Setting - Medieval. Magic is something rare in humans although more common in other races. Cannons and rifles excist and technology that incorporates magic exists (Not Magitek though)
Art style would be similar to a fantasy painting. Graphics would be sort of cell-shaded like the cell-shaded Prince of Persia game.
Plot - A very old empire is crumbling and the world is entering chaos, the main characters are stuck in the middle of it all. It turns out that the entire world order is being thrown into chaos due to a conspiracy dating back to when the world was created. Or something like that.
Leveling and stats system would burrow from the best stat/leveling system I know in a video game (Heroes Of Might and Magic IV), but expand upon it more. When you level up, you get to select skills to improve in.
Depending on what skills you chose to advance in, your character will automatically be asigned to a class and gain bonuses specific to that class.
Relics from FFVI would make a return, and so would Espers, only they would be called something else, and you don't "equip" them, you "allign to their energies" or something like that to be able to level up in their magic and gain their spells. The alignment system would have lore support (*looks angrily at FFVIII junction GF system*)
Combat system would be intuitive yet deep, sort of like the FFVI combat system, only there would be more content (More stuff like "Zombie" and "Poison" and such) and prehaps to give it more depth yet not make it unnessecarily complex and intimidating (*looks at newer FF games*), a stance system could be incorporated, so that you could change the stance of any character at any given time during the battle to give them different buffs. "Guardian stance" for example could give a character better defence, and "Berzerker" stance could lower defence and boost attack and so-on so-on. Beginners could just give characters the stances they think suits them best and not worry about changing them (Like giving a knight character the guardian stance and an offensive character the berzerker stance), while advanced players could try to abuse the system by changing to aggressive stance just before a characters active time bar is fully charged, and switching to a defensive one afterwars to get the most out of the system. Managing such a system makes for a very high skill ceiling without compromising the skill floor due to the system being easy to understand. With a high skill ceiling, the main story could be made easy, but there should be many many mini-bosses that would recuire near-perfect control of the system so that there was a challenge for advanced players.
Lenght - Main story could be like what the longer FF games usually are. Although completing the game fully will take a very very long time.
I suppose Uematsu is the guy who made the music for FFVI? He would make the music. And he would be forced to incorporate a synth into the battle and boss tracks (because the synth sounds in FFVI boss music and FFVIII and FFVII boss music were awesome. And the battle theme would start with the classic bass sound that the battle theme in FFV FFVI and many other FF battle tracks starts with. And when you win, the classic win tune from the older games plays.
I must have really been overthinking about all of this some time in the past xD
I usually think about "How would I have made a game in the [Insert series] series"
I LOVE ICELAND!
