See, I also would tend to say that FFIX really did it right. If I had one issue with FFIX (in terms of my party), it was that Vivi was a character I needed to have in my party as much as possible. Vivi was your reliable, heavy hitting offense. Some could argue that Steiner was instead... But I seem to recall the game encouraged you to have Steiner and Vivi in the same party-something about magic sword skills.

What pleases me about the License Board is particularly, I didn't turn the game on and it was so easy to power my characters up that it was over before it began. That was my biggest problem with FFVIII. By the end of the first disc, my party was unstoppable. And what's interesting, VeloZer0, is that you have the same problem with FFVII that you do with FFXII, but you'll forgive FFVII for it. I found the materia system pretty broken as well, but it took longer to get to a point where having too much materia broke everything about the game because you didn't have that much freedom with it. It wasn't until the end where you had 12 materia slots on every character that things really started to break down.

I'm now 45 hours into FFXII and I have most of the augments I want for each of my characters. Depending on the character, the lower license boards are fairly neglected so far. What I like about the freedom of the License Board is that it doesn't punish me by forcing me to use classes of characters that *I* can't use becasue I'm not a universalist when it comes to job roles. For example, I always have trouble fitting the Summoner types into how I play Final Fantasy. I generally have problems with the dedicated melee characters, and I'm usually wondering why they punish my mages with crappy gear. FFXII hasn't done that to me, and I'm grateful for it. Course I am getting pigeon-holed into using more status magic than I'm used to, but that's ok. I'm enjoying the added strategy to those magics now that they make appreciable differences.