By now I am sure a good chunk of you have played the Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII demo on your respectful consoles. I know I have and I was intrigued and bothered by what I got to play. But this isn't a "review" or hand on kind of thing so we will save all of that for later. Yea I know, boo…hiss… I'll deal with it.

What I will be touching on though, even though the following video does it better, is how the combat of the whole franchise has completely diverged and taken a more action approach instead of the good old fashioned turn based. To be honest I enjoyed the turn based combat of yore more than the action versions we have been getting lately. It reminds me quite a bit of how a D&D or Pathfinder game plays out with pen and paper. It also allows for me to better plan on how to use all of the abilities I have purchased and worked for over the course of my gameplay. With Final Fantasy the number of those abilities used to be pages long.

Now we look at Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII and it seems like we are removing the amount of abilities and actions that we can perform and moving to an action based to disguise this fact. Don't have time to see how few options you have when you are forced to run around, dodge, and time your blocking to survive a combat. It just feels like something has been taken away and an illusion replaced to keep the ability to keep these titles flowing out to market. It does mean that strategies need to be changed when Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII in general but it also feels no longer like an RPG style of game. More like playing an anime and not questing to save the universe.

I'll simmer down now so you can watch the video, if you haven't skipped on already. Do you think that Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII's evolution is a good thing or is it another loss to the RPG genre?