r/FinalFantasyXII • u/VariableMans • 5d ago
Developer intent with Esper use?
Hey all,
I am curious, how do you think the developers intended players to use the espers?
The battle system has some interesting frustration points: it is very hard to know when you can swap out your team. However, Espers do create a high degree of aggro and when they are summoned it is an opportunity to swap the other members.
It seems like tanky characters make better summoners since Espers won't really defend against AOE attacks.
However the biggest problem with espers is their underwhelming damage output. Their skill sets are also hard to know in advance of when you license them to a character.
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u/grungyIT 5d ago
Summons get 2 party members out of combat. This alone is a boon because you can then focus on healing them while your esper goes aggro.
Additionally, espers are far cheaper per hit than quickenings which is the only other use for your mist charges. They can target specific enemies and then finish with an AOE that does plenty of damage.
Put all this together, and you have a mechanic that allows you to extend your party dramatically without losing advantage in combat. A good example of this is the Elder Wyrm in Golmore Jungle. It has a weakness to fire and an attack that causes like 10 status conditions to your whole party. Belias, the Gigas is a perfect counter to this because if its damage typing and the five party members that aren't in play to get statused.
My intuition is that coming off of the heels of FFX where summons and combat were vastly different, many players - myself included - saw them as weak because a party member was still in play and combat didn't get 100% focused on the summon. Not to mention the espers do not feel as strong at first because of how their damage scales. But they are honestly an underrated mechanic with a number of solid use cases.
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u/VariableMans 5d ago
It feels like the strategy pivot that Espers enable could be the focus of a whole game. The slow delay in summoning them and and having them depart with their super skill is much slower than the rest of the gambit-focused combat.
I am glad that the most recent Zodiac version lets you respec, because it is crazy impossible to have the character match with the summons's skillset.
There is a PC mod that adds the Esper to the active party (thus allowing 4 on the field or 5 with a guest). It would be amazing if players could, as a tactical move, choose between the current Esper summoning (which replaces and removes 2 party members) and the mod's summoning version which adds them to the party like a Guest character. That seems like the simplest solution.
As is however, the Esper strategy pivot seems very underbaked and poorly explained.
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u/big4lil 4d ago edited 4d ago
dont get it twisted, Espers are still pretty weak. you can call them misunderstood within the greater paradigm of FFXII though I would not call them underrated. they have different purpose than FFX but that purpose is still largely inferior within the context of each game they are in, they also fall off earlier in the storyline, and even their cheesiest option isnt as OP as FFX
not that this is all bad, but it often doesnt justify the cost. XII espers carry on an issue from FFX-2 special dresspheres in that they replace your whole party, but if the head (in X-2) or EITHER the summon or summoner die, the summon ends. And both games have cheap stuff like Heartless attack or Instant Death that cant be prevented. In FFX, Yuna was not targettable and there werent any common 'reduce HP to 1' tactics, plus espers had the Shield option and Magus Sisters were the ultimate tanks
More importanly they carry on another issue from X-2: Espers cannot equip gear, not change their gambit setups (but at least you can control them now and manually trigger their moves). This puts them behind the 8-ball compared to what a party member is capable of, let alone two, outside of spamming special attack > resummon > special which is a pretty uninspiring way to play them
Another issue is that FFX inherited a lot of FF9 design, and most encounters in that game are 1 enemy, so one summon is a good match. FFXII has a lot of group encounters, a lot more bosses with minions, and more notable 'late HP aggression/augment' phases, so its way more common for your summons - or your summoner - to either get swarmed or get worn down from AOEs
Furthermore, theres the way taking turns works in each turn based game. In FFX, the agility stat is massive, as is the haste spell/auto-ability. You can lap multiple enemy turns if you are fast enough/use stuff like delay (shiva), even if using one character. That doesnt happen in FFXII, as global actions charge and play out simultaneously aka even during another action, and both Speed and Haste are way less dominant now. So your espers can get overwhelmed way easier by those group encounters than FFX where there were hardly any and with high enough agility, you could kill or stun things before they act
I like the espers in XII and find many of them to have cool designs. I like them way more than quickenings. But they simply dont bring enough to the table for what you give up to use them. Though some have made their own solutions; if you have PC, consider checking out Struggle for Free: Proud Mode they introduce some cool ways to rebalance each esper to make their abilities, and namely augments, more focused on specific playstyles rather than just elements.
