This doesn't feel like building your character though, lacks permanence and can be easily exploited. In example, game has several weapon types. With solid (permanent) character building you better specialize in some weapon. If such choice can be redone at any moment, weapon skills become useless. You can re-specialize at any time if you find weapon, you aren't familiar with.

Same with magic schools and especially non-combat skills, which you can specialize in only when you need them.

Ability to outlevel/overgear enemies (by going through some respawns) was always THE way of making up for poor character planning or tactical approach, and it also greatly prolongs game life. It also gives the freedom of choosing your own level of challenge - want it to be hard, you go for low level challenge, want it to be easy - you gain some more levels.

I personally don't like the idea of having to choose a weapon type. It can work if the weapon types are sharply differentiated (like in Lords of Xulima), but works poorly in other game, like Baldur's Gate 2. In BG2, one problem is that you are essentially required to make permanent choices about which weapons to use before you know what magical weapons there are. (I actually made a topic on the Baldur's Gate subforum where I gave my criticisms about the game's way of handling character creation and weapon proficiencies.)

By the way, what's your opinion on the Strike skills in Lords of Xulima? Which do you recommend for a Soldier or Paladin? (My Arcane Soldier is doing rather well with Flame/Frost strike. Extra damage + 10+ burning or 5 second freeze? Yes please.)

Also, are you using the Talisman of Golot in your current playthrough? I am currently playing without the DLC installed (though I do have it).

I am fine without having to choose skills during leveling. But having respecialization simply defeats their purpose. I like how it was done in MM VI, you never had that feeling of skill-point starvation and there was always the use for skill-points.
Burning might be more effective, as it will stick to the enemy and it can stack. Keep in mind, strikes are subject to hit chance and if your characters have low Speed, ability to stun enemies is largely irrelevant. I'd recommend prioritizing on Aura of Protection first, then all other skills.
Yes, I do. It isn't really that much game-breaking, especially if to save Power Spheres till the end. I use it for bonus stat-points (40% option), so far it is around 1 stat point every 2-3 levels. I neglect getting skill points, as you can buy 100 of them from trainer (20 per trainer, at gradually increasing price), some more - from various altars, and they have effective cap unlike stats.

Out of curiosity, is it actually possible to max out every skill on a character?

Another thing to note: some characters need more skill points than others. My Arcane Soldier, for instance, needs very few skill points to be effective.

Edit: My stance on respecialization is that it makes it easier to play around with the game and experiment. I also like the idea of choosing your setup based on what you expect to encounter in the next area, or changing your setup to deal with a tricky boss fight.

I also think more coarse-grained selections might be better than fine-grained selections. For instance, if most skills had only one level.

One other thing: Having speed give you more actions is, IMO, too powerful.

Basically, field with cereals gives you 130 gold once every 48 in-game hours. So you can buy stuff "indefinitely" and sacrifice it for EXP, gaining more levels...

In my cheated save I have maxed all useful skills rather fast (at Lv.70 -80 or so). Eventually I maxed out all skills, so they started accumulating without ability to choose anything.
People also say that Arcane Soldier is very bad at high levels.
When I played World of Warcraft, they had exact change from semi-permanent talent tree builds to situational. It made for very boring and sterile gameplay, those new situational talents could as well not be there.
You are doing it right by not looking into Bestiary from Deluxe Edition. Without much spoilers I'll tell you that enemies gain in speed very fast. Without investing into Speed, they'll be going first AND making couple turns per each of your own. Also Speed increases evasion and it increases duration of beneficial buffs (by increasing amount of turns you benefit from them). It scales just that good. With low Speed i also see no way to complete Arena. Did you try Arena yet btw?

Other stats are also useful, but they don't give as much benefits. You will miss a lot despite putting points into Str and Agi each level and won't gain much noticeable damage benefits. And remember that high enemy speed works other way around for you.

E.g., mushroom fight - you don't get first turn and shrooms might quickly catch you in cycle of hurting without giving you any chance to break through. With high speed, you can react and use Song of Stunning and quickly burn through one of them before you are nuked away.

I haven't tried the Arena.

My stance on Speed is that the stat either shouldn't have existed at all, or it should not have affected how often you get to act. As it is, when playing rationally, Speed is essentially a mandatory stat. To me, it feels like, even though the game gives you 2 stat points at level up, you only really get 1 to put in the stat of your choice.

I'm OK with having high speed characters getting their first turn first. I am not, however, OK with high speed characters getting more turns. In turn-based games, turns are way too powerful a resource to allow it to be affected by a stat.

In many RPGs, the most powerful skills are those that give you extra turns. There is a reason Quick is so expensive in Final Fantasy 5 and 6. (Even then, FF5 has an overpowered version of Haste that is cheap to cast.) In Baldur's Gate 2, Time Stop is ridiculously powerful if you aren't fighting an immune enemy (and may be useful even if you are). In Final Fantasy Tactics and Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, it's possible to deny enemies their turns foever. In Romancing SaGa 2, the Quicktime spell can trivialize what is often considered one of the hardest RPG final bosses.

