Quote Originally Posted by Man_Over_Game View Post
Keep in mind, I have exactly zero experience with this game, but it almost sounds like you're supposed to swap to Barret when you're getting swarmed so that his ranged attacks and tanking abilities pull enemies to him and waste a bunch of time to buy your main character some breathing room.
There's two problems with that. The first being, as I mentioned, he's kind of absent for a decent chunk of the game - think I'm about to reunite with him, but he's been gone for quite a while now. Second, his one real tanking ability thus far (besides generally being much more durable than the others) just has him take some of the damage for other characters when they get hit, it doesn't actually draw enemy attention or the like. Granted, switching direct control to him would draw enemy attention to him since the AI is designed to mostly focus on the player controlled character, but their attention would just go right back to the others shortly after I switched back. And, as I mentioned, he's kind of the least fun character to play, so I don't really want to spend much time actually playing him.

Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
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.
You could play that way, sure, but I think that illustrates precisely the problem I was criticizing with the way things are set up currently - that sounds less like a fun, intentionally-designed way to play an action RPG than it does a method of abusing the way this one's AI is designed.