Quote Originally Posted by Daralii View Post
Summons have been controllable entities since FFX, so over 20 years at this point.
And to add onto this, the only games where this was reverted to single powerful summons before EW were Bravely Default and Bravely Second. And that's only because those games were styled in the vein of FF3. Even then Summoner in those games had a good bit more going for it than just shitting out a big DPS spell or three then running OOM. With a stat distribution that complemented Black Magic very well as well as a ton of abilities to not only amplify summons but do other things like a last summon on death or raise max MP. They also got combined with Conjurer in Bravely Second so they now acted like a hybrid between Evoker and Summoner from FF3, able to apply both huge buffs and huge damage while also gaining most of the nicer abilities both classes had. Yokai also was a summoner type class but it could shit out status affects and other massively debilitating stuff alongside the -ja spell summons it had.

TL;DR. Big cutscene boom then OOM SMN hasn't been a thing since real early FF. Even recent spinoffs improved on it heavily, too.