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

[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