By the twelve, crafting made relevant again, more variety in equipment!

[Surian]

Looking back on some of the older games Square(-Enix) created, i dusted off my old Playstation and greatly appreciated Vagrant Story again with all it's magnificent crafting/weapon mechanics. And it got me thinking.

Everyone now has pretty much the same looking gear. Sure there's relic/allegan stuff, along with the primal things now, but other than that it all looks a bit bland and the same.

Leveling up Conjurer, from level 1 to 50 you basicly exchange two weapon models every couple of levels till endgame. Archer's bows are merely recolored woods of the same model. Lancer has some tridents, but mostly everything looks the same. Lets not even bring the dullness of yet another gladius or longsword to question.

So here's my suggestion.

Weapon pieces and the ability to take weapons apart and put them back together with diffirent pieces, much like what good old SE did way back with Vagrant Story. It only held 90 diffirent weapons, but the interchangability of it made it diverse beyond belief.

Basicly all weapons would consist of three pieces of a Hilt(grip), a guard and a blade part.

Not only would this open up a path for more diverse looking equipment without all too much effort in the coding (basicly three model templates locked together). Naturally some weapons like Relics would not be customizable, but other than those restrictions it can seemlessly be implemented in the current system, since if your character were to now have a Goblin Longsword equipped, the new system would simply say that the weapon consists of a Goblin Longsword Blade, Goblin Longsword Grip and Goblin Longsword Guard or whatever intuitive name you wish to give them. There's even room above or below the Materia slots to display the pieces the weapon consists of, should take more than 3 icons, a name next to it and maybe displaying stats.

You could for instance give a weapon the grip of a gladius, the winged guard of the cobalt sword as well as for instance the nifty long blade on the Goblin Longsword.

It would also make it possible to have rare and unique looking pieces crafted or dropped from monsters and dungeons. Rather than only flatout giving you a weapon (this should stay in ofcourse), any other pieces can now be combined into one with crafting as well.

It wouldnt even make crafting troublesome, since nothing would change to existing recipes. Just the weapon that comes out of that recipe can be taken apart and pieced together with other things.

Long story short:
- Let (nearly) all weapons consist of 3 parts: Blade, Grip, Guard.
- Let us take apart and put together combinations of those 3 parts for unique looks/stats at will.
- Let monsters/dungeons not just drop weapons, but unique and rare pieces as well.
- Let some of those pieces be craftable as well.