If you pick Magus, you are a loser

[RedPouch]

Some of your points are valid, but my preferences for most any fight have always directed me to use other characters. Ironically, I actually end up using Magus more often than you guys might think, but only because I get irritated with the lack of males in the cast. And I don't really count Frog/Glenn, either. I really wish there was a way to make him human in-game. Honestly, it would've been nice if Magus had undone his magic if he joins your party. Would've been an interesting perk, but then I'm not sure how human Glenn would still use Slurp Cut and Frog Squash.

As for being frugal, I used to be like that when I first played RPG's but now I've noticed that I can spam consumables a lot and I still end up with a lot of excess. For whatever reason, they always seem to heap up in RPG games.

I only brought it up cause it actually sound like what your friend was saying about Magus. Instead of his usual "Die you idiot" he actually says something a bit more sympathetic. As a 16-bit RPG, I find it hard to believe that Magus had some long-ass speech that got snipped down to three sentences, especially since the DS version doesn't have the same dialogue restrictions that the old cartridges did. While I am certain your friend is not wrong about Magus giving a personal speech to Zeal, I have a feeling its not far from the DS version.

No, not a long speech, but he said things that were slightly different. I can't remember exactly because we had this discussion a long time ago, but she said that Magus said something along the lines of Zeal being "the mom from hell" or something, and she gets a bit defensive about it.

Kefka's dialogue in the GBA version changes his personalty but its mostly because there is enough space to translate more of his unique speech patterns as opposed to actually giving him more dialogue. In reality, the SNES version still gets across what he was meaning, the GBA just does it with a few more words that happen to draw out more of his personality that wasn't completely lost in translation.

Well I can't speak too much for Kefka because I don't know what he's like in the Japanese version, but I was told by some members from EoFF that he's actually a bit more effeminate in the Japanese version. Not in a girly-queer way, but more like a Jack Sparrow kinda way, I think is what someone said.

My point is, even if they somehow made Magus' dialogue verbatim to the Japanese, I don't think you would see a satisfactory change in his personality and this has been my point about if they gave him extra dialogue. Frankly, its not like the other characters have more character depth than Magus, the game is still limited by its technology and thus all the other characters still neatly fall into stereotypes and cliches with little deviation.

I'm not really looking for a complete change in his personality. Like I said, it would've been nice if he had a little bit more depth added [and yes, you can add depth to someone without contradicting their personality slate, so it's ridiculous to assume that depth would automatically make him "sissy"]. And I have to say that the other characters do get noticeably more depth, namely Frog, Marle, and Lucca, so I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that. Not all cliches and stereotypes bother me in truth, but ones that get overly used way too often do, and it's even worse when overly used ones get lots of fanboy hype that just drives me nuts.