WAREMBLEM'S PROFILE

I just signed up to this forum to ask these questions. I have tried to do quite a bit of background research first, so forgive me if some of these have obvious answers I've overlooked.

Now, I've gotten the impression that Final Fantasy remakes/copies/derivatives are frowned upon here; seen as uncreative. But I've wanted to work on this project (I'll get to describing it in a minute) for a very long time.

What I want to do is make a game that takes the different character customization and battle systems of Final Fantasy games (mainly the SNES ones, i.e. 4,5,6) and combines them in a way that makes sense, and is fun to play. Let me be a little more specific as to what I mean.

Final Fantasy 5's job system is generally considered to be its best feature. In FF 4 and 6, the characters have "jobs" to an extent, but they can't change them. There's two different ways I'm thinking these could be combined. One, is to have characters which have both skills and stat growth that are unique to them, but that can also change jobs. The other, is to keep the systems separate, but allow the player to select a "style" for a particular character (think of the "isms" system from the Street Fighter Alpha series).

I do realize that this will take *A LOT* of time and effort to get working. I realize that these games have different stats for the characters and different ways of calculating damage, spell effects, etc. I do realize that these things would have to be standardized or converted to work with each other. I've looked into what resources for this information are available, and found huge algorithm documents for all three of these game on GameFAQs.

So my questions are:

Does this sound like it would be fun to play? Is it worth doing?

What would be a good platform to use for developing such a project? I've been looking into ika and Sphere, and I'm leaning towards ika because I'm more comfortable with its scripting language.

How much of what I'm describing has already been done? I want to avoid re-inventing the wheel as much as possible. Have attempts at fully recreating the battle system of any or all of these games been done before?

This last question isn't quite as important, but I'm kind of curious. I've searched around for artwork of characters from FF games other than 5 dressed up like white mages, red mages, samurai, etc, and haven't really found much of anything, which I found surprising. Does anyone know if stuff like this exists?

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I look forward to your replies. :)