So it's been out for a few days now, I'm personally really enjoying it, more than I am Dead Rising infact ; I bought both together you see.

I'm currently in London outside, got myself the Crazy Pizza Golem and some other new Golem (the one after that).

I would say that the battles are a bit frequent for my liking and they sometimes take a lot of time to finish as there are often too many enemies to defeat on the battle field. But it's not too annoying. Apart from that I'm loving it, definately knocks the socks off of Oblivion.

How far is everyone else? Please no spoilers I hope I didn't give anything away...

yeah im really enjoying it too. im at more or less the same place as you but im finding it incredibly difficult to keep some of my characters VP at a level where they are of any use, its pretty frustrating. To the extent that even the random battles are knocking me on my arse

And the quick menu sounds are really starting to bug me.

but yeah really gd game

I read this thinking 'huh? Im not getting this'

But a couple of battles in Karin has 0 VP and starts with 1HP And then Raiga the same! I now start each battle round with 1 HP on both those characters and have to use a powder to keep them alive, but then they can't attack Oh dear, and to cap it all off, I must have been pretty close to a heal thing and then i got a disc read error

But GREAT game

If you cycle your party members they will slowly gain VP (cept if they are all gone)
when they get to about 1/3 of their total VP i cycle a new player in (golem)

top tip there cheers, and so obvious as well I'll give it a whirl as dead rising is pissing me off so much atm

I am about 15 hours in at this point and enjoying the game as well; being a huge fan of turn based RPGs. Battle frequency has so far only really annoyed me when lost on a map area for being just numb and getting myself all turned around.

Anyone else using the auto feature in battle when they get sick of thinking strategy?

Not used it yet mainly because I haven't got bored and the fact that a couple of my characters have very low VP so I need to heal them at the beginning of the battle. Will the auto battle heal characters?

I havent played it in a few days now, too busy with my college work. But now its the weekend I can play again!

the auto battle feature in the game is terrible. in fights where your specifically told not to attack, they will attack anyways, and also if you chose autobattle, it picks all your character moves for you. what i mean by that isn't the obvious, but say i move my first 2 characters, then do an autobattle expecting it to move the last 2, the game will reassign my first 2 to do what it wants them to.

over all the game is amazing though. i love vandal hearts/fft, and this is kind of like a traditional rpg with that type of battle system mixed into it. to avoid spoilers i'll just give a percentage... the game says i'm 44% of the way through.

I'm not using auto often, used it mostly in one area where I got lost and was back tracking to where I started. There are cases I have used quick start after moving only some characters because I am certain 2 moves rather than four will finish off the battle, doing that is similar to placing the unmoved characters into standby for that turn.

I know the battle you mean with the auto being utterly useless....but I did ignore the instructions and just attacked first time through out of curiosity.

did you make the 4th hit where you get the game over? i got that from my auto in that fight all in all though, its an excellent game, its great to see games like this on the 360. i wish there where more of them on the first xbox.