The RPG Duelling League
Social Forums => Discussion => Topic started by: Meeplelard on June 05, 2015, 03:52:06 AM
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Before we get started, yes, I am completely attention whoring here so let's just get that on the table. Got that? Good, now that you're all aiming various murder weapons at me, let's get started!
The idea is simple...except it's not...but it is! Ok, enough of the silliness, this is something I wanted to do for a while. I look at a class/job, elements, etc. that are consistent through the Final Fantasy franchise and assess how it's evolved. For all that Final Fantasy is quite the evolving franchise, it does tend to reuse a lot of the same elements that it makes it an interesting analysis. To be clear, here's how I'm looking at things!
First off, I'll be looking at the series as a whole...as the best to my knowledge. There are some holes (FFD since I haven't played it is the most blatant one), and if someone wants to follow up and fill in those gaps, I encourage you! Naturally, feedback is worth something too. I am purposely skipping FF4HoL, however, simply because that game is so different in that it seems to purposely not follow FF Conventions. No, seriously, it'd fit better in a Dragon Quest style comparison. That and I don't think anyone really cares about FF4HoL anyway. I'm also skipping FFTA and FFTA2 since I don't feel confident about those games, and there's a lot of variations of one job, so someone else if they want to field that, feel free.
And if it's not obvious by the above, yes, Spin Offs count. I'm also going to be factoring in characters who are functionally this role, like from FF4, FF6, etc. but that should go without saying. There's a few oddities here and there, which you'll see what I mean when we get to them. On top of all that, I will be including Bravely Default in this. Yes, it's not a Final Fantasy game, but Bravely Default very clearly took a lot of cues and design ideas from Final Fantasy (as well as started as a Final Fantasy game early in development), so it definitely feels relevant to this. That is the only Off-Franchise I will be including. Going outside of that, suddenly standards and mindsets are going to change.
Lastly, FF10-2 will be included despite having a lot of unique Job Names. This is because a lot of FF10-2 Jobs are renamed for stylistic purposes (eg Gun Mage is just FF10-2's version of the Blue Mage), though my analysis may not be great there because I don't claim to be an expert of 10-2, but I'll try my best!
I am NOT giving jobs ratings, because numerical aspects will cause me to go crazy when different standards. I'll simply be giving vague descriptions of how good/bad they were, etc. This is of course leads to some misconceptions and will lead to me requiring to clarify myself, but that's part of the fun now isn't it!?
I should make it clear that for someone to qualify as a class/job/etc., they have to have something more than just a few vague similarities. Yes, Tidus gets Haste and Slow, but he's not a Time Mage since there's more to a job than just a handful of spells. No, factors I will be thinking about are skillset as a whole, equipment, general role, stats, etc. Not everything is going to match 1 to 1, of course.
As for what order I'm going in...doing it by ear. I was thinking of going chronologically but that's going to probably waste too much time, so I'll just do it in whatever I can. As far as what I choose...that's pretty arbitrary too! But enough of that, NEXT POST IS THE ACTUAL START OF THE ANALYSIS! Why not here? Because this is a garbage intro post that would be messy.
I think you guys get the basic jist of this and yes, at some point I might expand into other things like Weapons across the franchise! But until then...let's go into the first one!
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Knight
(http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/66/1a/d7/661ad7e56f37de0dfe7223e4b87deae1.jpg)
We'll start at the very first job offered in the series, and one of the most classic. Knight has classically been identified as a high defense, solid physical offense job that uses Swords, Heavy Armor, Shields, and often has other defensive perks be it limited White Magic, the Cover Skill, what have you. Sometimes it's capable of using more than Swords in games that let it.
There have been some variations on the job. Variations I will be including here are:
Fighter/Warrior: Often a precursor to Knight, though there have been cases where it branches off, not common enough so I'm including them here.
Paladin: Generally speaking, Paladin is pretty much just a rebranded Knight in game's it is in, notably FF4 and FF14; worth noting neither game has Knight. It's often interchange-able.
With that said...ONTO THE GAME BY GAME ANALYSIS!
Final Fantasy 1 (NES/Origins): ...go figure we start off with I think many will agree the best example of the job. The Fighter starts off clearly better than every other job from the outset. Can use the best weapons, hit's harder than those using the same weapons (Thief and Red Mage), has clearly higher defenses, and none of this ever really changes throughout the game. Having an excellent weapon choice, game best defense by a long ways, access to various resistances to elements and status before available for really any other class save Ninja (who has to promote to get it.) Knight ends the game with over twice the defense of any other character in the game, save for Ninja who is not THAT far behind but has significantly less HP. Oh yeah, insult to injury? He gets low level white magic and has game best HP, because why not? There's a reason that the best teams in FF1 tend to have multiple of these guys; they're that freaking good.
Final Fantasy 1 (Dawn of Souls/PSP): Ok, so after being disgusting in the earlier versions, Dawn of Souls tried to balance things out a bit. Knight actually didn't change fundamentally that much; he's still very much the exact same job he was before. He is, however, relatively worse than he was in the original versions because everyone else got buffed. Thief, for example, hits more times than him, and White Mage got a nice HP buff. Also, the game has an actual Magic Defense stat that's meaningful, and Magic Defense in this game is split into two: Fighters and Mages. Fighters take about 50% more from magic than Mages when all is said and done. On top of that, Ninja can use a lot of the same extra-dungeon gear Knight has, so his tankishness is compromised. That said, he's still a very solid choice and by no means bad, he's just not the disgusting "Everyone else sucks compared to me" level good he was in the original incarnation.
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): Fighter was your go to physical fighter/tank in this game for the first half, because you really had nothing else during that arc. Your options were a bunch of Mages and Monk otherwise, so Fighter was somewhat necessary if you didn't want to die. Dual Wielding Swords meant it's damage is better than you'd expect too. Knight pretty much was just an extension of Fighter, though now gaining actual competition. At first, yeah, he's just better than everything, but then Dragoon and Viking get actual armors and weapons, Dark Knight decides to stop sucking at Fargabad, etc., and Knight seems less required. He also goes through a segment of the game where he doesn't upgrade weapons much, namely everything from after the Floating Continent until you get the nautilus, so he's compromised here. Thing is, outside of that stretch, he's pretty much solid and always a good choice, when FF3 isn't being gimmicky with you. Cover is a nice perk, if not something to rely on. Come endgame, it's one of the only jobs that can wield some of the Forbidden Weapons, giving him a huge offensive push over every other physical job save Dark Knight, the other one who can wield it (and given neither can use ALL 4 weapons, you'll want to use one of each to take advantage of all 4 weapons.) Not as good as FF1o, but still a very solid choice throughout the game, just now having actual competition for the niche it had in FF1.
