too much versus too little

It's a pretty heavy game. Right now you have a top-down mechanic, where keeping your heroes alive benefits your troops. Can the troops conversely affect the heroes - can they attack the hero if there are no other troops on the board? If so, how do Troop attacks vary from Hero attacks - so that the Hero can effectively fight off the enemy.
As it stands, the win condition is to kill the hero. The troops seem incredibly secondary to me - yay, my hero gives all my soldiers +3 to killing your soldiers, but that doesn't help me kill your hero... and your hero is currently bending me over a table.

Also, how do characters earn experience, how quickly do they earn it, and how much do they need before they level up? There's no need to have 10 levels if the game will end before you actually reach the final level. In my card-based RPG, my characters are very similar to your heroes - they level up from 1 to 10, and earn skills and gain equipment along the way. However, it's a cooperative game that doesn't end until at least one of the characters reaches lvl10 and unlocks the final boss for the players to defeat. Leveling could take forever, so I made it so that most of the time, you will gain a level after every fight, so that the game doesn't bog down and can be played in one sitting.

You have a very complex leveling system right now. I imagine that all of the skill benefits for each path are laid out right on the path diagram, which to me is about the size of a 2'x3' poster to keep track of it all. Can you imagine a player sifting through 3 or 4 of these posters, plus managing his deck, tracking combat, bringing in Summons, and running an economy? The table alone would be so crowded with diagrams and rules that it would dwarf the actual Card vs. Card game area.

I would start by either dropping the card mechanics of the game and turning it into a book-and-miniature based game like Warhammer or Warmachine, or drastically slimming down the leveling mechanic. Perhaps each player must choose each character's path *before* the game, choosing which skill to gain at each level and organizing them into an unshuffled deck of cards for each character. First level up, draw the first cards from the top of the deck, next level up, draw the next card. This makes out-of-the-game planning a very large undertaking, but at least it keeps the game simple. It's still a little cluttered, since the player will be sitting on 2/3 decks for their characters, but at least it's better than having to manage several massive charts.

If the troops do nothing, I would get rid of them and focus more heavily on the Summons and the way that they bump characters out of the action for a moment. This of course could bog down the game, unless you reverted to a sort of Yu-Gi-Oh mechanic where damage not stopped by the Defense of the target monster over-flowed onto the character who summoned it (which is adding a lot more math to the game, making it faster to play but more 'dense' in terms of rules and concentration).

My girlfriend and her uncle are both huge fans of Final Fantasy, having played it all the way up from 1 to 13-2. I've always seen the way that it is card-based, and I think that the mechanic really fits the console games. However, they are games where a single player can have access to literally *thousands* of cards over the course of the game. This number drops drastically during a battle, but you don't feel the full effects of a level-up *during* a battle. If you translated FF directly over to cards, you would firstly have HUGE stacks of physical cards (I don't know if you've seen what 500 cards looks like -it's kind of like asking people if they've seen a million dollars laid out in bills) per player, and secondly, you would have a LOT of mathematics that are usually worked out by computer programming (I'm an Elder Scrolls fan, and I used to have 2 and 3 page equations for the likelihood that I would successfully enchant an item in Morrowind - no lie).

You are forced to trade off detail for playability. The more accurate your portrayal of FF10, the harder it is to actually play your game. The easier it is to play the game, the less true it is to the original. So the question inevitably becomes - if your game offers less accuracy and/or less playabiltiy, why not just play the console game?
My card-rpg started as a direct clone of D&D4e. Eventually I realized that I wanted a game that could actually be finished in less time than it took to play a D&D campaign, so I cut a LOT of stuff out of the design. 66% of the levels in fact, almost 90% of the powers, over 50% of the weapons and equipment, and completely reworked the D20-based combat system to work on a colors-and-symbols D6 system. The game was drastically simpler, but people love it, until you tell that it is meant to replace 4e. Then they all start ranting that 4e is superior because it has more options and more customization and more strategic combat etc etc etc... but they just had more fun playing my game in 90 minutes than they've ever had playing a D&D campaign for 90 days. Don't bind yourself to FF10 as the pinnacle of what you hope to achieve. Instead, try to convey the same feeling of white-knuckled combat, but in a faster, more accessible manner.

Your ideas in the first paragraph look good, but then I think it starts to get bogged down in too much detail. As SlyBlu said, a board/card game must be vastly simpler than an equivalent computer game in order to be playable. With the number of ideas going on, it looks like your game would take many, many hours to play.

That said, if you start again from your original premise and keep it as simple as possible, I think it has a lot of potential. Having 3 different "fronts" to fight on gives room for players to try different tactics -- I could focus on powerful heroes while you build up a poweful army. In order to be playable, such a game would need to have a vastly simplified skill/levelling system, if at all.

On the other hand, if the hero levelling and skill system is important to you, then you may need to downplay or remove the army and economic elements.

Regards,
kos