Sum-nom-nom-eners~

[NefGP]

tl;dr

I believe what Yoshi said was that SMN will have 4 pets, each aligned to a specific element that will channel the power of primals/use their essence.

So no, you don't actually get to summon them outright (which I still hate with a passion) but for all intents and purposes, we will get to use (a faction of) their power. So it'll be FFXI all over again.... minus the cool looking avatars.

*sigh*

Honestly I'd rather just have the job play the way it does in the offline games, calling them in for a big flashy effect but that creates a couple of annoying problems, the worst of which being the potential for abuse of spike damage via mass SMN. But there's ways around that, and we don't quite have the level of MP recovery available in this that we did in XI. So burning through all your MP too fast might actually punish a SMN (and it should).

The other problem is that it can seem a bit dull I suppose, if you're waiting for the right time to bring out a summon and relegated to using cross-class skills in between. Still, I'd much rather be able to use Hellfire, Diamond Dust, Megaflare etc. at will to give the party a decisive advantage by swinging the tide of battle - and look cool doing it - then be forced to play a gimpy pet again.

Summons are just one of those iconic elements of FF and while I can appreciate Yoshi's idea of making them unique, I still don't like relegating a staple of the series like that to being a reward for the privileged few.