Summons

[YTDN]

What's your favourite way of assigning summons? By which I mean do you prefer only one character to be able to summon, a summoner job that you can give anyone, having one summon assigned to each character or being able to assign any summon to any character?

[ShinGundam]

No limits :D

[Saber]

I like to be able to change them around. I like VI VII VIII a lot cause you can do just that. XII however once you placed a summon on someone it would stick and there wasn't anything you could do about it. The Job system in 5 and tactics was kind of cool. Red Mage's Duel Cast + summoner job = kick ass. Tactics to me had weak summons but you could still use them all on 5 characters at a time. VIII you couldn't fit everyone with every summon but it was still ok cause there was no MP and that made the difference to me. /end ramble

[Vermachtnis]

I like the Job system. Especially since in V you could give the summon skill with someone not so squishy and there's other combos like Sora said.

[Clo]

FFVII and VIII by far had my favorite summons system. I loved being able to assign them to whoever.

[Bolivar]

I really didn't like the times that 1 character had one (or up to two in the case of FFXII) assigned to them, I thought it worked a lot better in say IV or IX when you have dedicated summoner classes who may have secondary abilities to cover the difference when you're not using them.

Usually in games like VII I'll have on character boosted up with Summon Materia, or give just a few only to characters who already have extremely high magic.

[Jessweeee♪]

In games where it's vital to your character's development, like FFVIII and FFVI, I need absolute freedom. If there's a class system, then it's not necessary. Other than that, I don't care. Summons were only ever useful in battle in FFX and FFXIII. They were way overpowered (though super fun) in FFX, and I think FFXIII got them just right. In FFXIII you'd save your summons until everyone was pretty much dead and you really needed a life saver. They didn't do much damage, but they bought you time to slowly and safely build up a chain.

[Wolf Kanno]

I've never cared for summons, cause in the past they were nothing more than over-bloated Black Mages and in recent years they are either generally not very effective for battle as your main party is usually way more competent for battle. I'm still waiting for them to get the FFX style of summoning to work out and personally I feel its going to need to involve replacing the summoner as opposed to leaving them.

Not to get off topic though, I usually don't care. To me the way it works in gameplay should be based on what is best for the story. Getting job classes from crystals? I want a job class summoner. Summoner is integral to story? Have the clkass restricted to characters. Summons are magic artifacts that he writer says allows the cast to gain super powers? Then lets use something like Magicite, Materia, Junctions, whatever else we can find. You get the picture.

[Crossblades]

I prefer one character to be able to Summon

[|-THE redmage-|]

I enjoyed the fact that with FF7, once you maxed out the level you got another one, so theoretically your entire group could all summon the same things. I personally liked the materia system.

[Depression Moon]

Well I have noticed that in games where any party member can have a summon I usually don't like the game as much (VI, VII) as the ones that limit summons to one or two characters (IV, IX).


I've never cared for summons, cause in the past they were nothing more than over-bloated Black Mages

Hold on there Wolf, I think you forgot that there are some summons that resemble white, green, and time magic. ex. Asura, Carbuncle, Cerberus, the one that makes the party vanish in VI.

[Roogle]

Not to get off topic though, I usually don't care. To me the way it works in gameplay should be based on what is best for the story. Getting job classes from crystals? I want a job class summoner. Summoner is integral to story? Have the clkass restricted to characters. Summons are magic artifacts that the writer says allows the cast to gain super powers? Then lets use something like Magicite, Materia, Junctions, whatever else we can find. You get the picture.

I agree. I think that the storyline should decide the role that summons play, but I think that summons should affect gameplay if the storyline says that they should go to everyone. Final Fantasy XII and its Esper system seemed largely superficial and useless to both gameplay and story.

[Wolf Kanno]

I've never cared for summons, cause in the past they were nothing more than over-bloated Black Mages

Hold on there Wolf, I think you forgot that there are some summons that resemble white, green, and time magic. ex. Asura, Carbuncle, Cerberus, the one that makes the party vanish in VI.

