Turns out my problem was that I was circle-strafing in an effort to get more backstabs in. When you start moving, that disengages your current action (it goes from "Attacking" to "Moving" or whatever). So I just need to lay off the joystick if I prefer not to button-mash. :P

Re Achievements and s (since Rosewood also chimed in on it): That makes sense. For 360 games, that's usually the most empirical measure you've got for a beyond- threshold. It just struck me as odd from a game-design standpoint--if I were putting them together, I'd probably do it such that when you get that last achievement, you also know you've done/found everything there is in the game. (And not the JRPG way either, if you're referring to craziness like the Star Ocean "win at level 1" sorts of achievements.) Or maybe the Mass Effect way, where you have achievements that represent doing almost everything, to eliminate the 99/100 widgets frustration.

Hmm. It seemed to me that when I hit the "attack" button, "Attacking" showed up by the character portrait, they went through one round of attacks, and then the "Attacking" thing faded out and they went back to the ready animation. Attack speed went up considerably when I kept hitting the button (with the accompanying and quickly annoying order-acknowledgement VA) after each attack. But maybe I was imagining things. Next time I'll hit the button once and wait longer to see if she swings again... and if she just stands there and gets hit, I'll go hunting in the menus :