The Rise and Fall of Final Fantasy4

Looking at the comments on an excellent Destructoid piece about Final Fantasy IX, I came across someone who puts me to shame with his FF Nerd power level. I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to blog my way through the games, but I’m even happier now that I chose not to do that, because I could never hope to do it better than this guy.

        I spent a couple of hours last night just skimming through all of these, so take that as a warning about how much he wrote. Check out a couple, you’ll get a good idea of how dedicated he was to this. He’s got a good sense of humour, and the writing is solid too. He also chose to play the original versions of each of the games, in some cases requiring fan translations, which boggles the mind. I’ve been playing the GBA releases of FF I-VI (DS release for FF III), and they’re a whole lot nicer than what he had to deal with. The game I remember as FF II is radically different from the one he describes (in terms of gameplay), but then I haven’t played the game since I was twelve, so that might have something to do with it.

        So yeah, this guy is my hero.

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The Final Fantasy V And Pitchfork-related Section Of This Post

It seems like everyone has the exact same reaction to FF V’s job system. Pitchfork captures what vael and I felt nicely:

Final Fantasy V’s two-dimensional characters get tossed around by an implausible scenario with more plot devices and contrision than you can shake a moogle at. This seems to be the main reason a lot of players aren’t too fond of the fifth installment. A week or so I was talking about this with Polly, who is not a Final Fantasy V fan. “So what if the plot is silly,” I told her. “It’s still a pretty fun game.”

  “Pat,” she answered. “A little kid running around with a cereal bowl on his head is silly. Final Fantasy V’s story is just retarded.”

“WHAT?” I asked. “WHAT WAS THAT? I’M SORRY, I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER ALL THIS JOB SYSTEM.”

I’d be really surprised if he didn’t know about it, considering how in-depth his knowledge of the games are, but FF V’s job system has a feature he doesn’t even mention. I don’t the game ever actually tells you what happens when you “master” a job, but something very important happens, and it’s probably the best part of the game’s design. Nevertheless, the “oh my god this is so well designed” reaction can only reach new heights when you find out about the connection between Freelancers and mastered jobs.

        When you reach the maximum level of a job, it’s considered to be “mastered” by that character. At the start of the game, the Freelancer job is pretty lame: you can equip anything, but you don’t really have any abilities. Later on, you can mix and match any two abilities you like.

        Now, by default, you can use all the passive abilities of a job when you’re using it, without taking up your second ability slot. A Monk can use Counter without equipping it, and a Thief can use Sprint the same way. But when you’ve mastered a job, this ability extends to the Freelancer job. If you master both the Monk and Thief jobs, as a Freelancer, you’ll have both Counter and Sprint innately. On top of that, you get the best of their innate stat boosts, too. So you get great strength, stamina, and agility.

        So the Geomancer job may have a pretty lame ability (and some helpful passive abilities), but it only takes 175 ability points to master it, as opposed to something like 600 for the other magic jobs. That means a really easy boost to your magic stat towards the end of the game for your fighters. The other magic jobs, for obvious reasons, give better stat boosts than the Geomancer job, so your Summoner/White Mage won’t get much use out of mastering it.

        Playing the end of the game as a dual-wielding Ninja with the Ranger’s Rapidfire skill is pretty awesome. But playing the end of the game as a Freelancer, with Rapidfire and Spellblade, and the best stats and skills of the Ninja, Ranger, Geomancer and Mystic Knight is amaaaaazing.

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The Final Fantasy V And Update-related Section Of This Post

Looking over yesterday’s post, I had a quick thought about the characters in Final Fantasy V, who are interchangeable from one another barring a few minor stat differences - they may be roughly identical in the gameplay, but they still have their own personalities and look (unlike in FF I or III, each character has their own “look” when using a certain job) and the player defines their own gameplay roles for the characters based on your progression through various jobs and customization of the characters.

        By contrast, in FF I the party you choose in the beginning only has meaning to the gameplay, while choice of job in FF III is fluid and contributes nothing to the actual character. They may get names in the DS remake, but you can make your job level 99 Black Mage a Ninja and your job level 99 Thief a Magus, and it makes no difference.

        On a final note, which will spoil a bit of FF V’s story, swapping a character for another wholesale is a difficult thing to pull off. In the beginning of FF V, you have Galuf as a party member - he’s a tough old man, well-suited to being a physical fighter. Later in the game, your progress with his character is transported to a character named Krile - a young girl, best used as a mage. If you’ve been training Galuf solely as a Monk up until this point, suddenly you need to change the role you’ve defined for the character. On the other hand, if you know it’s coming, you can train him as a more general character such as a Blue Mage or Mystic Knight.