Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22
I've had similar debates with people about this before. No you don't have to equip characters with all the same abilities, but the fact that all abilities can be equipped to all characters in my experience has typically led to a cast of characters with no real advantage over one another. There's little differentiation in terms of unique abilities, and therefore every character feels the same. FFVII and VIII were the worst offenders in my opinion (VIII in particular though). Even though you can just equip different abilities to the characters though, I've found games like FFVI, VII, and VIII tended to just plain be balanced more towards favoring one certain setup for every character that would be the best in all situations, whereas with say FFV, I always had the desire to experiment, and there were numerous class and party setups that were easily just as effective as one another in different situations.

That's not to say that I hate all the battle systems in the other FF's, when in fact I like all the battle systems (just some more than others). And I'm not saying you're wrong that the player can engineer there own classes in some of these games. I just found that the class based systems, especially in FFV, were more condusive to the use of planning and strategy than the other systems since you had to work within set limits. At least that's how I see it anyway.

No, your absolutley right. It's very easy to equip every character the same in FFVI VII and FFVIII. But you having identified this, can now play it and give a character a job class they should stick to.

Personally, i see a game like FFIV and cannot play it because there is no character customisation. The characters progress in one direction and you get what you are given.

FFV is by far the best. You can give all characters a job class with a second ability and have no character the same as another. There is a reasonable choice of jobs with limitation to the abilities you can equip. Thus you can change your party over and over throughout the game having a different party everytime. (Or if you want to stick with jobs and master them, then there is huge replay value as every game played can be played differently.)
I think it's the only job system without faults. And ffxii's version of this looks set to be the greatest job system of all time ever and ever