Wow, things just got complicated… I’ve finally unlocked the ability to select my own “Battle Team” and it occurred to me that I have A LOT of choices right now… Sure, you’ve got 6 players and 6 classes to choose from, but amongst those 6 classes there are clear specialization.. I will offer the example of the Saboteur, first, Saboteurs essentially debuff the baddies, Fang has the ability to “Slow”, and “Curse”, while Vanille has the ability to “Deprotect”, and “Deshell”, clearly one is better at tearing down enemies with strong defenses and the other is more utilitarian. This complicates further in that the other classes that are available to each of them are very different, Fang can go Sentinel and Commando, while Vanille has Synergist and Ravager… These are very very different class sets… Similarly the Synergists are specialized to; Hope is more about strengthening your defenses, and Sahz is about exploiting the enemies weaknesses… sure you can say there are 6 classes, but that doesn’t tell the whole story at all.

Based on this, it’s clear that the challenge is preparation for the fight ahead, the problem is you don’t know what the fight ahead is and what classes you’ll need… I see a lot of death in my future based solely on the fact that I don’t know what the enemies ahead are. This is going to get very interesting, and 5 star victories more rare I imagine.

The areas are starting to open up a bit more although there is still one very clear path for progress. The character development choices are starting to come into play more too as … I’m starting to feel like this was a training processes, not unlike what you might experience playing an MMO, you spend an exorbitant amount of time getting to the maximum level, only to find out the game is just starting as you start into end-game content, focuses change, and you spend just as much time there as you did getting to the max level. Very clever Square-Enix I like it…