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): Ok, so we reach the first point where Warrior and Knight are completely different so let's split them up!
Warrior: Pretty much the go to armored physical fighter the entire game, Warrior generally has solid armor the entire game sans one stretch where right when you get off the Floating Continent I believe until you get Diamond Stuff. It's available early so lot's of Job Levels, and Advance is a great ability giving him excellent offense. He's also got higher speed than you'd expect, and if he's slower? Advance literally loses it's penalty given how it works. Weapons aren't a problem since Axes exist and generally cover the brief stint where Swords don't really get any better. Come end-game, it can use Ragnarok+Dual Tomahawk for end-game weapons making it a very viable choice the entire game.
As a reminder, all physical jobs can't take Magic hits worth a damn, so compared to other physical jobs, this isn't really a flaw, which is why I left it out.
Knight: ...and while Warrior is great, Knight is...less so. First off, Job Levels matter more and Knight joins after you've already plugged a bunch into Warrior, it's primary rival. Knight's lack of offense is immediately apparent, getting fewer hits than other jobs, and this doesn't really fix itself either, as unlike Warrior who can supplement with Axes for a while, Knight's stuck with crappy weapons until Defender pops up, and those start to fall behind too. It does have high defense out of the gate with high Vitality (for Armored units) and Knight ARmor being best armor...but then even that falls behind what other armored units get. Knight is also very slow, so it can't try to blitz things the way Warrior can. What good qualities does it have? Well, having high Vit, whenever it does have real armor, which is when Diamond stuff pops up, it's actually pretty good defensively, and it has Cover as an added bonus. Knight can also use level 1 White Magic for...uhh...battery...healing...look I'm trying ok? Also, Knight does finally get real legitimate offense...in the very end of the game, where it can use Excalibur and Ragnarok, and is the only job that can use both weapons. Seeing as both weapons have high attack and +5 to like every stat, that is a pretty big deal. This makes Knight a pure Investment; you're struggling with a clearly inferior Job for most of the game to get Job levels for something that might pay off in the final dungeon. Overall, I don't think it's worth it; you're better off sticking with something more consistently useful, like, say, it's Warrior brother listed above!
Final Fantasy 4 (2D): Cecil when he becomes a Paladin is functionally this. He has low level White Magic, gets all the heavy armor and swords and such, has Cover like FF3 Knight, and...let's face it, he's a Knight in all but name. I guess he can also use lot's of White Mage-style gear to differentiate him, which lets him get some more magic defense but who really does that!? ...don't answer that. We all know the drill with Cecil in any event; he's a nice solid tank with decent free damage from his physical, and having Cover lets him take the brunt of damage that you want to avoid on someone like Rydia. Additionally, Cecil has the perk of manual Cover so you don't have to hope a character nearly dies first before Cover kicks in leaving them susceptible to Magic. Cecil's a very solid character, as we all know. Flaws? Well, I guess just that he's very limited in what he can do but then that's how FF4 was structured; characters were given specific niches to fulfill, and Cecil does a pretty darn good job at his niche, which is all we can ask for. Oh yeah, he can also use Bows because Metallic Cave! Feel free to continue to forget cecil being able to do this, because his ability to use staves is WAY more important! No it's really not.
Final Fantasy 4 (3D): Cecil is...very similar to how he was in 2D versions though some key differences. First off, Magic Defense matters more, and Cecil's like the only one who has a combination of decent magic defense AND good HP, so his tankishness stands out more. The existence of Draw Attacks means Cecil can now literally front ALL damage, and the Counter Augment means he can smack people back along with it. He also gained more White Magic, most notably Protect and Shell which are now improved, and healing mechanics are way better so Cecil's Cura can be meaningful in battle now. Is he better than his 2D self? Well, not necessarily, a few new flaws arise. First off, remember how Paladin Cecil joins at level 1? In 2D FF4, it didn't matter beyond "look at Cecil level up a crap load of times!", since his stats were so good for a level 1, it was an upgrade to Dark Knight anyway. This version? The stats are still there but now level factors directly into, well, everything, it compromises his effectiveness until around Zot; you really notice Cecil lagging a lot on offense. Also, Cecil wasn't simply gimped in the Metallic Cave, he's flat out WORTHLESS in that dungeon, since they removed his ability to use Bows in favor of useless elemental swords. He can't use his weakness hitting weapons as well either, since weakness is nerfed as well, and to make matters more annoying? Well, his Ultimate Weapons being Holy Elemental is a downright penalty in this version of the game since most of the final dungeon resists it...for some stupid reason. We'll call this an overall lateral shift; he's better at the tanking, but compromises it with a significant loss in offensive worth.
Though, relative to the rest of his party, 3D Cecil is probably more useful than 2D Cecil since every other character got hit hard in some other way.
Final Fantasy 5: First game that won't be done twice, YAY! *ahem* Knight is your early game tank class in a game that shoves a lot of Antiphysical set ups for you, so this doesn't mean a lot. That doesn't make him bad because he exists BEFORE these anti-physical set ups exist. In fact, Knight's straight up fantastic early game because high defense, high physical damage, and any flaws he has don't manifest themself early game due to the nature of it. He's got good weapons the entire game, can naturally equip shields which is a perk, and has a bunch of late game swords only he can use because Knight Swords are a thing now (well, they were a thing in FF4 as well, because fuck Kain.) One of Knight's nice perks is the Cover + Guard combination; ability to use Cover to guard near dead characters, while immuning physical damage as well. Another boon he gained was the Double Grip ability; this makes a lot of physical fighters a lot more viable just because it boosts their damage notably. Equip Sword allows for some variety on a handful of jobs who have shaky weapons, and boosts strength to Knight level as well, which is pretty high. Overlal, I'd say Knight is a fairly well balanced Job; it's decent for what it is, but not amazing either.
