Summoners have been a staple of the Final Fantasy series for decades. More often than not, they’re the spiciest magic users in your party, calling forth supernatural entities to dole out splashy elemental attacks, like Shiva for ice and Ramuh for lightning. Depending on the game, these monsters are known as Espers, Materia, Eikons, or just capital-S Summons. Whatever we’re calling them, they create a compelling link between gameplay and narrative that’s been persistent throughout Final Fantasy from the early ’90s all the way up to the modern era. They’re also a clever way to justify some of the series’ most jaw-dropping plot twists.
Final Fantasy 4 came out for the SNES in 1991, and it isn’t the first game in the series to feature summoning (that’d be the 8-bit FF3). However, it is the earliest one I’ve played, so we’re starting there. Early on, our hero Cecil does an oopsie and unleashes a bunch of fire monsters on the bucolic village of Mist. A young girl named Rydia is the sole survivor, and she makes a last stand for her hometown by summoning the earth-shattering Titan. It doesn’t work out well for her.
You drag Rydia around as a sort-of child hostage at first, and though she fights alongside you, she starts at a super-low level and her magic stinks. Even in a game full of wussy party members you cannot bench, you will resent wasting so many turns healing this dead-weight kid. Eventually she forgives Cecil and joins your party in a non-hostage way, then learns some moderately useful summons and black magic spells. Shortly thereafter, she’s swallowed by Leviathan during an ocean voyage and presumed dead. (Party members “die” all the time in Ff4and Rydia isn’t the first or the last.)
Later in the game, Cecil and pals are getting their socks rocked off in an unwinnable fight against the prolific girlfriend-stealer Golbez. At the last second, a Mist Dragon blasts Golbez with frost to turn the tide. There’s a dramatic, hell-yeah music change, and Rydia returns to your party for good, only she’s an adult now. Turns out, she’s been living in the Land of Summons where time works “differently” and she’s now pals with Leviathan, even though he recently gobbled her up like a glizzy. (She’s forgiving to a fault.) From this point on, Rydia’s the best character in your party, able to wield the game’s most deadly summons and black magic. Her return also opens up a ton of cool side quests and megabosses for you to recruit as summons, like Bahamut and Odin, making Ff4 one of the first games in the series with a hearty helping of optional content.
Leviathan also has an appetite for the ladies in 2016’s Final Fantasy 15. But this time around, summons aren’t content to challenge you to a turn-based gentleman’s duel. Instead, they are world-devouring terrors that our hero Prince Noctis must corral into submission through a series of harrowing quicktime events.
For the game’s first half, Noctis and his three childhood besties — the meathead philosopher Gladio, the cheerful twink Prompto, and the posh chef Ignis — have been on an extended bachelor-party road trip in the prince’s flashy convertible. But when they arrive in Altissia, which is essentially Final Fantasy Venice, the happy adventure of the Chocobros falls spectacularly to shit. Noctis’s long-distance betrothed Lunafreya summons Leviathan, and the sea serpent attempts to eat her. Once rebuffed, Leviathan settles for destroying the entire city. As Noctis is distracted by fighting the beast, our big baddie Ardyn sneaks in to give Lunafreya a good old-fashioned Aerith gut stab. Suffice to say, the wedding is off.
After the disaster in Altissia, Ignis is permanently blinded and Noctis enters a prolonged blue period. During the dungeon sequence that immediately follows, Ignis insists upon accompanying you, and this once-hardassed ally constantly lags behind and bumbles into the path of oncoming enemies. The older brother figure and de facto leader of the bunch, Ignis was previously your best magic user. But from this point forward, you’re increasingly reliant on the summoning magic that’s only available to Noctis, and the game’s familiar combat loop suddenly becomes far more difficult. What’s more, if you don’t proactively protect Ignis, Gladio berates Noctis for sulking and generally being a self-absorbed nepo baby. FF15 has its quirks and flaws, but this sequence feels memorable, moving, and genuinely earned. From this point on, Noctis is forced to grow the heck up and embrace the responsibilities that come with his royal lineage. And the game’s best sequence couldn’t exist without summoning as both a plot point and combat mechanic.
Even as each Final Fantasy game has its own distinct feel in terms of setting and characters, the link between summoning and storytelling has been consistent throughout the series’ history. (Pick any number between four and 16, and you could find plenty of examples to make this blog work.) This form of magic is more than just another video game skill — it’s a way for Final Fantasy to explore the intersection of humanity and the divine, the porous border between the ephemeral and the eternal. Summons are to Final Fantasy what the Triforce is to Zelda: a mythological archetype that can be revised, rebooted, and rewritten in countless ways. And it’s one of the things that keeps me coming back to the series, again and again.
