What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Man_Over_Game]

Pretty much, yeah. There are a few fights where I think the intended/best strategy would be to switch your controlled character frequently in order to make the enemy spend most of their time running across the battlefield when you make them change targeting, especially in the 2-person party sequences where you often have Cloud + a ranged character that will be standing off some ways away. And the character you're controlling earns ATB bar a lot faster (possibly because you as the player are probably just spamming their attack button while the AI tends to take breaks between attacks, but the active player may just actually get more ATB), so if you want one of your non-controlled party members to handle healing duties or support spells or something you will sometimes have to switch to them to make sure they're actually getting enough bar to do so.

Eh, I kinda liked how FFXV did it. Each character had their own playstyle, their own fights that they excel at.

Gladio was excellent against big, predictable bosses to block and counter against. He used two energy bars where one regenerated constantly to block things, and the other depleted constantly that grew from blocking damage and increased how much damage he dealt (I think that's how it worked).
Ignus massacred swarms of enemies, especially if they had an elemental weakness (since he was a master at all of them). He charged up energy by dealing elemental damage to enemies and then released it into one big explosion.
Prompto could kite enemies around terrain and tear them to shreds if they were too slow to do anything about it. He had a reload system using his 4 guns that each had their own reload timer to require regular swapping between your weapons.
And Noctis...was good if the enemy was weak to swords.

They all had a very valuable niche and very tight controls that felt like you were able to play almost completely different games. Although I've found that, between Ignus and Prompto, there really isn't much that can't be solved by spamming favorable elemental damage or kiting behind corners to shoot a rocket launcher at dinosaurs. I only ever used Gladio if I was caught out by giant demons at night who'd otherwise kill my other characters in seconds.

Not sure why they made Noctis so friggin' weak compared to his friends, but whatever. All of his "epic" weapons have huge penalties that rarely make them worthwhile, and he take so much damage and deals so little in return. Simply just trying to dodge everything quickly drains your energy into uselessness.

From what I've seen of the FFVII rework, the combat honestly looks like a worse/clunkier version of FFXV, which just seems really odd to me.