Final Fantasy 9: Steiner is basically the Knight of this game. For a Final Fantasy Knight, Steiner's skillset is quite a bit more diverse than others. He has stat lowering moves (that suck), a damage = HP loss move (that sucks), a move that lowers his HP to do more damage (That is alright if you get it ASAP but sucks eventually), high damage moves that are awesome (...on paper but suck because they cost too much, large enemy groups stop appearing that late, and he's doing similar damage with his basic physical using weapons that give him that anyway), and some gimmicky moves you'll never use. So really his skillset is nothing to write home about. What qualities does Steiner have going for him then? Well, his physical is strong enough in most cases that the lack of Skillset can be overlooked, and he's your most durable PC in the game by a notable amount (highest HP and defensive stats, especially if you nab Tin Armor.) He's slow but this is FF9, so "whocares/10." The problem with Steiner? Well, it's partially that for all that FF9 characters are distinct, the 4 physical fighters all ultimately end up very similar by the end of the game. They have skillsets you won't use much because their basic physical does so much damage (MP Attack + Bird/Demon/Beast slayer is all you need) that it's kind of pointless. He's not bad but also very replace-able.
Final Fantasy 10: Auron, for intents and purposes, is built like the FF knight. Yes, he uses Katanas, but that's just to distinguish his weapons from Tidus', as well as giving him a Ronin-theme design wise. Gameplay wise, he's very much the FF Knight. High physical stats, a sluggish, gets Cover as well as Breaks (something Steiner and FFT Knights established.) Anyway, Auron's got two primary purposes in FF10. One is to kill Armored enemies, the other is to use Breaks to make them suck more. When not doing that? He's generally your highest physical damage dealer but arguably not by enough to make a huge difference and Tidus/Wakka catch him eventually too, he's slow so not a good lead off character either. He gets his jobs done, and isn't bad by any means, but also not this stand out amazing character. FF10, by nature, does a generally good job at making everyone feel meaningful, and Auron is no real exception here.
Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac International Job System: Having not played this version in full, I'm going to have to do this one on paper. It gets Heavy Armor meaning it gets lots of strength and high defense, it gets Swords and Great Swords meaning it'll have high evade early game thanks to Shields, and raw offense late game because Excalibur and Tournesol (...if you're crazy enough to get one like I was!) I guess it gest the job done as a tank role, but yeah, screw it, no one cares do they?
Final Fantasy 13: This is super controversial, but shut up, Snow counts here. Yes, Snow punches things, and you'd think he goes in with Monk, but when you look at his qualities, Knight fits more. His Attack stat is merely "Good" instead of "top tier"; "Good" is what Knights have, "Top Tier" is what Monks have. Shut up if that's an arbitrary distinction. His HP is game best, admittedly, but this is a game with no real defensive stat. No, the thing that stands out most about Snow = Knight is his main purpose: you use Snow for tanking. Snow's the best defensive character in the main game, since only one other character, Fang, has Sentinel unlocked early, and Snow's better suited for defending simply because of the HP edge. Otherwise, he's basically a lesser Lightning in Ravager and Commando Roles due to lower offensive stats, and yeah, if you're using him, it's because of the game best HP + Sentinel combo.
Final Fantasy 14 A Realm Reborn: Paladin is the game's Knight. Warrior is not, but I guess I'm obligated to cover them anyway? Bah, I hate you all!
Paladin: Paladin is a tank job; it exists to yell "COME AT ME BRO!" while flashing itself and getting every enemy to pile on top of it and oh wow this became NC-17 rated pretty fast didn't it? Anyway, Paladin's main thing is about damage mitigation. It gets a bunch of damage reduction moves, it has Cover to aid a party member immediately, Flash can blind enemies helping lower damage further, it's main damage combo adds strength down, Shield Oath, it's defensive stats, lowers damage by 20%, Shields exist to randomly reduce damage by more because that's how FF14 shields work and...you get it, Paladin exists to make damage numbers look smaller. Downsides are Paladin kind of struggles at DPS in general; while a very steady tank, it's damage dealing capabilities leave something to be desired. Back to the good stuff, Paladin also has Provoke, which admittedly can be transferred to other jobs, it's kind of essential for multi-tank situations since being able to transfer aggro on the fly can pull some weight off the other tank.
Warrior: The OTHER tank of FF14, this one really doesn't fit the usual Knight/Warrior mold, but it's named that way so I'll cover it. Warrior is about having more HP than others, using Overpower, being able to use parasitic healing to boost HP further, hits things with Overpower, he gets angry and hits things harder sometimes in Defiance, generates Aggro with Overpower, can boost his damage with Maim...did I mention he has a move called Overpower? Warrior despite how he looks and feels, is actually another Heavy Armor job like Paladin and can use a lot of the same gear.
The two aren't exactly interchange-able; reading into it, sounds like their roles are Paladin = Main Tank, aka the guy who pulls in the initial wave and works on that. Warrior = Off Tank, the guy who runs after the adds and takes care of them. They're both good at their jobs as tankings and you want both in your team so...good job there.
Final Fantasy Tactics: What the hell, game? Knights have been consistently decent at worst, awesome in some cases, and at least projecty in FF3DS' case. Then we have...this game. Knights, you suck. Ok, you're fine early on when you're basically Squires with higher offense, HP, and shields, but that's a low bar there. Other jobs show up and you stop caring. Weapon Guard is a reaction you'll get early I guess, so that's something but not enough. Breaks are cool on paper, but unreliable, only really worth something with a Gun or Bow. One thing that kills them is low move + inability to equip any clothes, meaning they can't boost PA or Speed, so they're kind of bone. Knight Swords...are both good and bad at the same time. See, they're good because they often have high WP and some cool special effect...but they're partially brave based which means they're damage isn't as high as you'd like, at least on Generic Knights. Yeah, not exactly a good showing at all.
Final Fantasy 10-2: Warrior is the game's functional Knight here. They have Breaks, high defense, solid physical damage, iffy speed, a defensive move in Sentinel, and Assault which...you know, that has nothing to do with Knights does it? They also have a bunch of elemental strikes named after various FF Mainstay weapons (Icebrand, Excalibur etc.) as an added perk, which is mostly there to round out a skillset. Overall, Warrior is kind of...generic. It's an early game physical job that gets the job done, but doesn't really stand out beyond that, and there's other jobs who can do similar roles just as well with more intresting perks. I guess Warrior's biggest thing is the high physical durability early game.