Most of those summons are situational at best. Asura is impractical thanks to Rosa being in the picture. The amount of fights where Carbuncle was a boon to the party can be counted on one hand, Cerberus is useful if you only give a damn about buffing your party in VIII but the games imbalance combat system makes it a luxury element at most since Doomtrain is much more effective. As for Fenrir, he's from VI and let's face it. You could remove the ability to summon in the game and it wouldn't change a damn thing. I know people who played the game for years before realizing you could actually summon in the game. Once again its the VIII issue where its a luxury element but really not needed for core gameplay, even the offensive summons are useless in VI.

Status based summons are pretty useless in the long run cause they are not as practical as just murdering everything in the first round with an offensive summon. In the Tactics series they have more clout but in the main series they are just there to create more options even if most of the time they are not the most efficient option. In the end its the offensive summons that are more important cause they get around annoying spells like reflect and often times are more impressive than their current Black magic counterpart that is available at the moment. Its better to use them to kill everything faster than to use them to heal and casts buffs cause that's what a white mage/time mage is for.

I think the only summon I would say is an exception is Golem in FFV cause he is useful in most situations and doesn't have a terrible drawback like Carbuncle. The other exception is in XIII where the summons are more useful as an auto party revive/X-potion option as opposed to being useful in battle...

[Depression Moon]

I've never cared for summons, cause in the past they were nothing more than over-bloated Black Mages

Hold on there Wolf, I think you forgot that there are some summons that resemble white, green, and time magic. ex. Asura, Carbuncle, Cerberus, the one that makes the party vanish in VI.

Most of those summons are situational at best. Asura is impractical thanks to Rosa being in the picture. The amount of fights where Carbuncle was a boon to the party can be counted on one hand, Cerberus is useful if you only give a damn about buffing your party in VIII but the games imbalance combat system makes it a luxury element at most since Doomtrain is much more effective. As for Fenrir, he's from VI and let's face it. You could remove the ability to summon in the game and it wouldn't change a damn thing. I know people who played the game for years before realizing you could actually summon in the game. Once again its the VIII issue where its a luxury element but really not needed for core gameplay, even the offensive summons are useless in VI.

Status based summons are pretty useless in the long run cause they are not as practical as just murdering everything in the first round with an offensive summon. In the Tactics series they have more clout but in the main series they are just there to create more options even if most of the time they are not the most efficient option. In the end its the offensive summons that are more important cause they get around annoying spells like reflect and often times are more impressive than their current Black magic counterpart that is available at the moment. Its better to use them to kill everything faster than to use them to heal and casts buffs cause that's what a white mage/time mage is for.

I think the only summon I would say is an exception is Golem in FFV cause he is useful in most situations and doesn't have a terrible drawback like Carbuncle. The other exception is in XIII where the summons are more useful as an auto party revive/X-potion option as opposed to being useful in battle...

I can agree with you about Carbuncle, but not Asura. Asura's spells could be cast on the whole party while Rosa's can only target a single ally at a time, though I can't remember if that is true for her cure spells. She can do pray which does heal the entire party, but it's based on luck and doesn't heal much. In a tough battle Asura can be a saver by healing the whole party at once greatly, or reviving several of the party members. She can also save time by casting Protect on the whole party rather than taking up several turns doing it individually. Phoenix is good for saving behinds too. In IX and VII I used it in place of Life to revive party members since it could revive more than one member and deal damage at the same time.

Summons should be a bit more useful in the series. Like you said in some games like VI overall they're pretty useless. I could cast regular magic that did more than they did. In IV Rydia's early summons like Shiva, Mist Dragon, Goblin, (Well this one sucks from the beginning) and Ifrit become obsolete once you learn the level three elemental spells. In XII they were so bad that it wasn't even funny. Back when we got the demo for XII I was expecting them to be something that would be useful and powerful, but when the actual game came out you found out that summons could get killed by average level mobs. In X they seemed to be the most useful to me. They could take great punishment if used right and were powerhouses. I think summons could be more useful in the series if the games were more difficult and the summons were actually powerful.

