The best Final Fantasy system?

[Village Idiot]

The best battle system I have ever played would be the Tales series, specifically Tales of Eternia.

Battles takes place like a 2d side scroller, with up to four of your own characters vs 6+ enemies. You control one character (up to four players can play at once with the multitap) with full control moving around the battle field attacking/evading/blocking enemy attacks.

The battle system is fully customizable. You can chose to play in Semi-Auto where you use R1 to lock onto an enemy, then press one of the attack buttons and the character will automatically move over and attack, and would automatically block depending on your evade rate. Or you could switch it over to Manual system, where it gives you full control over your character, and this is when the fun begins.

Normally, you can assign shortcut commands for your skills (ie: up + circle = Demon Hammer, forward + circle = Sonic Blade), so you can have up to four skills at a time. Or you can set it so you can use ALL the skills at the same time, but you have to input the command ala Street Fighter style.

There's even 'Extensions' to attacks/spells, where if you hit the skill command at the right time/do the right combo, it'll 'extend' into another attack on top of that. There's also combination attacks between characters.

And unlike the other Tales games, casting spells doesn't make the battle pause, so the battles get extremely chaotic later on, with spells flying left and right.

This makes random battles not a chore, but fun as hell. The game actually encourages you to use skills even though they cost MP by having you use combinations of skills a certain number of times in order to get a new one, as well as letting you regenerate a certain percentage of MP after every battle, and making restoring items % based and cheap to buy.

The magic system is also the most balanced system I've seen yet. You get 'Greater Craymels'(ie: summons) that you can give to both your mages. Spells are gotten depending on how the Craymels are grouped together. For example, having the Undine on one of your mages and Sylph on another will give you both Spread and Air Thrust, but also Heal. It seems simple at first, but later on, as you get more and more Craymels, you have to think about how you want to arrange it, and plan to make sacrifices on what spells you want.

For example, you can have the most powerful attack spells, but if you do, you won't get the most powerful healing spells(if at all), and vice versa.


Edit by Moderator: This is off-topic. This thread is for comparing Final Fantasy systems ONLY! Village Idiot put a lot of work into this post so I'd rather not have to start deleting posts to keep other people from posting about off-topic systems here, but I will if I have to.

[kakashi25]

Tales series battle system was great, but for final fantasy games I liked FF X's the most probably because ive maxed out 3 characters and trying to beat the games monster arena so fully understand the sphere grid. Can customize all your characters to get all abilities and basiclly equally strong.

[Chiaki Nozomi]

FF... I always played for the story. The only thing I liked about the battle systems was that I could mindlessly press buttons while doing something else. Sit there, run in circles or in a wall, when battle theme comes on, just start mashing 'x'. The thing I hate about those games (and most games in general) is that once you level up a bit, say 3-4 levels in the beginning, you can breeze through the game just mashing buttons mindlessly. Of course, on boss battles I had to watch their HP, but that was once a freaking story arc or stage.

Now Tactics... I adore that game. I've played though it about 6 times since its original release, and I love it more each time. The battle system required some stragedy (especially if you did the challenge routes made by fans)and the characters were diverse. I loved how the classes could be used effectively, no matter what class you were. Hmm.. I liked X-2 because of the dancer class. Just put the enemies to sleep, poison, and have Rikku and Paine do their abilities to learn faster. ^^. I have this weird thing of mastering every ability in a game like that. Makes it last longer, haha.

My true favorites are action RPGs... no mindless bobble on that! (It would kick ass if Square made an action FF RPG...but that's another topic! ^_~.)

[Biohazard]

Yeah, FF8 was way too easy if you draw enough ... but i found it quite fun..

I never played X or X-2 , but i liked the job class system in V too...

@ Chiaki Nozomi: Isn't Vagrant Story from Square? And that one is an Action RPG ^_^

[Prince of Chronics]

I liked the draw system (cuz everyone can have everything) and the materia system (cuz of the combos)... espers were alright too.... the battle system in FFX was quite good cuz you can get all the characters in for a given battle....

[DAK]

It's very close between the espers (magicite) of FFIII and the materia of FFVII. I think the magicite comes out on top (just because they permanently learn the spells unlike the materia system).

[diabolistic]

The best two systems for me were ff7 and ffx. the materia system allowed many combinations, such as the beloved revive+phoenix combo, or the hp-absorb+knights of the round .. gotta love the functionality of it. the grid system was great since you could customize the character anyway you see fit. my tidus could become a white mage, and my yuna had the potential to become a warrior.

ff6 had a pretty good system too.. though it was too similar to ff7 (or vice versa)

ff9's system seemed way too simple.. and after you learnt all the abilities, the characters seemed way too strong

the worst system would have to be 8..
after a while, you began to avoid random battles altogether; rendering the prospects of leveling your character useless.

[boneyjellyfish]

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that Final Fantasy 1 had the best system. Simple, easy to use, and it's the only system that had the spells NUKE, ZAP!, and XXXX. I may never forget the day I was able to beat WarMech thanks to the tireless effort of my Black Mage, who, with only 12 HP left, managed to defeat WarMech with a NUKE.

[e2-]

I loved Ff7 materia system but the most boring must bee ff8 junction or what the fu*k wos it it sucked

[Zero Avelok]

Like it was said before....your to young to remmeber...I just love the FFVI... the esper thingy...in the espers u could learn the magic and at the same time u could summon the beast in it.... ...that was THE best because they stay with u...the magic..not like in FFVII and many more....but the story of FFVII is one of the best...but i still love the magnificent FFVI and FFIV

[Hotaru]

Best battle system is FFVII
Worst battle system is FFVIII

[Bandersnatch]

Can't believe no one has mentioned FFXI as the worst. This means one of three things:

1. FFXI is your first mmorpg and your horribly addicted to slaying rabbits and sheep.
2. You have yet to play the game.
3. Like me, you consider FFXI an abomination and it doesn't deserve to be mentioned

Don't think combat could get more boring than FFXI. Best system is FF5's, while FFXI tries to improve on that it fails imo. FFVII had a great system too