Final Fantasy 4 The After Years: Cecil...what happened to you? Oh right, you got mind controlled and then un-mind controlled, went slightly insane and thus had crap stats and level for a large part of the game. The problem is, even when caught up, he's not all that good. He's usable when caught up, but now his gimmicks aren't as good as they were. High Defense isn't meaningful in FF4TAY anymore since enemies hit hard; tanking comes from Blink if anything. His White Magic is not improved at all either, and there's other characters who can use his weapons and heavy armor and such (Kain and Ceodore namely.) The one niche I feel he has here is you can use Cover + Blink to require one less character to apply it too, but honestly that feels like an ultra specific application, you may as well just keep recasting it. Either way, he's still going an entire decently lenghted dungeon both Underleveled with garbage stats, so you aren't going to use him until the final dungeon making the underleveled thing only compounded further.
I considered putting Ceodore here, but he feels very...hybrid-like. Not just because more White Magic, but his stats don't really reflect a Knight's either, and he lacks things like Cover.
Bravely Default: Covering Knight and Templar here since Templar is very much an extension of Knight taken in a specialized role.
Knight: Knight is your 2nd physical job and first one with notable defensive qualities. It's a pretty effective JOb for a large stretch of the game too, all things considered. Between the S in Shields, A in Armor/Helmets, it has a firm defense score. It has an S in Swords as well as As in Axes and Lances insuring it'll always have a good weapon available without using a skill-slot, and it's skillset is better than expected. Notably, Stomp is a good "Go to" skill early game, Ironclad works as a means to keep defenses up while using Brave if you don't mind losing one round of offense, Protect Allies can be a life-saver in some fights, and it even gets an ability that lets you dual-equip Shields, which is invaluable in some cases. Knight does slowly lose it's steam over time, but it never becomes downright bad, and it's skills are stuff you're likely to make use of throughout. Oh yeah, it also gets Double Grip, so it can boost other jobs damages if you don't mind dropping a shield.
Templar: When I look at Templar, I see a job created because "Crap, we have more skills we wanted to give Knight but can't fit them on, better make a new kind of similar job to cover that!" Templar's thing is being Knight taken in some more extreme directions. It gets some anti-physical things and has the game's S in Armors, it boosts Default, it gets some offensive tricks of varying use, but the offense is a bit disappointing all things considered, or forces usage of Brave which means the offense is limited. It's a job that exists for shear tanking, and that's what you're best using it for. Another problem Templar kind of has is it's gotten late, and shortly after it you get Dark Knight which...well...yeah. Granted, you'll want some of Templar's Tricks like Rampart, so it's not worthless.
I think that mostly covers Knight for now; note that I'm writing this now late and thus starting to think incoherently and want to go to sleep and might edit things in later based on what others say!
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I'd think that, given Knights' increasing focus on swords after FF4o, Warrior in XIV would fall more into the berserker/viking/other-axe-user category to be honest? But I suppose that's a bit of nitpicking on that point.
I suppose in regards to FF5 Knights, the only thing I'd have to add is that the antiphysical setups largely exist in a few points(the ones that come to mind are Byblos, Puroboros, Omniscient, and some of the enemies in the Undersea Trench, Istory Falls and the Dimensional Rift--and Puroboros is less antiphysical and more anti-ST). I suppose optional bosses are also a matter, but you're going to be cheezing them out anyway. I suppose it's my experience with 4JF talking, but I've found Knight to be one of the more effective jobs in general play courtesy of knight swords and Doublehand among other things.
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Warrior does fit more with Berserker in FF14, but the Berserker job is so rare in FF games, I just said meh and tossed it up there. Axe wielding jobs have been all over the place in Final Fantasy games. Because it's kind of with the topic, I'll just do a quick demonstration!
FF1: No one specialized in axes, though Fighter/Knight and later Ninja can use them. There weren't a lot of them.
FF2: while this game lacks jobs (sans one character), Guy is associated with Axes, and he's the "Big, primitive wild man" character.
FF3: NES version, Vikings were the Axe users. FF3DS, Warriors were added in, being Swords and Axes.
FF4: Cecil, Kain and Cid all had Axes. That's Knight (or equivalent there of), Dragoon, and...well, Cid's kind of his own classification. His job is Engineer, but his role is closer to Viking.
FF5: Berserker. I guess Gladiator in later games but Gladiator had a lot of weapons, so...next!
FF11: Looking here, they're used primarily by Warriors and Beast Masters. Sounds like other jobs can use them but these are the jobs specializing in them. Warrior in FF11 seems similar to it's FF14 self, fwiw.
FF12: No one associated with Axes. The ZIJS puts it on the "Breaker" job, which is...uhh...new. Looking at Breaker's License Board it seems to functionally be FF11/14's Warrior, namely an Axe wielding physical powerhouse Job. I'm reading this right, it's skillset seems to focus on FF-style breaks (hence then name), which I don't know how they work in FF12 since I don't think they were in FF12 original.
FF14: Used by Warriors, etc.
FFT Axes can be used by Squires, and Geomancers only. Equip Axe is on Squire.
FFTA2 has Vikings but they're nothing like FF3 Vikings.
Bravely Default, it was primarily Pirates, who are...closest to Breakers looking above (axe wielder who focuses on stat breaks.)
So really, Axes have been kind of all over the place. Often given to tankier Jobs, granted, but really doesn't like a point in having Berserker section; Axe users as a whole doesn't seem meaningfunl since they all have different focuses, contrast to Knight (and brethren) where in the focus has been generally the same.
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FF12: No one associated with Axes. The ZIJS puts it on the "Breaker" job, which is...uhh...new. Looking at Breaker's License Board it seems to functionally be FF11/14's Warrior, namely an Axe wielding physical powerhouse Job. I'm reading this right, it's skillset seems to focus on FF-style breaks (hence then name), which I don't know how they work in FF12 since I don't think they were in FF12 original.
They were in the original game, though IIRC IZJS (significantly) buffed them. (FF12 IZJS breaks are really, really, REALLY good. Like gamebreakingly so.)
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http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Technicks
Searching for armour break on the wiki listed these, Expose in FF12 lists reduce armour by 10% and the other version lists it in a way that suggests it stacks. Assume consistency from there and it being shit in the original being why you wouldn't know about it.
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The IZJS versions of those four skills are as follows:
Wither: Target's STR is reduced by 30% + 1.
Addle: Target's MAG is reduced by 30% + 1.
Expose: Target's DEF is reduced by 10% + 1.
Shear: Target's MDEF is reduced by 10% + 1.
