Quote Originally Posted by Akiza View Post
In single player Final Fantasy games players controlled five players and the summons were as strong as a player character.
Most FFs give you 4 characters. A few give 5. Others only gave 3.

In most FFs, summoners were simply aoe nuke spells (or an aoe buff or aoe heal/res). It didn't summon the entity as a separate character you could control. FFX is the first one I can think of where the summoned being is used directly rather than "summoned for one turn only" and it was stronger than the party as a whole, in theory (depended on the exact summon used).