FFXII's "License Board": Making the Sphere Grid look lika a good idea!

[Dr. Doom]

I just read up on FFXII's experiance (or lack thereof) system, titled the "lisence board", and I must say, I'm kind of not looking forward to it after what I saw. The following is from Gamespot's latest hands-on preview.

Originally Posted by Gamespot

Final Fantasy XII also introduces a brand-new upgrade system called the license board. Accessible from the main menu, the license board looks like a giant checkerboard for each character. Each space on the board, when purchased using license points, will enable characters to learn certain skills or enable them to use certain weapons and armor. If you purchase the "White Magick 1" square for Vaan, he'll be able to learn the spells "cure" and "blindna", which heal allies and blind enemies, respectively. If you purchase the "Swords 1" square, he'll be able to wield the broadsword and longsword weapons. The interesting and sort of counterintuitive thing about the license board is that it grants you the ability to learn skills, but not the skills themselves. If you want Vaan to cast cure, you still have to purchase the cure spell from a shop before he can cast it. Likewise, if you bought a longsword at the weapon store and want him to use it, he can't equip it until you've also purchased the proper license. We ended up hoarding both money and license points to ensure we'd be ready to pick up the skills and items we wanted.

Each time you purchase a license, you unlock the licenses in adjoining squares. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to where the squares are placed, except that weapons and armor are in a different section of the license board than spells and abilities. There are also special squares on the boards for "quickenings" and "espers." A quickening is a special attack that's specific to each character, and there are 18 quickening spaces scattered around the board. The trick is that only one character can learn a quickening on a given space (while the characters have their own boards, the layout of the licenses on each board is almost the same), so if you purchase a quickening for one character, that spot on the board disappears on all the other boards. Esper squares appear when you defeat monsters called espers in the main game--these are the Final Fantasy summon monsters. Just like with quickenings, only one character can learn to summon a given esper, so once someone purchases an esper square, it disappears from the other characters' boards. There's almost a bewildering variety of licenses to learn, which should allow for pretty free customization of your characters, assuming you have enough points.

Even the sphere grid wasn't that bad once you got into it (even thought I'll take the good old EXP system any day), this just looks like more trouble than it's worth. Of course, all this is assuming that it encompasses your characters' growth and not just skills... I guess I equate it more to the sphere grid than I would something like the materia system which gave you all you abilities but had nothing to do with your level. But yeah, I'm not too enthusiastic about this right now.

EDIT: Bloody hell, I spelled license wrong in the subject. Can someone correct it? ;_;