[TheGame]

Sly I can see your point, and have a good idea of what you enjoy... but I still disagree with you.

As far as individuality goes, your definition and my definition seem to be different.. From the standpoint of playing that game anyway.

From my understanding, you think that since every character can learn any ability (minus overdrives), they lack individuality. That's my disagreement. Here's some points of why I disagree:

I. The characters are limited by their base abilities. While they can learn any spells, it's still more efficient to make the casters (Lulu, Yuna) pump up their casting ability.. And more efficient to make melee (Wakka, Auron) pump up their physical attacking ability. The Hybrid guys can be "good" at anything, but given the same amount of focus they'd still never be as good of a caster as Yuna or Lulu, and they'd never be as good of a melee as Auron and Wakka. And how many good melee-Lulus have you seen?

II. Individuality per playthrough matters to me more then any single character. If I want to play through with 3 melee, one who happens to know white magic like a paladin, and one who happens to know dark magic like a dark knight one time.. then play through with 3 casters the next time... or just play with 3 people who are good at one thing each and suck at everything else.. I just like to have that freedom. It makes the game more replayabile if it's not the same thing every time.

III. The most popular FF games feature this freedom. It's not a coincedence that FF7 is the most popular FF game of all time. It's because of the freedom that materia gave. Since the materia could be shared, when someone was booted out of your group for one reason or another, you could just buff up someone else with the abilities you learned. If you want to talk about lacking individuality character to character, you need to talk about FF7. Because Materia makes the sphere grid look extremely linear.

I don't know, I'm just simply a fan of being able to create your own strategy.