I like the idea of them being powered up versions of black/white/green/time magic spells, but like I said I think the game should have the use of them in mind unlike in XII in which they had to be afterthoughts.

[ljkkjlcm9]

I'm not much of a magic user in general, probably because of way back to FF1 being the first FF I played and magic was SO limited that mages were essentially a wasted character and only helped on bosses.

However, games that let anyone summon have either A) overpowered summors, or B) useless summons. All the summons in VI are completely unnecessary and as stated I know people that never knew summoning was even possible (same people probably don't know you can change your weapon during battle but anyways). In VII, you had some useless summons that were no stronger than your regular attacks, and then your absurd summon. By the end game, the only summon worth using is Knights, and that's cause it's absurdly overpowered. VIII was slightly better, and the summons were more important for the junctioning, not the actual summon. However it once again had your overpowered Eden, and your everything else is worse than a limit break or even a regular attack.

Essentially the only time a Summoner is useful is when it actually is a job class or assigned to someone. As a job class, you make it their strongest attack because you make them magic focused (though I'd prefer a mostly physical team anyways and my mage would focus on healing/buffs). Or, it's a summoner character, and that's really their only means of significant damage.

However, FFXIII does seem to have it work pretty well, where the summons don't break the game, they're limited to how often you can use them well enough, and they're truly best use is in dire situations, which is how someone would ACTUALLY use a summon. Now, if they combined that with a bit more flexibility(equipping like FFVIII or something, with stat bonuses depending what it is like Ifrit gives fire resistance), it could be the best summon system IMO.

THE JACKEL

[Saber]

I think I like it better when summons don't have HP. There is a big difference between just coming in the battle and doing your thing or coming into battle and hope you last. Its sad when these mystical creatures show up and just die in 1-2 turns.

[Loony BoB]

If I have to pick, then I'll go with freedom. However I can completely understand the restriction of that freedom should characters have fixed classes in the game or alternatively if jobs are affected by storyline.

I generally prefer the games where there are no fixed jobs as I would like to be able to have my favourite characters in my battle team and adjust them to fit. However, one way around this would be to have fixed jobs, but at the same time have them not be able to change once they are assigned a job. This would dramatically increase replayability, too - although I imagine balancing would be insanely difficult for Square Enix if they ever opted to do this.

[Omni-Odin]

No limit dog

[Wolf Kanno]

Forgot about this thread...




I can agree with you about Carbuncle, but not Asura. Asura's spells could be cast on the whole party while Rosa's can only target a single ally at a time, though I can't remember if that is true for her cure spells. She can do pray which does heal the entire party, but it's based on luck and doesn't heal much. In a tough battle Asura can be a saver by healing the whole party at once greatly, or reviving several of the party members. She can also save time by casting Protect on the whole party rather than taking up several turns doing it individually.


Rosa can heal the whole party and lots of her spells actually doaffect the whole party oddly enough. Also, Asura is random, its great when she does heal you or cast protect but its not so useful when you need her to do something specific. Not to mention when she casts protect on your whole party and then keeps doing it when you need her to heal or revive or when she tries to revive when everyone is alive and well. She's not a stable summon so she's very impractical compared to Rosa who can heal the whole party at once and careful strategy will prevent you from having to deal with reviving more than one character at a time. She is just not practical.


Phoenix is good for saving behinds too. In IX and VII I used it in place of Life to revive party members since it could revive more than one member and deal damage at the same time.

Except the damage isn't so great and once again its a bit wasteful to use something that costs 3x the usual mp cost of normal spells. Not to mention towards the end of the game, you tend to run into more things immune or healed by fire. Also, there is no real point in VII since you can let anyone use Revive materia or the infinitely more useful Blue Skill materia with Angel Snack (though I will give you that's impractical on the basis the spell becomes available at the end of the game. As for Eiko, I rarely found myself in a bind where two men were down and called for Phoenix's useful ability to revive multiple targets. Its usually one and its not like Eiko is not a useful Damage dealer til she gets holy since its her most powerful move. Her offensive summon are mostly lacking unless you are careful to exploit elemental weaknesses but seriously, the rest of the party are far more practical. She's better off just sticking to being a whit mage by end game cause her summons are mostly obsolete due to the games skill system.


