What's really interesting to me about all this is the more I think about how DIFFERENT each character can be, while still being fundamentally balanced for the game overall. Comrades and this new update has really got my brain spinning about this a lot, especially because of some other things that exist in FFVII that aren't as present in FFXV, or they're much more specialized:
Weapon Types
– In XV, Noctis is the main character, and he can use any weapon type, so it's really all about specializing him for battle, and knowing which of your Chocobros will be more/less effective. Comrades REALLY opens this up a bit, and you start to learn more about how the different weapon types pair and synergize with the different Sigils to make things feel like different classes, without explicitly BEING different classes. (Making a character with Sigil of the Rogue & Shuriken make me think about how Yuffie could play in FFVIIR)
– If enemies keep the same sort of weapon & type resistances, as well as limb break weaknesses in FFVIIR, it'll be really neat to see how that will encourage using particular characters for particular missions, as well as swapping to certain characters in particular battles. That's even more enhanced by customization potential like Elemental Materia giving weapons elemental properties to further specialize against particular bosses.
MP Management
– In XV, only Noctis manages MP, and it's basically just for Warp-Striking. Comrades expands on that a bit with how it uses offensive spells, as well as Barrier for guarding against attacks. While Comrades really gets into a more balanced MP usage, you're very rarely ever looking at not having MP, because it's debilitating to how the Combat is designed.
– In FFVII, everybody has MP, and it's a much more carefully managed resource, because it ONLY affects magic. If MP stays costly and can actually run low in combat without needing to regen, and certain characters use X thing more efficiently than others, I can see some really interesting dynamics to when swapping between various characters could be a LOT of fun – especially with limbs, and weapon type weaknesses that XV has. That also ties in to how some Materia are ability-based, and others are magic, and how character with low MP can still feel really powerful even in that system, depending on how you allocate things to that party member.
Limit Breaks
- Aside from the Armiger System and 3 bar cost Abilities of your allies, XV doesn't really have Limit Breaks, but that gives a good handle on how you could control them.
- Like XV uses its L1 Menu to control abilities, I think that having something like that in FFVIIR to passively activate Limit Breaks would be really awesome, but the character Swap also makes it so that it'd be easy to swap to a character and use their Limit Break manually. The Exception here would come in the form of Vincent, where you could keep him from using him Limit Break IF you wanted to still play as him, because after activating his Limit Break, he'd go into full AI-only mode until the end of Combat.
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