Please, stop opening old wounds! T-T
Vue imprimable
The early game Death Trick involves using an eidolon to knock an Adamantoise down, debuffing the crap out of it and then spamming Death and hope for RNGesus to be with you.
Death can only be used if Vanille is the party leader. Only the party leader can summon. As such, Hecatoncheir is definitely used in the Death Trick.
The reality of design is simple. Egi's can't block the view of other players and they can't demean the original primals. Shrinking Garuda down does make her look laughable and not threatening. Having them the size of FFXI Avatar would block players view and might miss damage markers and such.
Having said that Garuda's Egi does need work. I would love to see players re-imagining of the Egi's using the two guidelines that I posted above.
This is so bafflingly wrong. There are many great summons in FFVII, most of which don't take multiple minutes of cast time. The ONLY context in which Knights of the Round is the "only viable" one is the Weapon superbosses. GFs do exist mostly for junctioning, but many are very useful in battle. I like how you ignored FFX and FFIV and entirely since it's a big deal both narratively and gameplay-wise for Yuna and Rydia.
The summons in 7 were viable, but they weren't better than using regular magic to more quickly and efficiently take down enemies. Many of the summons in 7, 8, and especially 10 are hardly better than just spamming heavy thrust in this game. 10's summons, while important from a narrative perspective, were significantly more annoying to deal with outside of the special "summon" battles Yuna had.
I already addressed story purposes. I like how you ignored that.
-Yuna does as much damage with Holy as Aeons tend to do. Not to mention the advantage of having the other characters around. And frankly, given how the game is set up, she can hit for 99,999 damage with normal attacks if you take the time to develop your characters like that.
-Rydia's Black magic is as strong and less MP/ATB intensive than her summons.
-Summon materia makes your characters weaker, and barely outdamage physical attacks early on. Magic + All materia combinations puts out similar AoE damage without as hard of a hit to your characters HP AND are available much earlier than the summons. You can sorta make a case for the Bahamut materias, but they're one shot burst damage. The only reason Knight's of the Round is viable is because it does more damage than Omnislash, allowing Mimic shenanigans to happen.
-If you know how to Junction, actually using GFs becomes a waste of time. Aura -> Limit Spam is vastly superior to any summon in the game. And it's entirely possible to do this before Disc One ends.
You guys are never happy, you ask for something they give you something and still you don't thank them instead just attack them more.