NibelFire
Lv. 25 Adventurer
- AKA
- Blaze
The "invocation" part makes me curious. How does it work in detail? Is it handled by the system, or is the player able to choose when the gauge should be activated? In case of the latter, the "invocation" could be a character specific command, this would mean that every character has the opportunity to invoke their own summon gauge.
That's what I thought, but in hindsight I think I misinterpreted these lines. It reads like the Summon Materia alone starts the "invocation" process, and shows up only after a specific precentage of the gauge is filled up. Something I already mentioned in my post I linked above. Looks like I should've listen to my past self more.
Anyway, that doesn't give me an answer on my problem with the red Materia symbol! Why is it necessary to differentiate Cloud from the others, when the system only allows one summoner in the first place? I don't want to believe this is only for nostalgic reasons.
After rewatching the Aps fight again, it looks like the summoning process isn't as straightforward as I thought after all. Seems like the part of having the summoning gauge appearing on screen was very cleverly omitted from the footage. It would be an odd design choice to hide the progress bar from the player until a % mark for no reason, which mean that there has to be more to it. As for the red materia symbol, your guess is probably as good as mine.
I still stand by my take that multiple summons won't be available. At least not in this first game. Of course, I'd be more than happy if Square makes me eat crow, as they have done multiple times when it comes to FFVIIR.
Another thing that catched my eye, after I watched the footage again, is the Summon Ability Menu has one subcategory, where you choose between Ifrit's abilities and one other option that uses 2 ATB bars.
I guess we can issue the Hellfire attack manually, but will this be resulting into Ifrit leaving the battle field earlier? Or will it be displayed as separate options entirely (calling back Ifrit included)... grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Both of those abilities were demonstrated, and neither were Hellfire. Would be great to have an option to do that manually.