if-then Fantasy

I was listening to the March 31st edition of the Giant Bombcast (yep, I'm still that behind) on my way in to work this morning, and they were discussing Bioware's upcoming RPG Dragon Age, and it's combat AI systems. This got me thinking about another game that had a really interesting way to fight, that I unfortunately never finished: Final Fantasy XII.
Like previous games in the franchise, you have a party of characters with you when you do battle, but in a departure from normal turn-based formula, you can assign AI scripts (called "gambits" in the game) to all or some of them, making them essentially AI controlled. This has been done in other games, setting basic behaviors (attack, defend, etc) for your other characters, but not with the depth that XII has.
You essentially set up a list of if-then statements and put them in descending order of importance for each character. You can do this for every character in your party, essentially making a battle play out with no input at all from you. This is a far cry from the old days where you input each party member's action, although that option is still available for purists.
So you might do the following for a healer-type character:

• if party member status is dead---cast resurrect
• if party member health less than 20%---use high potion
• if party member health less than 50%---cast heal
• attack (you can specify which enemy: closest, weakest, or the one the lead character is attacking)

This puts highest priority on resurrecting anyone killed during the battle, if no one is dead on the healer's turn, it moves on and looks for anyone with less than 20% health, and so on. It's really a deep system, and you can stack at least 10 commands (probably more, I can't remember) for each character. I usually played it with me in full control of Vaan, the main protagonist, and everyone else set up with scripts. You unlock more and more options for scripts as the game progresses as well, so that opens it up even more.
From what I've seen of Final Fantasy XIII so far, I can't tell if they're going to use the same system or not, but I really hope so. I keep telling myself I should go back and try to finish XII, but I don't think I'll have time. Too bad, it was fun while it lasted.