FFXIII vs. Earthbound: Tension in Turn-Based RPGs

Wow, been a while. But you'll never predict when inspiration strikes.

I'm replaying Earthbound lately. Fantastic old RPG if you ever want to play it. Hard to find, but seeing as how Nintendo won't re-sell it, I don't feel so bad ROMing it.

However, something struck me as I was playing it earlier. My hatred of Final Fantasy XIII received new...Context.

First, a simple point:
The battle systems of both of these games are boring. Both of them. The battle system in and of itself isn't exciting, engaging, stunning, or even particularly fun. Both battle systems are monotonous, repetitive, and just plain dull when broken down into their mechanics.

So why do I like Earthbound and hate FFXIII?

Earthbound has tension. The way your health rolls down rather than instantly moving gives you chances to respond in bad situations. Battle to battle you worry about your health and PP and making it to the next area. When characters die, reviving them is a chore. If the party wipes, you keep your EXP but lose all your PP and half of your money (and only Ness is revived). Very quickly, tension between each battle builds up. Your desire to continue the story is pushed along by this tension of trying to make it through each area. You want EXP, but you are afraid of death. This pushes me through Earthbound. It takes what is otherwise boring mechanics and creates a meta. I strategize in each battle. I avoid certain enemies and fight others. I am afraid of this enemy and then happy when I start to insta-win against weak enemies (a FANTASTIC feature). It succeeds in maintaining my interest, though I occasionally take breaks to keep myself sane.

FFXIII removes all the tension and makes fights feel like a boring chore, even though they tried to provide more mechanics and more interesting choices. Your health is maxed out after every battle, you see. So battle to battle, there's no tension. Each fight now feels like it's just DELAYING your progress through the linear world rather than providing a tense and difficult challenge of survival. A struggle is now changed to a slog. Additionally, you are graded on your performance in each fight. Higher grades means better loot. This teaches the player to optimize and pick one dominant strategy. This strategy will be used in most battles (Most are easy and don't require the player to think very hard), and so the player will find themselves doing the same thing to win battles as fast as possible over and over and over again until they reach the next cutscene. The battles don't feel tense, you're not super worried because the consequences are so low and there's no meta. The mechanics are still boring, because the whole reason to have something like an ATB (Active Time Battle) system instead of a Turn-Based one is so that there's tension where you have to act and think quickly. But you just develop a dominant strategy and only control one character, so it's really easy and non-complex. The interest and strategy of each individual battle goes down, because you're not trying to conserve resources and live while also leveling up. You expend lots of resources because the next battle everything is back to max.

Maybe I'm far off the mark, but it just feels...Bad. Boring. The battles have lost what made them purposeful in older RPGs, and Square-Enix seems to have forgotten why you have random encounters to begin with. If they don't make me feel tense and provide some level of difficulty more than 5% of the tmie...Then why have them?