Final Fantasy: Full Weapons and Armor set or Weapon/Accessory combination?

[Mirage]

The problem with that is then it transitions to prerendered video. It looks odd if you enter a town in full hardcore giant armor and pauldrons with 2 feet long spikes, and then get a CS with like a leather vest. and shorts and that's it.

That's true but graphics are getting good enough that prerendered video can be replaced by respectable in game cutscenes. In fact, they decided to do all or mostly in game cutscenes in XIII-2 and it saved a lot of disk space. I suppose this same decision could be made for a Final Fantasy that shows armor, weapons, and accessories on a character.

Although the armor would have to be pretty dang awesome looking...

Sometimes, prerendered videos are used not just because the developers want to make prettier visuals, but to hide loading times. For example in FF13, there are many instances of prerendered videos that looked *exactly* like the ingame realtime rendering, but while this video was playing, the game was secretly loading the graphics for the next part of the game. If anything, i would think they'd need to do it the FF7/8 way, where there was a prerendered background movie, with the actual 3D character models put on top of that. I'm not sure how accurate they could make that look. I know FF7 and FF8 had a few instances where the characters were moving slightly out of sync with the moving background, but the tech might be good enough to make that a non-issue now.