Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Velhart]

I can say this much..the 1.xx battle system and fights did not feel scripted at ALL. Gear and skill meant quite a lot more then simple memorization in 1.23. Why they took what we had away for this..I'll never know.

1.xx was the same for at least since the new team came in. Gear was relevant not because of the content itself necessarily, but because you needed any small "oomph" you could get to push content underneath the 17 minute mark.

Also, skill in fights like Ifrit was more towards knowing dealing with the system than the content itself. Things such as animation lock, latency, and crashes were definitely more of an issue than actually dealing with the mechanics itself. Like the game wasn't built for that type of content, but they put it in anyways.

Not holding a candle to ARR, because I have my own complaints, but 1.xx was definitely not great to deal with.