Try it, I am interested to see at what stage you'll stop :)
Problem isn't with speed being overpowered (I like it how speed works in this game and FF X, adds another vector of combat flow), but with other stats. Strength provides way too little combat benefits and no matter how much you focus on Agility, you still seem to miss a lot. Energy gives too little PP in comparison to cost of higher end spells and Constitution has high diminishing returns on its own.

There should be factor to decide who goes first - you or enemy. If to leave it to RNG, then you risk being decimated by enemy's nukes without chance to react. If to make it into a stat (Speed) it will quickly become useless if the only thing it decides - who goes first. E.g., if enemy has 1001 Speed, and you - 600, all your 600 Speed are useless in changing the combat outcome even by 1 damage point. If enemy has 1 Speed and you - 1001, that 999 Speed is also useless in changing combat outcome.
In Final Fantasies with ATB high speed isn't exactly that powerful. Exception is FF XII, because of real pause and ability queue, so casting Hastega becomes really helpful. But so is casting Protect and Shell (and many other buffs/debuffs, FF XII is quite rich on those).
FF Tactics had very unusual ways of maximizing combat capabilities. Speed alone won't help if other stats are bad/low :)

Actually, there are two situations in the FF series where high speed actually is that powerful.

1. If you do not have control of the party member. My favorite example of this is in the DS version of Final Fantasy 4. Have Rydia sing Hastemarch (one reason I always give her Bardsong) and have Rosa cast Berserk on front row characters, adding Haste for good measure. As long as the enemy doesn't counter physical attacks, the enemy won't survive long. Works really well against certain bosses, including the final boss. Other examples include things like Dance and Rage in FF6 or Vincent's limit breaks in FF7.

2. Final Fantasy V's ATB implementation actually has an interesting feature: When it is time to enter a command, the game will pause briefly. Hence, if you can enter the command fast enough, the time cost of having to enter a command becomes zero. If you want to see this, try setting the battle speed to 6. (This pause is the only thing affected by battle speed; setting it to 1 removes it entirely and is actually not the best choice for a speedrun.)

As a side note, was it really necessary for FF7's version of Mighty Guard to grant Haste status?

Of course every tiny bit helps, but Haste in FFs with ATBs was mostly outweighted by reaction times (which becomes stupid in FF VIII, especially if you can't get Limit Break out of Aura fast enough) and by long animations in some cases (e.g., ATB bar keeps filling during many spells in wait-mode of FF IX, which is useful to regen massive amounts of HP...). Other stats were also very useful, you just didn't have much control over rate of their increase until lv.70+. I use middle speed setting and not touching it for the sake of real intended game balance. That pause is barely existent on middle setting in SNES version (so need to mash buttons fast).

By intended ATB flow I mean the following. In FF XII certain creatures get their Charge Timer is reduced to 0 on low health so they attack non-stop as long as animation allows (in some cases it looks like even faster than animation thanks to increased combo rate at low health). by changing battle speed to fast you are effectively increasing characters' speed multiple times. I look at it as exploit, especially when you can issue commands without loss of ATB time in FF XII (which makes it best ATB system in FF series). Similar, but less pronounced situations exist in other FFs with ATB.
FF VI-IX didn't have serious accent on combat mechanics. Vast majority of battles were far beyond extremely easy. Compare welcome enemy Goblin in FF 5. who hits you for 4 damage against your 36 HP, and "MP" in FF 7, who hits you for 4-7 damage and you have 302 HP (then you level up after first fight and Barret joins with another 300+ HP...). Haste here, Haste there - it barely changes anything.

Here's one interesting tidbit about Final Fantasy 5. There is a first level Time Magic spell usually called "Speed" (but at least one translation, I think the PSX one, calls it "Drag") that actually changes the battle speed to 5 when cast, giving you more time to enter commands. Try it! (You do need to go through that basement with nearly invincible level 20 enemies with (IIRC) 666 HP to get it, though.)

If your battle speed is set at 6, casting this spell will actually set the speed to 5, reducing the delay. If the battle speed is already at 5, it will do nothing.

I think the problem of Arcane Soldiers is the design of their strike skills. If kept at level 1, the skills are cheap and become quite effective when used with a strong weapon. If leveled up, however, the cost increases drastically, while the power barely increases. Really, the elemental strike skills' power should have been based on the skill level, and the cost should have increased more slowly. (I would also have made those skills have only 10 levels like the other strikes.)

By the way, for an Arcane Soldier, which would you say is better for late game wounding: Wounding Strike (21 skill points over 10 levels) or Hammer of the Destroyer (16 skill points over 5 levels)?

