Which party development system?

Burning Eclipse

I've always given a lot of though to this, but Lost Odyssey has recently thrown it into stark contrast...

How do you like your party development in a Final Fantasy game. Personally my favourite was IX, and because of that and a few characters I fell in love with, that is my favourite Final Fantasy and if you ask me on the right day, my favourite game, full stop... I digress.

The point of this post is to illustrate the difference in party development. In IX, Vivi was your only option if you wanted to cast Black Magic, Garnet was your Summoner/White Mage, Eiko was your White Mage/Summoner and so on.

In many of the Final Fantasy games, X being a notable example, your party can become entirely homogenous. By the end of my slog through FFX, Yuna was my strongest Black Mage and hit for 99,999 most of the time. Even if you push your characters to the hilt in IX or Lost Odyssey, some are simply incapable of being anything other than what they were to start out with. I've seen parties in XII where everyone excelled at physical combat and White Magic! Again, everyone the same, you're never forced to use your party creatively...

I also liked the job system that V did such a great job with, each character fills a specific role...

There are certainly postitives for both sides of the argument? Freedom to develop characters how you want is one, but, at the same time I think is detracts from individuality.

What are your thoughts on this? Any ideas I haven't touched on?

ec18

I always liked the simplicity of VII....i know people think it was too easy and made the characters blend together....but I thought it let you concentrate more on the story

Mark Hamill

Burning Eclipse wrote: »

There are certainly postitives for both sides of the argument? Freedom to develop characters how you want is one, but, at the same time I think is detracts from individuality.

Personnally I think that the individuality of your characters should come from their dialogue and story not the battle system. Playing a system like IXs or VIs is coming along to a game of VII where someone has set up your materia for you, but you aren't allowed change it back. It can work if done well (for the most part, VIs characters are setup pretty well), but most times you'll find that one or two characters in these situations are crap and no-one in their right mind would touch them because you cant change how they work.

Burning Eclipse

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Personnally I think that the individuality of your characters should come from their dialogue and story not the battle system.

Obviously the dialogue and story should be the backdrop for your characters and their individuality. It just jars a little in X where frail little Yuna can beat a guy down as well as Auron? As I stated previously, it takes from characters individuality.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Playing a system like IXs or VIs is coming along to a game of VII where someone has set up your materia for you, but you aren't allowed change it back.

I think that is a massive exaggeration. Sure Vivi will never be a bruiser, and Zidane will always be your thief who does decent damage, but there are still plenty of options for character customization within predefined job classes.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

It can work if done well (for the most part, VIs characters are setup pretty well), but most times you'll find that one or two characters in these situations are crap and no-one in their right mind would touch them because you cant change how they work.

Again, to draw on IX as an example, the characters are very well balanced. I tend to use the same 4 + 1 throughout the game, but Freya and Quina are both very useful, as is Amarant. You could easily make a party of any 4 characters without being weakened in any way!

Mark Hamill

Burning Eclipse wrote: »

Obviously the dialogue and story should be the backdrop for your characters and their individuality. It just jars a little in X where frail little Yuna can beat a guy down as well as Auron? As I stated previously, it takes from characters individuality.

Thats true, I suppose, but it only really happens near the end of the game if you level up a lot, for most of the game Auron and Kimarhi are the only charcters that can effectively attack armored creatures, Lulu is your primary black magic user, Yuna your white magic user etc.

Burning Eclipse wrote: »

I think that is a massive exaggeration. Sure Vivi will never be a bruiser, and Zidane will always be your thief who does decent damage, but there are still plenty of options for character customization within predefined job classes.

Not really, Vivi will always be your only black magic user, you might be able to characterise which magic he learns first, but he's still stuck as your black magic user (Not bad mouthing Vivi or anything, he is my favourite charcter, his back story is so good that the developers bastardised it for Zidanes back story:))

Burning Eclipse wrote: »

Again, to draw on IX as an example, the characters are very well balanced. I tend to use the same 4 + 1 throughout the game, but Freya and Quina are both very useful, as is Amarant. You could easily make a party of any 4 characters without being weakened in any way!

I didn't find IX to be very balnced (maybe its just me). Out of the 8 characters I always used Zidane, Vivi, Steiner, the little girl (can't remember her name, she was a white magic user) and Quina (who I swapped with Steiner if I needed more magic-based attacks). Freya and Amarant are crap (Zidane is faster and Steiner is stronger) and I prefer the little girls summons to the princess.

To be honest, it still is better than how it was done in Blue Dragon: when you first get the jobs system, the story for some reason points out how one character seems to the attacker, one seems to be the healer, and one seems to be the magic user. But this is just your starting point, you can pretty much change immediately your jobs to whatever you want and there is no real reason not to do so, so your characters lose their individuality on that front. (fortunately their dialogue keeps the characters individual: one is incredibly irritating witha stupid catch phrase, one has no personality and the last one turns into the first one by the end).(Oh, and the fourth one is the first one again, adn the fifth one is largely ignored)
Eh, seemed to fall into a rant about Blue Dragon there, sorry about that rant over