Stats vs. Gear

[Wolf Kanno]

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?