Yeah I've heard about that one spell. I doubt in its usefulness. My perfect walkthrough of FF 5 is on hold now though, just not enough time for all games :/

That one enemy was Garkimasra which was retranslated in FF V on PSX/GBA all wrong :) It reappears as Garchimacera in FF XII, but it is MUCH weaker there (its more powerful variants are surprisingly meant hough, one of the most powerful variants is boss Diabolos).
Chance to hit with them increases. Lv.1 skills miss a lot and are far less effective (only 1 wound for Lv.1 Wounding Strike).
Hammer of the Destroyer is quite expensive, makes same 6 Wounds, just adds some minor damage on top of that. But being spell attack it always hits, unless you critically fail or enemy has Wounds resistance.

Remember that combat is a lot about efficiency (at least on Old-School Veteran), otherwise you might waste all your nukes before combat is finished, and later fights tend to drag for quite a time. 30 PP is 15 levels worth of level-ups for Arcane Soldier. So couple uses and Arcane Soldier is without PP (unless you invest into Energy and Meditation, but it will cripple Arcane Soldier).

You could load up your save just to experiment with things.

One thing of note is that, with memory cursor and a battle speed setting other than 1, you can repeat actions before time continues just by holding A. This can be useful, for example, when stealing the bow from the bird enemy in Dragon Valley in the second world, or stealing from Shinryu (just make sure you can run away before Tidal Wave). I am referring to Flame/Frost strike. At skill level 1, my Arcane Soldier can already do 10+ elemental damage with a successful hit, with Flame Strike doing that amount of burning and I've seen Frost Strike do as much as 5 seconds worth of freeze. I can't see these skills getting much stronger through leveling without breaking the game. (Apparently, on earlier Early Access builds of the game, Freeze Strike could freeze its target for as much as 50 seconds, which is clearly not balanced.)

Accuracy isn't enough to compensate for the fact that these skills drastically increase in cost at level up. As I have mentioned, skill points are not a problem for Arcane Soldier. All you need to do is invest in Swords (or Bows) every level and learn Frost Strike, and you're golden. This gives you plenty of points to invest in other skills you might want.

I see Learning, Bodybuilding, Immunity, Fast Reflexes + you forgot Armors. Basically Learning + Swords = 4 Skill points already. Also what I meant by Hammer being expensive, is its PP cost. Mages get much larger PP pools, i keep investing into meditation and Energy each level up (with Speed), and they still run out of PP very fast. Similar thing with Paladin, attempting to make caster out of him is doomed to fail, as he will never have enough PP to do sustainable healing.

On other hand, all Arcane Soldier special are quite expensive PP-wise. Probably has to do something with this class being underpowered at high levels according to what people say.

Only if you level them up. The elemental strike skills scale with the weapon's base damage, so you don't need to level them up. Level 1 Flame Strike does nice damage and burn for only 4 PP (I have seen it do 10+ points of burn with my current weapon), and Level 1 Frost Strike does decent damage and freeze for 6 PP.

As a side note, there is a way to deal with PP costs for a mage: Don't use powerful spells in battles that may last a while. Use Hammer of the Destroyer (not Meteor) to wound the enemies you're fighting and Flames or Ice Shards if you are looking for damage. (Against a single enemy, Flames is more efficient than Fireball or Inferno.) If an enemy has less than around 30 HP remaining, use Stone Arrow to reliably finish it off. Some players report getting good use out of Brittle Armor.

I once had an interesting softlock when playing Final Fantasy 6. I was fighting one of those ninja enemies inside the Zone eater, and the enemy killed two of my characters, leaving only Gau and Umaro alive. Gau was using the Magic Urn rage (he had a weapon equipped thanks to a glitch, but it wasn't a spell casting one) and Umaro had the Rage Ring but not the Blizzard Orb. The enemy was invisible. Therefore:

I could not win the battle, as my physical attacks couldn't hit and the only spell used, Cure 3, only targeted party members.

I could not lose the battle, as the enemy kept using elemental attacks, healing my characters. Gau's random Cure 3 casts further increased my survivability.

I could not run away, because the enemy was marked as one you can't run from.

Problem with this is that some enemies won't wait when you peel them off and Cleric has finite PP (till specific point) and throughput. You can wait and slowly peel enemies, but enemies won't wait.

Also, it seems Level is far more important in this game than just more HP, PP, stat and skill points. Looks like it also serves as multiplier to damage taken (and probably damage done too). Poison from Rasmagas was supposed to deal 6 damage against 0 Resistance, but it was dealing 7 to character with 10 resistance (poison damage didn't seem to vary). Game files are obscure on this, seems that main parts of damage formulas are hardcoded.
Gau was causing all kinds of bugs in FF 6. Occasionally I get urge to play FF VI after hearing Warring Triad BGM in Dissidia, but it quickly goes away after I remember amount of glitchy stuff in that game.