In IZJS, no enemy in the game is immune to stat breaks, including all bosses. In the original version, most bosses were immune. All four skills stack multiplicatively and infinitely; you can, with patience, whittle any enemy in the game down to 1 in all stats, including Yiazmat. You can actually kill IZJS Yiazmat in like 15 minutes.
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It occured to me I left off WoL from the Chibirhythm games...screw it I am not going back to do that now, because we have MORE IMPORTANT MATTERS!!!
BLACK MAGE
(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111122111031/finalfantasy/images/2/26/Theatrhythm_Vivi.png)
Yes, the font is inconsistent with Knight but shut up.
Black Mage probably has the single most iconic "classic design" in the franchise, proof of this goes back to how they made a whole point of making Black Mages look like that in FF9! Yet Modern Square-enix likes to pretend that isn't a thing and they smell as a result. Also none of that is relevant other than "This is why I'm choosing Black Mage!"
Black Mage has historically been identified by one very simple thing: Casting the Spells that make the people fall down. Also known as Black Magic. If Final Fantasy has a Job system of sorts, there's no question Black Mage is going to be there somewhere. It's a job with a very straight forward purpose, and immediately recognizable in what it does, to the point where it's one of the few FF4HoL actually couldn't try to pretend it wasn't a thing and had to put it in straight up! Anyway, onto HOW THE CLASS HAS BEEN THROUGHOUT!
Naturally, just having offensive magic doesn't qualify as a Black Mage, so the games where Magic is a universal skillset or a character falls under just a general Mage (as in, someone who uses all kinds of magic) like, say, FF13's Hope do not apply.
Final Fantasy 1 (NES/Origins): If Knight started off with the best, Black Mage starts off with the worst it's ever been. Black Mage's primary purpose was casting MT Spells to kill things in groups, and having some status as well as the offensive buffs. Fast/Haste works in all versions and it's great, Temper only works in Origins and is useless otherwise. It also gets Sabre (also bugged in FF1NES), which is...kind of pointless on the Black Mage seeing as it can't do physical damage and you wouldn't use it for. So what are Black Mage's problems? Obviously, it can't take hits, but that's a given. No, it's real problem is there's never a good reason to use them over the Red Mage. Red Mage casts Black Magic almost as good as Black Mage for most of the time, and the MP difference isn't large enough to care. Add in Red Mage has actual weapons to conserve MP wish and can use White Magic, it's just kind of a slaughter. Later on, you can item cast MT Fire 2 and similar spells which sounds cool in theory, but then remember everyone can do it just as effectively since Int is ass in this game, so not really a point in Black Mage's favor...if anything it HURTS his use because it means everyone else can do that to some degree, and Black Mage just has a few shots of stronger variants. So yeah, sorry to say but Black Mage kind of sucks here.
Final Fantasy 1 (Dawn of Souls/PSP): Now this is a much different story! A few major things kicked in making Black Mage a lot better. First of all, going with an MP System instead of a MP Charges means Black Mage has that much more ammo, and thanks to Ethers, he never really runs out, so you can be more spell sling happy than before. That of course doesn't help against the Red Mage, who has the same advantage, but other things helped Black Mage here as well, most notably, Intelligence now does something and it's a very notable impact. Black Mages magic damage is way higher than Red Mage's the entire game, and with the new MP system, he can actually use Flare late game on more than 2 fights to get reasonable crowd control. Add in Haste and Temper being extremely useful on bosses, and suddenly Black Mage looks like a viable class. It still has durability issues of course (...ignoring FF1DoS' nerfed difficulty) and has a crap physical, but the fact that it has legitimate advantages, not superficial ones, suddenly makes it a way better job.
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): Lumping Black Mage and Warlock together because one is blatantly an upgrade of the other and meant to replace it, just like Fighter -> Knight. Black Mage is somewhat of an under-appreciated job in FF3. It's useless at first since there's no real Black Magic and yeah, just wasting your time, but once it gets Black Magic, it's decent at it for all that it's ammo is limited. The game really wants you to use them during the Mini parts, because Magic damage is your only way to hurt things. True, Red Mage can be used, but Red Mage vs. Black Mage is a meaningful difference on damage, with the latter being way higher and has nearly double the MP. Once you get off the Floating Continent, Red Mage all but useless, but Black Mage has a new rival: Conjurer. How does it compare? Well, Black Mage has a few notable advantages on Conjurer. First off, consistency; Conjurer's only way to do consistent damage is Titan which is ST; Black Mage can do MT damage and do it 100% of the time. It also has higher MP than Conjurer. It also can use status whenever you want, Conjurer's status competes with ST damage. This means that Black Mage may not be as strong as Conjurer, but it's a lot more reliable. It's damage is sadly lacking around now, even with level 3's (which it can only use a few times), though, a different use perks up in the form of status. Black Mage's status, if you've been using one consistently, is actually very good (especially the Shade spell), especially the Shade spell. This becomes extremely valuable in the Cave of Darkness where status can prevent enemies from splitting, as well as making the dungeon less strenuous.
Warlock is an extension of Black Mage, but it's harder to defend, as it's main rival, the Summoner, is a huge step up from Conjurer. It still has more MP and has status but when Summoner can murder entire battle fields with spells like Titan or Leviathan, Warlock's hard to justify. The best use you'll get out of Warlock is a strategy of using it's excess MP it has compared to Summoner, then swap to Summoner, thereby artificially inflating that character's MP.
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): Black Mage in the first half of the game more or less is unchanged, outside of having a competent physical thanks to early game bows being quite good, so overall refer to the above. 2nd half is a different story...Black Mage kind of sucks. Magic damage doesn't scale as well as Physical damage, and it's limited. Status is nowhere near as good as it was in FF3o, and MT damage isn't as meaningful since you only fight 3 enemies at a time (FF3o could have you fight up to 8, which made splitting enemies that much worse to boot.) This extends to Magus as well, who has to compete with Sage that gets everything he gets and almost as good at it (though, less MP on higher level stuff), but can also Heal and use Summons. I hear Magus is the one case where Status is worthwhile, and it's good for that, and while I don't deny it, I do question it's long term uses up the Crystal Tower and World of Darkness, if those JLevels would be better spent somewhere else. Overall, Black Mage has a good start here, but weak end.
