I know exactly what you mean about fights where you think you're doing awesome or at least the best you can and then the battle ends. The game then slaps you down a says it was mediocre and you stare back asking "What was I doing wrong and how am I supposed to do better?" Yeah, its a little puzzling, but I guess it just means that there are some tricks that we are missing. Perhaps with having completed the game and fully gaining a grasp of the system I might be able to replay the game and get better scores. I don't know if that is true or not, but it is pretty clear that there must be something we're missing.

Some of the fights just some unreasonable for the time that they say, but then again I guess if you know exactly what you have to do it should go pretty smoothly. I think most of the fights are not meant to last longer than like a minute or two and bosses no longer than five minutes. Which probably comes from people getting really annoyed at hour long bosses and monsters from other games. ^^;

And there is not actually a 9999 damage cap. The cap is 99,999. So you should not be stopping at 9999 as far as I know, unless the game as a really early level cap that invisibly disappears. But there is definitely a great sense of joy when you launch the enemy in the air and just unleash everything on it for massive damage. I got the most joy working out the timing so that I could just juggle the enemy in the air without letting it touch the ground.

And yeah, there are times when you jump or move and end up evading an attack. That is something that I actually do specifically with adamantoise, because they have an attack that only hits you when you're standing on the ground. So if you're airborne then you won't get hit. The Adamantoise are the most annoying monster in the game, apart from the Gigcactaur with his 10,000 needles. ><