Hot video games take: while Final Fantasy X's conditional time battle system may have, conceptually, been a reduced version of earlier games' active time battle, they reduced it by removing all of the boring waiting parts and the stress of not making your inputs fast enough when the timers do eventually elapse, so all they removed was the bad parts. CTB is strictly better than ATB as a result.
The bouncing between "gotta wait for my turn" and then the "oh shit gotta enter my inputs now" was honestly the absolute worst. Though you could turn off the latter part, the former part was dreadful enough as-is.
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Also I've felt this way about CTB vs ATB ever since I first played FFX well over a decade ago but it still bears repeating.
