2 Summoners

March 24, 2008, 5:27 AM

Did you think it was needed to have two summoners within this game? Most of the other games allow you to give every character a summon (Except X). So, do you think having a set summoner is a good or bad thing?

March 24, 2008, 5:29 AM

I thought it was interesting, especially since both have sets of summons which can be used in different ways. Garnets summons are more offensive, while Eikos summons - especially Phoenix and Carbuncle - are more defensive. I liked the variation in the skills between them too, and say Garnet had Eikos skillset and her own, she would have been over-powered, so having two summoners allowed all the abilities to be in the game, but with balanced characters.

My Character Profiles · March 24, 2008, 7:17 AM

I actually thought that Eiko and Garnet were on a level playing field.

Garnet had more typical healing spells like cure and life, and a wide array of spells to get rid of pretty much any status ailment. She also has a wide variety of elemental summons.

Eiko can learn almost all of the commonly used spells that Garnet can learn, including cure and life...plus a lot of handy magic like regen and full-life. She had really powerful summons, but not as much of a variety.

I guess you could say that Eiko is more..."reliable" in regards to the types of magic that she can learn.
But Garnet has the elemental variety of summons that come in handy during battle.

March 24, 2008, 7:39 AM

Well, unless you used BOTH in battle you'd be kinda SOL'd, eh? I mean, yeah you have items but, meh, not everyone uses them. =/.

March 24, 2008, 8:12 AM

It wasn't needed to have ANY summoners in IX, since all the summons were pathetically weak. And Garnet becomes practically useless once Eiko joins. Eiko learns better spells before Garnet, she knows the only two summons even remotely useful (Carbuncle and Phoenix) and she doesn't have that "can't concentrate" thing screwing her up in battle.

It never really bothered me though, and IMO it was nice to have a FF where the summons weren't uber and could pwn anything (like VII and X).

March 24, 2008, 8:17 AM

Didn't that "Cant Concentrate" message dissapear after awhile or it still occur during the game?

March 24, 2008, 12:03 PM

No, it wasn't "needed" for the developers to include two summoners; it certainly wasn't integral to the plot what-so-ever! It's such an absurd concept ya!

Ugh.

Anyway, I liked how their skill-set was mainly diverse. They each had a certain 'strength' over the other, so it's sort of difficult for me to determine a battle-favourite... though I do like the fact Eiko can use Holy.

I'd mainly choose Dagger for the offensive elemental aspect, as there's no real point in being overly defensive in IX [let's face it - it's not exerting], so ultimately being capable of striking all monsters on the field for 9999 damage was niiiiiice.

March 24, 2008, 12:57 PM

Eh, I forgot how much Garnet annoyed me with her lack of concentration shizz... really made Eiko effective.

But really, I liked having two summoners. It added to the competition aspect of fighting for Zidane's attention (even though Garnet wasn't really looking to compete). Sure, they each could have been a bit more effective with their summons, but they were sturdy magicians regardless. I used both equally, and it was fun.

March 24, 2008, 3:08 PM

yea, having two summoners was interesting, and i liked how all of the characters are different and they use different attacks. Thats what i like about ff9. But garnet summons are for me better than eikos in every way...

March 24, 2008, 7:58 PM

I actually prefer only one person being able to summon in a game, but this game didn't do that bad of a job with multiple summoners. I hardly used Eiko and I only really liked maybe one of her 4 or so summons, so it didn't really bother me.

I would rather however ahve just a Sole Summoner who can do all of them instead of splitting them up with different characters like in FFXII.