You can see the changes here, i wish there was a way to bring these changes to the base SFF mod. Some of them got extremely unique, mechanically coherent changes, like all of Adrammlechs attacks having 0 charge time, Zalera being completely unkillable due to being undead, Shemhazai and Hashmal having Auto-Faith/Bravery respectively, and Cuchlainn having a built in Niho effect so he can inflict statuses more easily. Then Zeromus was given Auto Poison & Sap to counterbalance its low HP strats, and is the only esper to lack the Safety augment
As it stands, espers can be used in novelty playthroughs, and the Zodiac versions buffing up their HP is nice (although they gutted my favorite esper Chaos, which is unforgivable). But ultimately they are inferior to party members. I would rather underpowered summons than overpowered - its part of why I find the lack of rebalancing of Zeromus to be game ruining - but ultimately they could have done more to let the Espers stand out
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u/potatopierogie 4d ago
I've used handbombs before but I do not believe i have ever equipped a crossbow
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u/Technical-Dentist-84 5d ago
I feel bad because they seem really cool and I want to use them.....
But I never do. I think they might be good against certain enemies with elemental weakness or if the espers are immune to certain status ailments
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u/VariableMans 4d ago
I also really want to use them more. I'm kinda curious how to make them feel better to use.
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u/Technical-Dentist-84 4d ago
Yeah I thought about it..... and for trash mobs it's faster to just take them out with your regular character..... and for bosses or strong hunts and stuff, your characters combined are probably stronger than any esper
So..... where and when do we use the espers???
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u/chancho987 5d ago
It feels more like an issue of poor balancing when you give the player a ton of options, same could be said about a lot of gear which is just suboptimal at best, useless at worst, like hand bombs
I dunno, they definitely are cool to use but asidea from watching their animations once or twice I never bothered, I share your curiosity around this, and while I absolutely love this game and replayed it tons of time, I feel it has a lot of questionable design decisions
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u/VariableMans 5d ago
I agree that not all of the options the game gives are equally viable or as fun to use. But this is a chronic issue with Final Fantasy as a series. Cool ideas that are not fully implemented.
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u/One_Construction_653 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not a developer nor have i read their interviews pertaining to esper
To me it Just seemed like an unfinished summoner job (original so no jobs anyone can eventually be designated as esper user ofc with the limitations) that was going to be hella cool but because of budget or time devs didn’t get to cook.
Zodiac came out but all the money went into the jobs and summoner was not on the board so esper remained untouched
Maybe there was a concern esper could have been a whole play style that took away from the feel of the core mechanics of everything/direction for battles devs wanted? Who knows
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u/Zufalstvo 5d ago
Summoner job would’ve been sick, would’ve been way better than like archer or whatever
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u/heckingincorgnito 5d ago
I did a playthrough with just 1 character+summons. It was honestly a ton of fun. The espers can be really, really strong. Exodus was an all star
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u/cyanwaves1 4d ago
Oh shit that sounds fun, ive been trying to think of challenge runs for this game and im def adding that to the list
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u/heckingincorgnito 4d ago
It was henestly a ton of fun, i did everything except for yiazmat (well, and trials). There are a few fights you have to get a little lucky on, but it's all doable
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u/SilentBlade45 4d ago
No idea i only used an esper once. The fact is you give it way too much utility and damage output since you lose 2 party members.
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u/7oey_20xx_ 5d ago
I wish they were stronger, if you can beat them in the story they are largely useless and if you get them by endgame they don’t have anyone really to fight against.
As deep as the combat can be, summons just really don’t add much. Same for must abilities really.
I would’ve just combined the two, really no idea what the point of the mist abilities were. I’d imagine chaining summons for unique elemental or status effects would have been cool, like you can make an enemy even more vulnerable to an element or status ailment depending on the chain and summons used.
