So...about Quina.

[Sora_lion_heart]

Quina is good for mighty guard, auto life, white wind, and the frog spell. If I remember right you can finish the frog catching game in the various swamps around the world and have frog drop do 9999 damage for a VERY little amount of MP. Twister isn't that bad either. There are a lot of good spells but some of them take a different tactic to be used best.

[GalaxyFlare]

Quina learns Healing wind an a revive type spell.

Quina has some stupid looking abilities but they just as effective as some of Vivi's spells.

Quina is a blast though!

[Rinoalover]

Quina's alright.

Worst Trance in the game, but that doesn't matter because Trance is near useless anyway. It has some pretty good spells though... Beyond those mentioned I like Mustard Bomb and Freeze. xD

Everyone other than Vivi, Steiner and Zidane learn some sort of healing move.

Garnet has basic White Mage. Cure, Cura, Curaga and Life. And some status removing spells like Stona and Poisona.

Eiko gets a few extra things more than Garnet like Esuna, and she can summon Phoenix(which does low amounts of Fire damage and revives everyone who is fainted. With 99 Phoenix Pinions it has like a 30% chance to revive everyone if everyone faints. I find it to be useless.). She is kind of a screwy character when it comes to stats and usefulness. She's terrible for me. Near useless. She can actually be really good if you do a few things through the game... xP

Amarant has Chakra which is AMAZING. (low MP cost to heal HP and MP. During Trance he uses it on everyone.)

Quina learns Auto-Life, White Wind and Angel Snack. (Which is pretty much Esuna on everyone for the cost of some MP and a few Remedies.)

And Freya learns Reis's Wind which puts Regen on everyone, and White Draw that costs a lot of MP to drain MP from an enemy and give it to the party.

[Bambi]

I think Quinas underrated, s/he's always in my party and if you make the effort to collect all the blue magic youve got a pretty fucking nifty party member there, only drawback really is the trance, it becomes redundant once you have all the eat abilities, and even then, its not really all that much use unless you trance against summat you know has summat you need

[MC Clapyohandz]

Like we were talking about last night, you can get Quina relatively stronger weapons earlier than a lot of the other characters, so I like to use her early on in the game while she's one of, if not the, strongest physical attacker. Eventually I end up phasing her out, only because I can't bother with getting all the Blue Magic and/or frogs.

It's really up to you though. If you commit to getting the Blue Magic and Frog Drop, then Quina is worth the time.

[MagicMasher]

Thanks for the input, guys.

To be honest, Rinoa, buffing up Marcus (which I know is what you need to do to buff up Eiko) seems easier than running around collecting all the Blue Magic, even with a Walkthrough/Player's Guide. It's not that I'm LAZY, enemies just never do what I need them to do and having to use Eat when they have <25% HP gets annoying. I got Aqua Breath to use, since I heard it takes off 25% HP, but it always misses.

To be honest, the Blue Magic looks awesome and sick. Mighty Guard, once you get high in level and have enough MP, probably outshines any of the White Mage's protection spells (since they aren't multi-target)..but I don't know if I have the patience to collect them. And even know, when I have like 6-7 Blue Mage abilities, I never use them as they aren't useful/I don't have enough frogs to do decent damage with Frog Drop.

White Wind probably would serve me better than Eiko's stuff, but I'm always more inclined towards Summoners (unless you guys can save me the trouble and say that the summons are pretty useless in this game).

[MC Clapyohandz]

Summons are pretty useless in this game.

Well, I shouldn't say that. I just never use them. They don't really add much more value to Dagger or Eiko, in my opinion, especially if you use Vivi, or the Vivi-Steiner combo.

[MagicMasher]

Haha. I kind of figured they were when Dagger had like, four that had those high MP costs. It was just taunting me.

I guess Quina is better than Eiko. Gah, I just don't know. I've read that Eiko is more useful with the Phoenix summon, and because he gets much higher caliber white magic than Dagger, but...Rinoa kind of shot that out of the water. xD

[Bambi]

Eikos the better white mage, Garnet, i found was pretty useless

Catch some frogs and get better weapons for Quina as well

[Rinoalover]

Yeah. I just level too much in the game. Which really hurts Eiko. Eiko for me is never any good. She only heals as much as Garnet when she has concentrate set. xP

And I know Marcus affects Eiko, I just read recently that he actually affects Amarant. I don't believe it, but it still confuses me.

But, yeah, it's all up to you.

And the Summon's MP cost goes down later in the game.