Final Fantasy 4 (2D): Palom is the only actual Black Mage in the game, though I think many will agree I need to evaluate Rydia so I'll get to her in a bit. In the original versions of FF4, Palom existed just to be a token offensive spell caster during Mt. Ordeals, to kill off pesky Zombies that Cecil couldn't kill, and nuke things at MT. He also murders Milon in 2 hits with Boast, but Milon is awful so who cares. When Tellah gets his OP spell selection, Palom still has the advantage in having an actual MP score, and does more damage with Aras than Tellah does (Tellah does have Agas granted, as well as Bio), so he's now more your cost efficient Mage. He works, though he can't take hits to save his life. FF4a gives him a bunch of gear that mostly just ups his stats to the point where he can compete with Rydia. Compared to Rydia, he has lower MP, negligibly higher HP, considerably better defense, and does Black Magic better than she does, at the cost of not having Summons. It's a pretty even trade and the two are mostly interchange-able, because while Rydia is probably technically superior, the parts where it's important Palom pulls his weight well enough. In fact, you could probably get away with using both if you wanted to murder things fast! Also Flare is a pretty awesome spell because it's fast and hits really hard, gotta toss that in!
As far as Rydia goes...well, I'll be looking at her as a Black Mage, not a Summoner. If she didn't have Summons, how would she be? Honestly not much different than she is. She'd mostly lose out on MT damage for the mid-game, until she gets Agas and Quake, but otherwise, she can sling Bio around for a fast, cost effective damage move, with Aras to hit weaknesses. Her status rates are pretty good too...except FF4 makes like half the enemies immune to it and has stupid status mechanics so meh. She CAN be twinked for physicals thanks to Minerva + Bow, for all that it's not worth it, but hey, that's neat for a Black Mage right? Basically, yeah, Rydia's about what you'd expect, even without Summons; Summons make her better, make no mistake, but she could have just been a Black Mage and gotten away with them. In fact, her primary form of offense during the Child Arc is her elemental spells (Chocobo mostly just a Boss spell.)
Final Fantasy 4 (DS): Why does the DS versions of games despite Black Magic? Ok, so early game it's just as effective as it was, but only because Tellah's stats are high for the time and stats are that meaningful. Palom doesn't really feel particularly special since now the situation is reversed; Tellah does more damage with the same spells, Palom just gets Aras earlier (which is a perk) and has more MP (also meaningful!) Rydia? She absolutely needs her elemental summons now since the Aras don't last nearly as long as they use to, Flare got nerfed so hard it's not really a great spell it use to be, doing now less damage with an actual charge time...and it's the only end-game spell worth using. It says something that Rydia literally joins with all her end-game gear save the Stardust Rod, which gives a lot of magic boosts, and her magic still feels lackluster. The summons help mid-game, but they don't last, seeing as the elementals are just Aga level spells, while the high end ones take too long to be feasible.
Final Fantasy 5: You get Black Mage, it's starting spells are worse than Blue Mage's Aero...well that's silly! Also not a huge deal since Black Mage has higher magic to lessen the gap and can hit a lot more weaknesses than Blue Mage can, which comes up fairly often, so that aspect is not a huge deal. Black Mage is a job I kind of feel bad for in this game. It's actually good at what it does, and doesn't have any real major issues as a glass cannon spell caster in and of itself. It hits notably harder than Red Mage with the same spells, elemental boosts exist to make the damage stand out, has the resources to make it manage-able, etc. The problem?
Summon exists, and in most cases does the same thing better. As soon as Summoner gets Ifrit, Shiva and Ramuh, you really have little reason to use Black Mage, and then Summoner learns Titan and it's kind of a one sided slaughter. Black Mage only finally feels meaningful again when it gets the Agas which crush anything Summoner can do on ST, as well are capable of hitting flying enemies, but that only lasts until Summoner gets Syldra, which is basically the best Attack Spell in the game (complimented with Leviathan hitting weaknesses in the final dungeon, and Bahamut in case the rare Wind Immune pops up.) To make matters more insulting is Summoner has game best Magic (...Oracle aside...but Oracle sucks), so there's little reason to invest a large amount of time in Black Mage. so outside of the brief early-game window where Summoner is limited/doesn't exist, and the Moore -> Pyramid window, there's really little reason to use Black Mage.
Final Fantasy 9: Remember how I said that FF9 has really 4 distinction of characters? No? ...well I did now retroactively and you're wrong if I didn't! Anyway, Vivi's distinction is...well...Vivi. Vivi really is a unique character in FF9 because he's the only dedicated offensive spell caster from start to finish. Until Garnet gets Ramuh, he's also the only character capable of legitimate MT damage (Zidane's Trances don't count), immediately noticeable in early dungeons when he's your screen clearing character. He also has the MP to support all this too. Vivi's use is kind of a Sin Curve overall...well, ok, more of a Cos Curve since he starts high. He starts off really good because he's your cannon, with Zidane and Steiner being your ST damage and Garnet being your healer. His damage starts to taper off when weapon upgrades happen and such near the end of Disc 1, then he gets Aras and Bio and shoots up again, especially if he can hit weakness. He won't really improve much until he gets Agas, so he slowly gets worse until that point, especially since Garnet learns Ramuh and Eiko pops up with Fenrir (admittedly, that can't do crap against flying enemies) , so his MT isn't as needed. Also enemy hordes of the "large sacks of HP" start popping up too, and fighters are starting to outclass him at ST. Focus helps of course so that's a boon! Agas are a similar boost in worth, but unfortunately, that's about where Vivi's use caps off; Fighters start doing too much damage, and even with Flare, it's basically Vivi using more MP to do a similar result. The other problem is that Garnet and Eiko match him in magic damage come end game, and they can do a heck of a lot more (like, say, Heal), so it's hard to justify him.
He also gets status, but FF9 status is kind of unreliable. Double Black would be a great trance since breaking the damage limit, unfortunately, Trance is the least reliable thing ever, kicking in when you don't need it. Overall, I think Vivi qualifies as "well balanced" but in kind of averages sort of way. He has his highs, his lows, and his medium points, and overall we have a character who works for what he is, even if it's not all the time.
Final Fantasy 10: Lulu is outright called a Black Mage by Wakka here, so any arguments about her not fulfilling this will get you smacked. Not that I think anyone would argue this in the Normal Sphere Grid since Lulu's entire purpose is nuking things with offensive magic. Good thing Lulu's good at it too! Her flaw, first of all, is that she's slow; she makes a poor character to open with. Otherwise? She's got crap tons of MP, does a lot of damage with her spells, is basically the only one who can kill large number of enemies thanks to FF10s RPS style combat. Honestly, there's really not much more to say; Lulu's good at what she does, and that's all we care about.
