Final Fantasy VII: Overrated?

[Karellen]

The point is that they have an impact on your status and the more magic and summons you load on a character, the weaker it gets. You also have a limited number of slots for materia per character, something that prevents you from overloading a character with all magic and summons.

As I said though, the stat effects aren’t significant enough to dissuade one from giving characters magic material as they see fit. Similarly, while the material slots prevent you from using everything they’re not much of a restriction either. ONLY being able to equip 4-16 materia isn’t much of a restriction. For the most part I found the amount of material slots was relatively proportional to the amount of material I had, leaving me with quite an easy task of weeding out the amount that was useless anyway.

Compare that with how things are on the two previous games, where you can have a character with all the white and black magic and even summons available at any time without suffering any penalties. Want to have Sabin with Ultima, Flare, Meteo, all Cures, Fires, Bolts, Ice, etc in VI? Just get him to learn it from the Espers and he can carry as much magic as you want him to without this detracting from his stats. Not mention that after he learns the spells from the Espers he does not needs to keep it but can pass it along and still retain as many spells as you want him to. Unlike in VII where you must keep the materia on the character despite the fact that you have mastered it.

I don’t know why you are comparing the system to FFVI when I already said I don’t consider FFVI to have a good system either.

In V things are quite similar, a Mimic can use all the white and black spells you have learned and the summons you have at any time. Or if you use the Suppin (normal) class, you can access all the abilities of your mastered classes at any time and even a couple of skills, again without significant penalties to your stats.

This is true but at the same time what you’re describing isn’t really all that flexable. A mimic with three types of magic will have to forgo the item command and any auto-abilities. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a really good combination of those three choices (depending on how many classes you’ve mastered. I only had about 5 mastered for each character by end game) but that’s far more limited then what the material system allows.

I would say that the materia system in VII puts on you more limitations than the system in VI and about the same if not more than the system in V. That the enemies are less challenging is besides the point and quite frankly, something that not everyone would agree with.

I have never met anyone who thinks FFVII is harder then FFV. Possibly FFVI, depending on who you ask.

Some are on the ground in several places, others require defeating bosses (i.e. Bahamut, Shiva) and other require doing side quests (i.e. Leviatan) or completing certain missions within specific parameters (i.e. Ultima, Phoenix). That is hardly different from the way you find Espers in VI and Jobs in V, the latter of which you get from crystals, something that you must obtain to advance the plot.

Getting jobs in FFV isn’t the exact equivalent of getting powerful material in FFVII. Most of them have to be leveled up significantly to get their best abilities and some that have cool abilities are pretty useless in and of themselves (hunter, for example). Materia usually gets progressively more powerful as it levels up as well but unlike FFV where you can only level one job at a time any materia you have equipped levels up at the same rate which makes any sort of planning irrelevant.