Hypothetical question

[Rez09]

Well . . . I feel kind of like an echo in the room now.

For what I would change, I like nothing about the current implementation of the esper system-- literally EVERYTHING the game does right mechanically is undermined by it. Character definition falls to the wayside when everyone is basically a Red Mage running Quick and Ultima, battle formulas are thrown totally out of whack when static character stats start wildly inflating, and the Espers themselves fall completely to the wayside when their uses as summons are basically forgotten. For a game moving away from the everyone-is-everything approach of FFV to something more defined like FF4, this simply does not work. To be clear, I think the general IDEA of the esper system is excellent, but it needs to be brought more in line with what the game is trying to do and represent more of a choice for players than it currently does, either by limiting the number of times they can teach a spell or allowing the espers themselves to be customized in some manner so that players need to pick what they can do instead of them doing everything.

Actually . . . it might be interesting to have it be a combination of the two, giving each esper a set number of depletion levels that can be spent to learn spells from it and powering it up as it depletes. For instance, say Ifrit comes with his normal spell list and a cap of 10 depletion levels, with each spell costing x levels to learn. Let's also say Ifrit grants a passive bonus of +x% to fire damage when equipped, where X is 2.5 times its depletion level. This would allow a player to decided if they want to burn through his depletion levels super quickly to turn Terra into a bomb ass fire mage with a Firebrand alongside his elemental bonus, or to save his charges for other members and power him up later. Hell, one could even include his current level up bonus as a purchasable bonus for depletion levels to power up characters like Cyan that don't need his spells to make the choices even more varied. A system like this would force players to make constant choices with their espers and reward them for making said choices regardless of what path they choose, and it would render the summons themselves more useful in battle since it could easily be the only access some characters would have to magic. It would also make those redundant spells on different espers more welcome, since it would grant the ability to take stats here knowing they exist over there later or vice versa.

As for what I wouldn't change . . . again with the echo, but the open ended nature of the World of Ruin. My favorite part of the game is prioritizing what order I do things in and when I pick people and gear up, and I'd absolutely hate to lose that.