You get Ramuh earlier than Shiva and Ifrit so they probably upped Shiva and Ifrit abit to help you catch up. The same is said with Shoat. Really the first 4 espers (Ramuh, Kirin, Siren, Stray to my memory) are just there for you to grasp the concept of leveling up magic.
Further more the point of the esper system is that you can only equip one to a character at a time and therefore only learn a certain set of magic at a time, with Phoenix you learn cure3 and Fire3 faster than anyone else but at the same time Phoenix is alot harder to obtain and you cant learn Bolt3 or Ice3 from him meaning you have to grind some more. AND at the same time while you grind magic your level will be increasing and upping stats that are useless to the character being used at the time (Unless you train at fanatics tower) so you have to make sacrifices in that respect too. |