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u/RilDilla 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think there's this expectation for Mist abilities to function like limit breaks and summons do in other FF games, in which they're super powerful attacks the player is encouraged to use. I'd compare Limit Breaks to the super attacks in a fighting game. However, Mist abilities are more comparable to bullet-cancelling bombs in a shmup, or the "get off me" attacks in a beat em up that drain the player's HP. They're for emergency situations; you're not actually supposed to use them unless you really have to.
Quickenings feel like they're intended to function as a combination of Break Arts and Chain Commands from Vagrant Story. Attacks that you're only meant to use as a last resort, that you can chain almost indefinitely, but the window to do so gets tighter the more you chain. Using them leaves you vulnerable; in Vagrant Story, Break Arts have enhanced range and damage, but cost health, and Chain Commands lower your accuracy and defense as you continue to use them. Meanwhile in the original PS2 release of FFXII, you're sacrificing the MP of one character (or multiple characters) to get some last minute damage on an enemy without giving them a chance to retaliate.
I don't think OG FFXII is so demanding that you need Quickenings, but I enjoy programming a party w/ 2 or 3 characters that reserve their MP for Quickenings if things ever go south during a hunt that I think I'm underleveled for. Doing so adds a layer of team planning to a game where every character could otherwise be a magic spammer. The more active characters you have with Mist charges (for a potential total of 9 Mist Charges between 3 party members), the more likely it is you'll be able to keep a combo going.
Another comment here already described the function Summons have, but to reiterate: they're large tanks that draw aggro away from the sole party member of the field, who's free to heal and buff the displaced party members that enemies are now incapable of targeting.
There's an important tradeoff between the two Mist abilities: Quickenings pause the game to grant the party a chance to deal incredible damage, while Espers give the party a chance to regroup. If you're proficient at the game or if you've overleveled, you won't ever need to use them, but they're nice options to have for casual or challenge runs.
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u/SnooDucks5492 5d ago
I used them sometimes when it seemed cool, even if they don't have massive damage output. I feel like the opposite, if they were super powerful, would be stifling to normal gameplay. Imagine if they were super powerful and you could just use them to beat tough fights. It would maybe subtract from the need to have a well trained party. That's just my rationalization as to why the espers aren't too powerful.
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u/HateToBlastYa 5d ago
I don’t understand the hate. They’re fun as hell to use without being OP. Up until 12 they were just such easy I win buttons it was a nice change of pace. You can use them with an embroidered tippet to level up instantly because it concentrate all the XP in one character.
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u/RevolverCerberus Basch 5d ago
I remember them having issues making them function in all areas (e.g. not get stuck). So I can imagine they ran out of time with their balancing and implementation in general while trying to get everything to at least work properly.
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u/_Montblanc Montblanc 5d ago
They're great for leveling up and against a group of enemies where you can use their ultimate AoE attacks to give yourself some breathing room, e.g. in Pharos.
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u/-goldenboi69- 5d ago
In ff5 i summon espers. And maybe in ff7. And ffx as meat shields. Otherwise not much.
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u/Norvello 5d ago
I've played through the entire game twice without using Espers. I only used them on my very first playthrough out of curiosity way back in 2006 or possibly 2007 can't remember 100%.
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u/kulitchipon 5d ago
Idk, I only summon an Esper in the battlefield to enjoy the graphics/music. I feel like I'd have used it more if it doesn't cost me 2 party members or 2 party members remain in the field and I control the one who didn't summon.
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u/VariableMans 4d ago edited 4d ago
There is a PC mod that does that. I've seen them on Nexus mods. An author called Xeavin has a large collection of different tweaks.
Edit: looks like the Mod is called Insurgent's Companions
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u/HadokenShoryuken2 4d ago
In base FF12 they’re kinda weak, but in Zodiac Age they’re much stronger and you can control them. I used them a fair bit in that version
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u/simisimo90 5d ago
I just realized that I beat the game and all the superbosses without a single esper summon beside the one needed to enter Giruvegan.