PedroSteckecilo said:
Really? I though FF12's battle system would have been fine if anything but "Attack" had been a decent combat option, the big mistake was having Technics be WAY too useless and making the bosses un-scannable.
Magic is much more useful in FFXII than it is in any FF game since 4, mostly because you have regenerative MP and MP regain on kill for magic users, which means that your casters don't run out of the stuff halfway through the dungeon and have to piddle about with knives for the rest of the time. Also, the fact that buffs persist between fights made them much more useful because you don't have to use up one turn out of a three turn battle to cast the buggers. (High level spells had problems, their animations locked out all other casting, so you couldn't heal whilst you used them, which was either an odd design decision or a concession to the limits of the PS2 whilst not having the top level spells look too weedy)
Technics (bar Steal) were admittedly not very useful, but they were generally the kind of one-off things that you might only need to do occasionally anyway, so you just left them to manually activate when needed.
Overall though, FFXII, and also the game it most resembles, Knights of the Old Republic, did a very good job at mechanically controlled combat. (KotOR was possibly hampered by the D20 system and the inherent limits thereof, but as a system for representing mechanical combat on computers and consoles it was fine)
