The Sphere Grid was amazing, though eventually you could have all characters being amazing in all roles, knowing all spells and attacks. (I always migrated Yuna from White Mage to Black Mage and benched Lulu).

Also, Path of Exile (a Diablo-like, free-to-play game) has a Sphere Grid system too <3

But I’ve never made it all the way back through the game. I think the furthest I made it is up through Cosmo Canyon once. Most of the time I do the same as you: I get through the story-heavy Midgar portion of the game, then lose interest as it becomes a little more free roaming.

For years I think I was actually scared to get to the end of disc 1 a second time. But now that I’m an adult with some real-life tragedies under my belt, that doesn’t bother me so much any longer.

The way I would run it in a tabletop game would restrict magic to only magic using classes, and there would be a large number of magicite, all of which would be pretty rare and probably rolled randomly as part of only the most generous treasure hordes. And yes, summons are awesome. (Though I’m actually not very fond of Pathfinder’s Summoner class. Go figure.)

Regarding the FFX idea, recall that in the tabletop presentation it would be used exclusively for spells. Personally I think this could have a really interesting flavor explanation about the nature of magic. How there’s a flowing path to it, or something.

If you still enjoy console RPGs, I’d highly recommend going back and playing Final Fantasy 5 at the very least. The original fan translated version of the game is easily available in a lot of places. I’ve never finished it myself, but it is a fantastic game. Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot like a ‘missing link’ between 4 and 6.

FF8 is also highly underrated, but most people disagree with me on that.

Like you, I don’t have consoles available to me to give the new games a try. The newest console I own is a Playstation 2, and in recent years I’ve done more to extend my collection backwards rather than forwards. Just last year I bought and repaired 3 NES consoles.

One of these days I hope to give the newer Final Fnatsy games a try…but I doubt it will be anytime soon.

Though FF 6 is my favorite of all of the FF games, I remember in the end all characters pretty much learned all spells, which is a bit bland. Maybe something like only the lowest level powers of the esper could be learned permanently, and everything else would require “equipping” the esper-thing. Also, this would lead to an interesting “there can only be one” dimension to magic-users; for example, the only magic-user that would be able to cast Flare in the entire world would be the magic-user that held the Bahamut item. And I love summoners. My favorite type of wizard other than necromancers.

The FF X model feels like a feat tree, and while (as you probably know) I’m not a big fan of feats, I’ve always thought that feat trees are a potentially elegant solution to the problem of coping with the plethora of feats.

Taichara put together a B/X Final Fantasy hack a while back, but pulled it because of copyright issues I think.

http://hamsterhoard.blogspot.com/2010/01/file-downloads.html

Now for some FF reminiscences. I’ve played 1, 4, 6, 7, 9 (only a bit), 10 (only a bit), 12, and 13 (only a bit, I should go back to it some time). 6, 7, and 4 are my favorites (in that order). FF 1 was the first video game I beat and probably one of the things that helped cement my love of RPGs (including the tabletop variety). 12 is fun and beautiful, but the plot is not very interesting to me (and feels like a Star Wars rip-off).