It wasn't until doing one of the harder combat challenges and played more on hard mode that I realized that party members don't have any smart AI to do much on their own without player constantly switching to them.

While mass effect and Dragon Age Origins didn't have the best AI the former had quick abilities of companions mapped to the controller while the latter had a tactics menu to input behavior for companions when certain parameters are met.

This game could go a long way with having that.

Having custom materia loadouts would also allow the player to heavily cut down on the time needed to switch out and pick individual materia in the menu.

The aerial combat is rather poorly designed in this game and becomes more of a problem in hard mode where combat is more serious and deadly. Since Cloud & Tifa have little air control they just leap in the air and stay there until an attack finishes which feels wrong against enemies that can easily strafe in the air or stun lock either character mid-air since neither can control their movement midair. This leads to that annoying thing where Tifa or Cloud automatically jump into the air to miss hitting an enemy that is "out of bounds" because of the invisible walls that only exist for those character's melee attacks.

Also, I can't help but feel that while it's great that knowing your enemy's weakness is important, you won't know an enemy's weakness until you've fought them and can't change equipment in battle. This leads me to game the system by entering combat & using access to learn weaknesses & then reloading save to easily put in the correct weapon + item + materia combo. It's not an easy win in hard mode but it's too efficient but rudimentary.

However, this is my favorite real-time with pause (or slowdown) combat in recent memory.