Merrith
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Oh I'm with you 100%. The sphere grid honestly should have been adopted as the go to leveling system of pretty much anything RPG in my opinion, especially games that have pre made characters and parties. X is actually my favorite game in the entire series. The point I was trying to make was, that it was the first final fantasy outside of VIII's smaller changes that was a real departure from the basic mechanics the entire final fantasy franchise. Up until then, they were all level based, they all had over worlds, they had been mostly been building on the jobs through equip-able items (Espers in VI, Materia in VII, ... I don't know about VIII it just sucked, and Equipment in IX). The battle system was largely the same since the introduction of ATB in what? III? And since then the game systems in the franchise have all been completely reworked at best or at worse totally gutted and something completely new was brought in instead.
I liked the sphere grid because it reminded me of 7 a lot in that the design was you could essentially completely customize your party, didn't have to have set jobs, but you had to really get late game/grind in order to open that up. Materia system was similar in that it didn't let you have everyone able to do everything b/c the characters weren't learning the abilities themselves, it was the materia that leveled up, and you didn't get access to the All versions of the materia (not the support All, the full leveled up All of summon/magic/command materia) until virtually the end of the game.
The Espers in 6 let you teach the magic to everyone as you went, so despite having their own individual skills, most of the characters who weren't OP on their own like Sabin became do all magic casters. As broke as the combat was in that game (at least the SNES version), being able to permanently give each party member the spread of spells you could as early as you could made a lot of the game trivial. 9 was different in that you were locked into their "jobs" for their skills, and only could learn skills from their specific weapon types. 8's system you could really just break in a lot of crazy ways. Some people really love that, I personally didn't.