Stats vs. Gear

As I reflect back on some of the games I really love within the genre, and especially with Final Fantasy, I find myself sometimes wondering which is more important for strong gameplay, stats or gear? With few exceptions and some subversions here and there, I often find that I genuinely prefer when your gear is more important than your stats, largely because it prevents the usual RPG shenanigans of "victory by over-leveling" there are exceptions of course but I usually find that games where you control your stat growth and in which they matter more than your equipment tend to be poorer experiences for me.

There are of course exceptions to this rule like MegaTen and the Souls series but the devil is in the details on both of those franchises and I sometimes feel they do fall more into one of these dichotomies better than you would think.;)

To give an overall example of what I mean, and to use my two favorite straw FF titles to contrast:

In FFX, your gear isn't terribly important. Most weapons don't have any real attack/defense value and the character's stats do most of the heavy lifting. There are some game breaking skills you can acquire by end game, but even then, their purpose is to basically remove the barriers needed to make the stats not completely break the game.

Contrast this with FFXII, where physical built Vaan, equipped with the lowly starting dagger is having a difficult time out-damaging mage built Penelo who is using a second tier staff weapon. Vaan only beats her when the Dagger's higher combo rate kicks in and adds multi hits to overtake her basic strike. Even as they level together, the gap in their damage doesn't really shorten. Vaan only beats her when he gets access to a better weapon like a Mage Masher.

What about you?

Pretty much agreed on gear mattering more. I feel it's more strategic in the long run. In a stats-heavy game, utlimately you need to just grind to progress, which is easier yet more boring. When gear matters more, sometimes all you really need to do to win a grueling battle is just rethink and reconfigure what everyone is wearing. If gear carries a lot of weight, that really gives you a lot of room to figure things out.

I also really like it when games have gear change your character's looks!

In most cases, I gotta go with gear. That being said, in games where you have the freedom to choose, I usually customize a character's gear based on their stats. Also, it's already been touched upon, but monster collection games like SMT and Pokemon also make tracking stats fun

In Dark Souls gear seems to be almost everything. The upgrade system is pretty lame but the scavenging weapons part is awesome. I remember finding the halberd on my first playthrough after hours of carefully making my way through the Burg and Parish. I thought it was the most epic thing.

The need the power level to beat certain bosses in a stat-oriented game does kind of leave a bad taste in the mouth. But I also feel that when I find out I could have beaten a boss 20 levels earlier if only I'd obtained some super god-tier weapon that kind of cheapens the experiences. I think it requires a deft hand to balance it in either regard. You don't really want your gear doing all the work, but I also don't want a grind-heavy game

But looking at my favorite games recently I probably lean towards gear. Levels don't matter quite as much in games like Nier: Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, or Bloodborne. And in all those games the gear won't completely carry you without some skill in dodging and exploitation of weaknesses and such

Gear is more fun because you can find it from exploring or stealing or completing a quest. When the gear is meaningful it makes finding it all the more fun. Just making everything experience based where you then increase stats on level ups loses some of the variety.

My ideal situation is choosing between heavy grinding or fighting a few harder enemies for quicker results (but which require a stronger gear set to survive let alone beat), good gear should be earned but not impossible to come by, and there should definitely be a cap to how much progress you can make in stats by grinding in an earlier section.

Almost every game has taken to including a species list: fliers, tanks, magickers, poisoners, flitterers, elementals, non-elementals, instant killers, undead, etc

Gear is definitely the only aspect of the game which should determine a character's viability against any particular species. Grinding on a species should raise a character's individual viability to an extent until moving on to a new location with a new variant on the species.

Maybe I'm overthinking it.