Final Fantasy 12 ZIJS: So as someone who actually bothered with Black Magic in FF12, I can only assume these guys are good. Yes, that's right; there's ways to play FF12 besides just casting Berserk, hoping that spell hits, and watching one character kill things. Black Magic actually kills things way faster if you bothered, and have the MP, etc. Murdering just about every enemy in Pharos with Firaga is fun and educational, you should try it! That aside, looking at it's skillset, Black Mage seems like it's quite competent and reading up on it for others, they seem to agree. Only people who seem to hate Black Mages are the "hurr durr physicals rule!" nonsense. They're your primary form of Crowd Control who get good ST damage too. They also are one of 4 classes to learn Steal, which if you've played FF12, you know how big a deal that is. Another major thing that makes Black Mages good are, well, in FF12 one limiting thing is for spells like Scathe, they could only do 9999 limiting that's use (when Firaga can be twinked to hit that high...hmm...); there is no longer a 9999 damage limit in ZIJS, so that will make them quite viable end game.
Final Fantasy 14: The Black Mage (and their Thaumaturge earlier forms) basically exists as the chief user of AoE damage. A neat thing about them is they always have some level of minimum offense. Spam Fire spells til out of MP, Transpose, spam Ice Spells until up to maximum, throw a Lightning spell in the mix for added DPS during the Umbral Ice Phase. For those who don't know, quick explanation on why you do this:
When you cast a Blizzard spell, you get Umbral Ice status. Umbral Ice increases the rate of MP Gain (by an extremely notice-able amount; while in Umbral Ice, spells may as well be free.)
When you cast a Fire spell, you get Astral Fire; this increases the MP cost of Fire Spells, but also raises their damage significantly (25% per stack, up to 3.) Astral Fire also stops you from regaining MP.
So Black Mage is shifting constantly between Big Damage and Modest but Unlimited Damage. Because of Umbral Ice, it also allows it some utility use, like an emergency 2nd Cure caster. It gets a bunch of buffs that let it make spells easier to cast by lowering charge times and such, and also gets a Sleep spell! Downsides to Black Mage? Naturally can't take hits, limited on Cross Class skills, and for ST DPS, it's a bit on the low side. It's not attrocious to be clear, just most other DPS' beat it here. Black Mage's primary purpose is blowing up mobs of randoms and killing adds and it does a pretty good job of that too!
Final Fantasy Tactics: FFT decided to call this job Wizard because...it's FFT...except in the Class Introduction screen where it called it Black Mage. Never change, FFT Translation...by the way, screw you WotL! Remember how in FF5 Summoner beat Black Mage in most ways that matter? Yeah, not so much the case here. While Summons are the superior skillset, Warlocks have some key advantages, a big one now being they have Game Best MA, making them the best job for shear magic offense. Sure, Summons might be better, but Summons on a Magus are better than Summons on any other Job, as well as skillsets like Draw Out, Math Skill and Un-Truth! ...you can choose it ignore that last one. On top of that, Thaumaturges also get Magic Attack Up, which is extremely handy for downright nuking things regardless what Magic class you're in. While it may not be the greatest job, particularly because Black Magic itself is,for the most part, a lesser version of Summons, the Vivi actually feels like it has a place and not simply a "worse version of this other more powerful job!"
Worth noting that in War of the Lions, Summoner was notably worse in this making the Lulus better by extension. I don't think it quite closes the gap entirely granted, and it does hurt Palom's use because that's one less strong skillset for them to use their game best MA with.
Final Fantasy 10-2: You know, I played this game twice, and I remember Black Mages being a thing and doing Magic but I don't remember them being particularly special at it? They did have MT damage which was harder to come by I suppose, and MP Drain means they didn't run out of resources. Glancing at the stat topic, it seems their magic damage is not great end game, being somewhat below average and they have charge times. I don't feel confident talking about them, so if someone else wants to field this by all means!
Final Fantasy 4 The After Years: First and foremost, No, Golbez doesn't count. Got that? Good. Palom is our primary Black Mage here with, again, Rydia as the Summoner/Black Mage hybrid. Like in FF4, Black Magic is your main source of big damage, though one thing that hurts them I found is the Lunar Phase system. Because of the way bosses work, most of them rely on big magic damage (a lot have Meteor) so you want to go in during the Anti-Black Magic phase. This in turn means Black Mages are worse against most bosses (though Rydia can get around it with Summon.) Otherwise, Palom's big thing is he learns the important Black Magic spells before anyone else, and has the stats to justify it; Rydia, by contrast, while getting them later, has more options in the long run, so overall better, but both are worthy of taking that slot.
There's generic Black Mages who assist Ceodore and Porom...but we don't care about them because they're Core Classes and Core Classes are awful! ...jokes aside, the generic Black Mages are pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light: I'm making an exception here because I remember the damned job. Black Mage existed to be able to cast Black Magic every-turn, as it's passive is "All Black Magic costs 1 less AP to use", with the basic spells costing 2, (1 = Basic Physical.) It could damage magic damage which sometimes mattered because high defense, low magic defense things existed and...then you stop caring because FF4HoL honestly doesn't do a good job at distinguishing jobs after a point and basically wants you to only use later ones because the game is stupid. Yes, I wasted your time, MWAHAHA!
Bravely Default: Good thing this game exists and disowned itself from the above, because Jobs are meaningful again! Black Magic is your primary MT damage dealer until you get Valkyrie. Magic Mojo is kind of useless you either use 2 Black Mages, or get others who learn Magic Mojo and equip it because it's a 1 slot skill that works for filler. Black Mage has a good start but it slowly starts to taper off as things like Valkyrie show up, enemies get more health, etc. It still has a few nice niches though. It's best quality is probably Piercing Magic Defense, allowing any spell caster to do consistent damage regardless of enemy. Arcanist showing up allows it it a compliment as well, since now it's status (which is actually fairly effective this game) can be used in combo spells like Sleep x3 + Twilight to murder an entire enemy team (or alternatively, Evil Gaia x3 + Dalek Catch Phrase.) I guess Black Mage is a decent early-mid game job that tapers off, but still has it's niches later on is the best way to put it.
EDIT: Forgot 2 IMPORTANT GAMES!!! on this list...
