Ability to switch weapons on the fly

Yeah different "sets" of weapons and shards like in dawn of sorrow and order of Ecclesia should be a thing, I agree.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, different weapons are clearly geared to be useful in different circumstances and play styles. The whip has a broad vertical range that it strikes, yet it is slower than some other weapons. The katana has really fast initial strikes, but it's slow recovery time makes it bad for multiple fast enemies like the bat clusters(and it has no downward strike). And guns are basically like shard abilities with a different mana bar. So being able to switch between them quickly can help you vary your play style.

On the other hand, the absence of a quick switch ability pushes toward careful pairing of weapon choice and shard abilities to cover more situations. Technically, it doesn't matter since the game pauses when you go to menu, allowing you to switch what you want when you want, but in practice, no one wants to have to go to menu to switch out equipment more often than they have to. So most people are going to find a combination that works for them and keep that going until either the situation demands a change or new equipment or shard abilities are gained.

What about this, you can swap cancel once, but if you want to swap back you have to wait for the recovery time of the weapon you just swapped in. that would make it dynamic while preventing spam.