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Originally Posted by Andross
This goes back to what I was talking about with allocating resources. Unless you're a super-hardcore power leveler who will spend hours of time on optional grinding, you're going to have a limited amount of resources to attribute; for example, you can't give all of your characters in FFVII KotR and Bahamut Zero on an average playthrough without power-grinding, nor can you give all of your characters in FFVIII the same GF abilities and same magic junction allocation. Usually, each member in your current on-field party will be functionally different from the other two.
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But that's the game's problem, now, isn't it? If you have to do that for every character, even ones you don't like using, then the game shouldn't be forcing you to switch your party so often, should it?
I think Super Mario RPG is a fine example here. You're not forced to use every single character once you've acquired them all. However, should you so choose to swap them out, they actually
do play differently than each other-- they're not the same setup with a different-looking weapon. And, to make the transition not painful, even the characters out-of-battle level up as normal, so it's not like raising a single Pokemon and finding out that's not a good idea.
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Now, it is true that the off-field party members will act as carbon copies once you transfer all of the statistics from your on-field members to them. However, it is only the characters who are currently on-field that matter, and the characters who normally remain off-field will be the characters you don't like.
So, even though the currently off-field members will function as carbon copies of your on-field members when (And if) you decide to bring them on-field, the characters on-field will still function differently from eachother. To strengthen the "on-field characters matters only" argument, in the more class-based FF titles that had large parties extending your on-field supply, such as FFVI or FFIX, you could still get away with using the same on-field characters throughout the game without switching out for the off-field ones.
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But that's not my point. My point is, why bother having those other characters at all, outside of the story? They're all exactly the same. The characters only differ from one another depending on your own whim. They're all blank slates-- so much so, in fact, that you can literally swap one character's entire setup of summons and magic junctions to another with the push of a button.
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Sometimes it's bad enough having to see certain characters (Again, Cooke and Mack; don't know if you played Lost Odyssey or not).
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I can agree on this point, but it doesn't matter much from a gameplay standpoint.
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True, it isn't unreasonable to use a character you hate if they're good in battle, but I believe it would make it better to not be required to use that character at all.
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Can't argue there.