There isn’t a whole lot to add, except I played for 7 more hours… consecutively… and I didn’t really want to put it down but clearly it was time.

I spent a good 30-40 minutes trying to figure out how to beat Odin, he was totally wrecking me… had to resort to some cheap (but totally within the rules) tactics to get through it.

The story is interesting enough at this point, the combat is challenging enough for me to go ahead and say this is a good game… I’m really missing not being able to control my teammates though, especially the saboteurs and the synergists… sometimes I’d rather have protection on everyone instead of casting 3 spells on each guy, I’m looking at you frocobo…

I haven’t ~really~ got into upgrading the weapons, I feel like I should do some research first but I didn’t want to step away from the game to do it… I know, its kinda sad but meh!

Tip:
Paradigm shift a lot, in 2 member parties it makes a lot of sense to use a Dual Casting (ravager/ravager) paradigm, and immediate shift to Slash and Burn (commando/ravager) paradigm, this will decrease the rate the chain meter decreases, and when the ATB meter is full again, go back to Dual Casting… in a lot of cases this will stagger the baddie… switch back to Slash and Burn so that the stagger lasts longer, doing this should keep the 5 star ratings coming in through the split sections where you only have 2 members. I only figured this out towards the end of my session last night so I didn’t get a ton of use out of it unfortunately for me, hope it serves you better.