In XII they were so bad that it wasn't even funny. Back when we got the demo for XII I was expecting them to be something that would be useful and powerful, but when the actual game came out you found out that summons could get killed by average level mobs.

I found them more fun to play cause they were glass cannons and some like Chaos, Ultima, and Zodiark are not as easily killed as people think they are. Really most of the tier 2 and 3 summons are fairly competent but I feel most people gave up thanks to Belias and Mateus sucking or just prefer the gambling with Quickenings. I will agree they are impractical in XII which is their biggest fault but really I liked actually teaming up with summons and having a tag team match, I just wish the means of summoning wasn't counter productive (using MP).


In X they seemed to be the most useful to me. They could take great punishment if used right and were powerhouses. I think summons could be more useful in the series if the games were more difficult and the summons were actually powerful.

I felt they were too powerful in X and could use them to wipe out most of the games bosses. Even ones that have anti-summon skills can be mowed down if you have all of them charged up for their Overdrives. They seriously suck the challenge out of a game that doesn't have much to begin with.

*****************************************************

The way I would love to see summons used (and this would work better in a turn base combat scenario, not a more action based system like XI-XIV; would be to have them replace the summoner, yes the summoner not the party and leave the summoner especially if this is going to cost mp or some other arbitrary point system. I feel they should grant buffs to the party just by being there and they should change how the battle is fought.

An example of what I have in mind is... say the party summons Alexander, we get the lengthy summon animation and now the screen scals back to see the monstrous death machine towering above the enemies with the two remaining party members standing on the summons shoulders. Th party now gains a defense bonus as well as a dodge to physical bonus. Summoning Alexander also imbues their weapons with holy and they have resistance or absorb holy damage as long as Alexander is on the field. For the sake of balance, since Alexander is a bit defensive heavy, he reduces the parties attack power by 20 or so percent which is a small sacrifice for great defense. For the fans who need a bit of movie style flair to battles, the party literally slides down Alexanders arms to attack the enemies.

Alexander will fight in the summoners place, since he's powerful, he's slower than the rest of the party so his powerful holy attacks don't come as often and either give them limit breaks as their full summon attacks or make them automatically use them after some odd number of turns and then cancel the summon and bring back the summoner. The party will now have Holy cast on their weapons temporary and all have protect cast on them as well. Making them an excellent means of buffing and combat as well as just finally making them change the course of the battle for you. Another element I would add is the ability to have multiple summons on the field. For the sake of balance, the summons will be broken into tiers where its possible to have the whole party be replaced with summons like Ifrit, Ramuh and Shiva whereas summons like Titan and Carbuncle are tier two and can only share the field with one other tier one summon. Tier 3, with the likes of Alexander and Bahamut will only be able to have them alone be played on the fields but for the other summons to be on the field I thought it would be fun for them to also have dual or triple attacks as long as the other summons are on the field. So instead of Ifrit and Shiva doing Diamond Dust and Hell Fire, they do a combo limit break together or a triple one if Ramuh is on the field.

Summons can level up, but as they do, they grant more bonuses to the party. Ifrit starts off by giving the party a 20% resistance to fire based attacks while he's on the fieild, as he powers up, the amount increases until it reaches the point where you absorb it, also later on he will have fire cast on your weapons and even raise your parties strength. Then what abilites stay behind will depend on the summons level as well. Imagine entire boss battles in the story that would require your to have to summon Ifrit, Shiva, and Ramuh in the beginning of battle just so you can have immunity to the three basic elements for the fight. Cause obviously the game is going to have to be really difficult to balance out how super special awesome the summons are. ;)

This was the idea I was toying with at least...

[Roto13]

I almost never use summons in the older games since they're basically black magic with higher MP costs. As far as I'm concerned, Rydia is a black mage. :P