When I was about eleven years old, a friend gave me my first hands-on experience with a console RPG, Final Fantasy 5. I had no idea what was going on in the game, but the presentation, music, art, and talk about the many different character classes and abilities piqued my interest. One aspect of the game in particular that my friend showed me that got me excited was the ability to summon "espers" like Bahamut and Odin. My friend didn't explain to me what was going on though so I had to just go off of what I saw; your four party members on the right side of the screen fading into white, then a huuuge dragon appears with fire blowing out of the right side.

As a kid not knowing ANYTHING about the game, I suppose it makes sense to just make assumptions, which my first was that the characters fused together to make a dragon. Summoning familiars, imps, spirits, etc. I suppose, was not really something normal in my childhood life, but Voltron was! -not only that, but where did the party members go? I guess it makes sense that maybe they became the dragon, kinda like how Prince Adam becomes He-man. Adam's there- flash of white- He-man? What happened to Prince Adam?

As cool as the characters combining sounded to me, I was still at a loss at how it worked, like how they would control the dragon. I still have no idea how the Voltron pilots or Power Rangers control their mecha. Does each character have reign over a limb? I don't see how that would work out though.

Anyhow, as most everybody knows, summoning in the Final Fantasy series is not fusing, BUT, it is present in the Breath of Fire series. -and though I still have no idea how it works in BoF1 and 2, it was still a pretty cool thing to have. =)