Final Fantasy XIII-2: how the battle system has changed

This new video from Square Enix shows Serah and Noel battling familiar creatures from the FFXIII bestiary.

To be completely honest, it doesn't do a very good job of explaining itself, so we'll try to shine our own humble light on points of interest.

The Paradigm Shift will be familiar to players of FFXIII - it lets you rapidly assign and re-assign roles to your characters, leaving them with broad behaviours and sets of abilities that you can manually select, or just plough through by tapping A for semi-intelligent default behaviours. Commandos deal damage. Ravagers build chains. Synergists buff your team, and Saboteurs debuff the enemy. So you can flip from having a Sentinel and Medic combo to lick your wounds, before switching to a Commando-Ravager damage whammy. So far, so unchanged.

What is new to FFXIII-2, is the speed at which they change - no more flipping to a defensive stance, and then waiting for your gauge to fill before you get those vital healing spells. In other words, you don't have to plan ahead for the game to catch up with your amazing brain.

Then there's the Tune system, which lets you tweak the paradigms. The official line so far is that these let you "study your enemies closely - and choose to have your allies take out single or multiple targets at a time". Presumably this'll shift into focus closer to release.

And while the original game had each role with a level cap of five, we can see that they go a fair whack higher, here. Sadly, no more details on the system by which you recruit vanquished enemies to fight alongside you. At least, not here.

Then, of course, there's Cinematic Action. Because if there's anything Final Fantasy XIII was missing, it was Quick Time Events. We're really excited for FFXIII-2 here, but this video feels like a bone that's had its thrill-marrow mechanically extracted.

Never mind - have loads of new screenshots!