Over the course of Final Fantasy XIV‘s run, we have encountered a lot of primals. There are the seven who    are fought in the main story of the relaunched game, of course, plus Bahamut and Phoenix over in the Coil series. Then in Heavensward we got Ravana, Bismarck, Alexander, King Thordan and the Knights of the Round, the Warring Triad, and technically Shinryu. (He first appeared in the patches.) Stormblood has Lakshmi, Susano, Tsukiyomi, plus arguably the Ivalice series gives us a few more and… you get the idea, right? There are a lot of primals.
Summoners – the job whose whole concept is summoning primals – can summon five of them. The first five, even. Oh, and now a variant of one of those five.
The thing about Summoner is that it has, in many ways, always been a bit of a problem for FFXIV from a design perspective. Not because I think there’s ever really been a question of whether or not Summoner should be in the game; indeed, Summoner as a concept has become so iconic that every single game after the one that introduced the concept (Final Fantasy III) has featured Summoner in some capacity. Rather, it’s a problem because of how FFXIV works as a game… and how Summoner should work, as well.
Summoner was added to FFXIV as part of the game’s relaunch as A Realm Reborn, and it makes sense because Summoner was one of the most widely requested jobs to be added to the game. While FFXIV had already made it clear that summoning was a Big Deal, it’s also, you know, a Final Fantasy game. It’s a big deal to the point that several games have made it the foundation of their core mechanics.
And turning Summoner into a pet job did, in fact, make sense as well. Summoner had been a pet job in Final Fantasy XI, and while that had resulted in some serious mechanical issues which are beyond the scope of this particular column, the foundational idea makes sense. Several prior games (most notably Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy X) had already toyed with the idea, and indeed the series has always recognized the idea that if you’re summoning magical creatures, some of those creatures can and should be characters in their own right.
But therein also lies a problem: Summoners cover a lot of ground.
In broad strokes, summons for Summoners have always belonged to three different categories. The first category are either creatures of animal intelligence or with roughly human-ish intellect but not a whole lot of magical power. Think of the MMO incarnations of Carbuncle, the older games with starter summons like Sylph and Chocobo, or even a Scholar’s faeries. These creatures are basically magical familiars.
Another tier up are creatures with far greater power than mortals and human-level intellect, like Ifrit, Shiva, and Ramuh. These have frequently been portrayed as either lending humans a portion of their power or characters whose autonomy must be respected in some fashion. This is, in fact, the whole heart of Summoner as a concept: You get beings to loan you their power. Also fine.
But then you have beings like Bahamut, Alexander, Odin, and so forth – creatures that are intensely powerful and (in single-player games) come in nearly at the end of your playthrough when the king of all dragons decides to let you summon him at a point that makes logical sense. You should not be able to summon Bahamut and just have him hang out while you check your retainers in town. That just… doesn’t feel right.
The result is that Summoner as a pet job works fine with the first category, all right with the second, and not at all with the third. But the iconic summons of the series more or less exclusively belong to the second and third category. So you have to figure out how to make a pet class work where the most iconic pets are only available in brief spurts.
What compounds this even further is the fact that in single-player games, it’s fine if your Summoner has 15 different summons and only uses three or four of them by the end of the game. This does not work as well in an MMORPG wherein you both expect your basic rotation to stay the same and the designers probably do not want to design a whole other visual element to your abilities because you have three new summons that replace your old one. And what happens if there are other summons along the way?
Oh, and let’s not forget that one of the design team’s quirks is that they just don’t seem to like pet classes very much. I don’t want to drill down into this too much; people have used old quotes by Yoshida to justify that he has some kind of hate-on for Summoner, which seems entirely off-base when that’s not how the game is designed. But it seems clear that things like pet AI have never been a top priority and that problems like people summoning their tanking pet were considered an issue right from the start.
The egi-glamour system, when it was introduced, seemed like an obvious solution to the problem. But it still didn’t work that way because instead of taking the opportunity to let Summoners branch out beyond three very specific summons, the team did not want to do the work to design new visuals for one job or just didn’t have the spare time to do so. So far from really changing anything, Summoner is stuck in the same place as it always was, with three otherwise long-surpassed primals having an outsized importance for basically no reason.
Don’t tell me they were important to the Allagans or some nonsense. The Warring Triad is right there.
The real problem here, of course, is that the changes that would need to be made for Summoner are changes that would have a larger ripple effect. If you have to ask why Summoner gets to have Leviathan, Lakshmi, and Tsukiyomi to cycle through, you have to also start asking why Black Mages can’t change their elemental alignments. And those are good questions, but that’s also a huge amount of work that does not appear to be in the pipeline.
So Summoner feels… well… kind of not like you’d expect Summoner to feel beyond “you’re still summoning, at least,” and there’s not really a good solution to that. It makes sense to have it in the game, and I know exactly why it was added so early in the game’s life cycle. But it also seems clear to me that the team has never totally known what to do with Summoner beyond needing to have Summoner, and the nature of the game doesn’t play as nicely with Summoner as it does with some other jobs.
Still, can we at least get Alphinaud’s alternate Carbuncle models? The work is already done on those.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to take a look at the ways that patch 7.1 has had its content spread out even further than normal and ask whether it worked out as an experiment – or, perhaps more relevantly, whether this was the right time for that sort of experiment in the first place.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
