@br0kenrabbit said:
@Jag85 said:
You can make any character into a mage by equipping magic materia and leveling-up their magic materia. FFVII doesn't have traditional RPG character classes, but the materia system is a free-for-all system where you can assign virtually any combat role to any character. The only things that stay unique to each character are the weapon type and limit breaks... and the clothing, which is just window-dressing that has no impact on gameplay.
BTW, Diablo II came out in 2000, three years after FFVII, so that's a poor comparison. At least try compare it to something that came out in 1997 or earlier... But speaking of Diablo, its spiritual successor Path of Exile adopted FF7's materia system (as Maroxad already mentioned above). Clearly because it's a very flexible character customization system.
Doesn't get my interest, and I love micromanagement (Civ, Stellaris, Total War, etc.)
Understand I opened this discussion called the game over-rated, not bad. The cutscenes were a big draw at the time, and sold the game. Take away those CGI cutscenes and you may still have something decent but it wouldn't have got the attention that it did at the time.
As cool as it would be to give everyone a gun over melee weapons in a modern era setting. Sadly you cannot do that.
However, equip enough magic materia on someone, even barret, and his attacks will start doing very little damage. At least in the early game. Turning Mr. T into a dedicated spellcaster. Thus he functions like a mage.
The problems with the materia system is that it becomes too freeform later on with far too few restrictions. Unlike FF5, where attributes are static, only depending on the job and character, stats in FF7 increase when you level up. As a result, your stat growths eventually completely eclipse the penalties and stat modifiers you get from materia. You also get well over a dozen slots per character (I think it was 16), so you end up pretty much being able to equip everything on your character.
But in those magic Shinra Arc moments, the materia system truly shined. A lot of materia were very limited in supply, and you barely had any slots to go around. So you ended up making a lot of choices.
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