Which Final Fantasy has your favourite magic system?

[Ploid 6.0]

FFXII FFXI

It's kind of close to FFXI. It starts off kind of weak, but by the end it's pretty nuts and useful. Similar gameplay style to FFXI with auto attack, and real time with pause to make ordering around the whole party work. There is no mana bursting skillchains, but there are kill chaines, and the whole quickening burst to take the place of satisfying manabursts.

 

[Tornak]

I'm more of an "each character has an established job" kind of guy, so I appreciate games like IV, VI, IX, X... more than the ones where you choose jobs (these are a blast, though) or every member can do about everything.

In particular, I've always loved the way IX handled it, what with skills (active and passive) being tied to specific weapons and gear and, once you learn something, you keep that forever. I was very happy to see a somewhat similar system in VII-R. It also has many and varied magi users, down to even having a Red Mage of sorts role for Freya's Dragon Magic. Thus, you get the usual suspects (with peak PSX tech) and more out there stuff (even Steiner being able to use it somehow thanks to Master Vivi, or Zidane getting some weird thief-oriented spells).

As of recently, I adore VII-R's magic. The fact that it's real-time obviously adds some more strategy to your positioning and all of that. Great effects and usefulness (they really want you to stagger enemies), as well as lovely ATB/real-time hybrid where you're penalized for magic use, but not the point where you don't want to waste it. And, of course, the Materia system, which is absolutely great.

Oh, and I quite appreciate VIII for what it tries to do conceptually (within the lore and the gameplay). Even if it's a broken system (which can make it real fun).

 

[Deleted member 3040]

The thing about 8 is that you don't have to go around and draw spells from every enemy. The only two things you're going to use spells for are casting them and junctioning them, and well, 100 Fires (for example) isn't useful for either of those things on any level. It's only useful if you have this urge to completely fill out your spellbook for some reason. Most of the spells you can get you can either get through cards, or are located on roughly 4 boss encounters, so you just draw from that and then you're done.

Last time I played, the amount of time I spent playing Triple Triad to get good magic and ultimate weapon materials early completely and utterly dwarfed the amount of time I spent drawing from enemies over the whole game.

PS. High magic makes you draw more iirc.

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As someone currently playing through it, I guess the issue is that this isn't something you can know during your first playthrough.

 

[Chucat]

As someone currently playing through it, I guess the issue is that this isn't something you can know during your first playthrough.

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Yeah true, it mostly depends how quickly you're able to work out that enemies level up more efficiently than you, and that junctioning gives you stats without levelling up, and then going through the entire logical argument in your head that ends in "Don't fight anything and just junction increasingly busted magic".

Besides that though, the game really, really needs a guide so you know what turns into what, what enemies carry which magic and how efficient said magic is for junctioning.

In a more flippant way, the game is pretty much a galaxy brain meme.

 

[Lightning1981]

Final Fantasy Type 0. You can go through pretty much the entire game just spamming it and destroy everything.

 

[X05]

Yeah true, it mostly depends how quickly you're able to work out that enemies level up more efficiently than you, and that junctioning gives you stats without levelling up, and then going through the entire logical argument in your head that ends in "Don't fight anything and just junction increasingly busted magic".

Besides that though, the game really, really needs a guide so you know what turns into what, what enemies carry which magic and how efficient said magic is for junctioning.

In a more flippant way, the game is pretty much a galaxy brain meme.

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Yeah, I really like the magic of the game in that sense, as you will probably never cast it the vast majority of the time, but it's totally integral to how the game works, or breaks lol
I mean, a fun one is that after Rinoa gets Angel Wing you *really* should max her Magic stat and get rid of all of her offensive magic except for Meteor, so you'll wreck the shit out of everything (yes, everything) when you use that Limit Break