Been oh-so-long since I played this game. Really awesome game as mentioned before. I never got all those summons and fancy junk. My general strategy for playing RPGs is to simply level up to level 99 and then have my characters so strong that I can just whoop and enemy's ass
I recently conquered "Xenosaga Episode 1: Der Wille Zur Macht" in this same fashion. FFVII took me around 80 hours, and Sephiroth was really easy
