.
I think there are 3 or 4 save points WITHIN dialogue because they are so long.
For one of the very late bosses (the one with 2 consecutive bosses), there is about 15 min (I timed it on my second attempt) of (obviously) unskippable dialogue leading up to the battle.
The extended briefing on how exactly to attack the tower only to be shown a FMV of the attack. Really? That would be like playing a Star Wars game, and they have a long briefing on how to attack the Death Star, only to show you the scene from the movie.
I spent most of the time with the controller sitting next to me and just slowly hitting the X-button to advance the dialogue (think of the scene from The Simpsons where Homer works from home and sets up a bobbing bird which would keep pressing the "Yes" option and you have an idea of what I was doing for the majority of this game).
