In your opinion? I think it eliminates the need for class specific characters in all honesty.

It puts the games characters on the same level as those from Blue Dragon with names and appearances being the only distinguishing factor for them.

I always thought it was cool but after a second glance I think it wasn't.

The materia idea was great for combat, the story behind it had a few flaws though.

Was good; many combinations, many strategies.

Was probably the worst change the FF series has made, besides the whole girly main character thing. Materia was awful, it ruined the class balance, it made characters only worth as much as their materia slots, coupled with the very limited and crummy equipment system it made for awful character customization. It was also vastly overpowered and failed to provide adequate alternatives.

It was a marketing decisions basically, it took Espers from FF6 and dumbed them down as much as possible, and dumbed down the characters and equipment system just as much, which makes the game extremely easy to play but moreso makes into a bland and boring "everyone is great at everything" system which lets people who drool over Cloud and Vincent make full absurdly overpowered use of them without any consequence or fault.

But in hindsight, the entire game is sort of like that. "Here is a bunch of cliche stuff that everyone will probably find something cool about, it's all the same so just pick the things you think are coolest and we will make sequals about them and swim in the $$$". No color, no originality, no flare, no panache, just a big unorganized amalgam of things which the polls say are popular with the child to young adult demographics.

My main complaint.

Also, if you're going to say it's good. At least explain why.

Khrushchev did all the work for me.

This post was edited by AlphaOmegaX on Nov 23 2008 02:03pm

I liked the system. It wasn't the system's fault that was bad. It was the implementation.

The materia system is fine, but it was taken to such extremes of power that it made the game way too easy. Further, the characters should of been much more individual and had a definate roll they would play, which would then be accented through the use of materia.

Materia should have given utility, fun, combos, and some strength personallized to what the character did best.

Materia actually made any character you liked the best into a god, differing only in terms of ranged attack and limit break.

For this reason it made the game way too easy and simple; accordingly, it sucks.

I like the system, yes it makes it so that their are no classes for the characters but if you do it how I do it then you can choose who does what, I made one of my characters a white mage, one a black mage and then a fighter/thief type charcter (that one was usually cloud).

I tried not to overpower my characters, it makes the game more enjoyable if your not killing every boss without fail atleast failing once or twice.

I personally liked it as it offered a way of customising the characters rather than having to go along with some preset character classes. I agree that it offered a bit *too* much freedom over the characters as you could formulate a materia combination for pretty much any situation, but that was only true later on in the game when you had access to a wider range of materia.

You could make all the characters different if you wanted to. You could designate Cloud as your main physical damage dealer, Tifa as a support character with healing spells along with Haste/Protect/etc, Cait Sith as a black mage, or any combination of different classes. To be honest, I don't really know anyone who makes all the characters do exactly the same thing, except maybe right at the end of the game after a bit of grinding, but even then they'd still have slightly different roles (for example, 3 damage dealers but with one of them designated as a support character or whatever else was needed).

At the end of the day, there's no right or wrong answer. Some people like having more control over their characters whereas other people like having characters with distinct roles that can't be changed. Both can be good if they're done right or absolutely terrible if done wrong.

i think it was a good way of making combat and abilities simplistic in crisis core, but as for a non-mobile game i like the license boards of ffxii better

i prefered FF 9's system
but materia was pimp since anyone could use it