Theatrhythm: A Black Mage in this game I'm definining by someone who focuses very heavily on using offensive magic, getting most of the elemental spells, and stats are clearly defined as Mage. For this game, that would be Terra, Shantotto, Vivi and Rydia. So let's analyze each!
Terra: One of the better characters in the game. Trance makes her the strongest Mage in the game (if you don't suck), and she gets all 3 Agas and I believe all Aras so some flexibility, as well as her skill slots are well suited for her, so no problems there. Another bonus she has going for her is her speed is passable enough; it's kind of average at base but she gets Agility Up, which pushes her to the point of "can regularly max reach the end of Dark Notes" which is all you need for an FMS, so she's good for leading a team of 3 dudes wielding Strength Up 2+3 which means they have no speed whatsoever. She also gets Bluff but it's hard to use that alongside Trance and have room for something else.
Shantotto: A Terra variant; Shantotto gets Dualcast + Ancient Magic combo making her blow stuff up when a boss appears. Her spells don't hurt as much as Terra's thanks to Dualcast < Trance, but Ancient Magic is probably good enough to make it roughly even. She also has good speed so she's good at the FMS leader as well.
Vivi: Is Shantotto w/out Ancient Magic. He's solid, but kind of superfluous unless you really want a 2nd Mage. He also lacks her speed so not good at FMS'. That and this is Theathrythm; if you're not one of the starting 13, you might as well not exist.
Rydia: And here we have "how not to do a Mage." Rydia's problems are two fold. First off, she misses Dualcast AND Bluff, making someone like Lightning or Ashe (who one could argue is a Black Mage but I don't think she was a blatantly magical oriented) actually better at spellcasting. The 2nd problem is she's 2 Pro-active, 2 Re-active, meaning she can only use 2 Spells at once, while the other 3 can use 3 spells if they want too (well, Terra's Trance takes up a Re-active slot technically, but it's so good that it's worth it.) She gets all 3 Boost levels, and Mana's Paean is nice, but not enough to really save her. She also has Vivi's problem of "isn't one of the initial 13."
Curtain Call: So...there's a lot more Black Mages this time around. The same 4 still exist, but now we have a bunch of others! I'll be briefer here as a result. Terra and Shantotto are decent PCs who, if you take twinking into account, are apparently the undisputed best BMS PCs in the game, with Terra having the ludicrous 6x Multiplier on her spell (which makes Ultima so stupid strong you don't care it's OPB), and Shantotto having 3x w/ Ultima and Ancient Magic combo. Vivi's better too since Dualcast is that much more meaningful, and Tornado is a unique spell to him that lets him fire off a near-Ultima level attack with only a 25 chain. Rydia...gets Bluff and doesn't have the slot restriction, so that's better than before, but still not particularly great.
New Black Mages? Well, Krile is basically another Rydia, a mage who gets Bluff and little else...also doesn't exist in the US because Square-enix is stupid. Hope gets Faith meaning he boosts other Mages and gets a Limit...that is Physical damage...yeah, I don't get it either. Ace is basically Hope except that Physical Limitis a Magical One, making him a hell of a lot better. Yuna #2 looks fine on paper but then that Physical Limit pops up and you're banging your head against the wall.
So Black Mages are all over the place here, ranging from "Among the best PCs in the game" to "MEEEEEEEH."
I believe that should cover Black Mages. Anyone want to fill in the gaps for things i missed from the franchise, be my guest!
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Probably should have made a joke about the band.
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We'll just call that a missed opportunity then!
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Since you asked, and since I'm inundated with them at the moment...
FFD: This game has two Black Magic using classes, and notably you're only going to want to bother with them on the Dark Warriors side, since they get the added benefit of actually learning the full Black Magic skillset, while the Light Side misses out on key spells like Meteor and Ultima. Overall, Black Mages have a pretty strong start as your MT elemental-weakness-hitting class. Other MT options pop up slowly, and Summons are limited by what side you're playing as. Really the only thing that replaces Black Magic's niche are Fusion Abilities, most of which require some level of Black Magic to be learned first. The Black Mage also learns nearly all the status spells, which have extremely high accuracy, plus two flavors of accurate ID if your target isn't immune. Black Mage also picks up the ability Magic Font, which increases all magic damage a flat 50%, which can be applied to other classes too. Really the main thing that hurts Black Mages and Magus in this game is that Magic. Is. Slow. As. Hell.
While your physical fighters will be gleefully pounding away at the enemy, Mages have to wait through a casting time, which roughly halves their DPS in comparison, especially with the myriad of physical twinking options lategame. Black Mage basically -requires- Red Mage's dualcast to keep up. Dualcast Meteor on a Magus is certainly still a force to be reckoned with by the final boss due to its multihit property being able to get around the damage cap, but it is outshone by physical DPS completely. Still, overall balanced if the enemy is extremely tanky, I suppose. Not the worst showing of Black Mage, but certainly not the best.
Final Fantasy Record Keeper: lol~
So Black Mage is a Core Class in this game, and Core Classes suck. But Black Mage at least has availability going for him. You get him as your 3rd or 4th PC in a game with a five-member party, and he's the only one who can cast the spells that... you know. Until you get your 6th or 7th character, then you'll be dropping him quickly. His Soul Break -is- your only source of Dark-elemental damage until much later when you can final make the spell "Dark". Still, once that's available, he has literally outlived his usefulness as other characters can just take his equips and skillset (literally) and use them better. His equipment was pretty limited to begin with.
However, he does have -one- slight purpose for existing beyond that (as do most of the Core Classes). IF you can suffer through getting him to level 50 and finding his Break Level Limit crystal, you can get access to Manafont I and II, which restore some MP charges at the beginning of every fight. THIS IS INCREDIBLY USEFUL (on another character) as skills are incredibly useful for making battles go more smoothly and there's no reliable way of recharging their uses otherwise. So... still awful, but not FF1o awful!
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If you're going to include Record Keeper, you might as well include characters who fall under that category too. Vivi, for example, is straight up Black Mage through and through. Characters like Terra, Rinoa and Ashe are a little more ambiguous, but it's obvious the primary purpose of them is Black Magic since they all have 5* Black Magic, and stats that support it (their other perks are there so a character like Vivi doesn't just straight up obsolete them, like Terra's ability to use Heavy Armor or Rinoa's ability to use Ranged Weapons.)
There are some ambiguous cases, but I'd at least make one requirement "character gets 5* in that kind of skill." Alternatively, you can look at it simply from a "how viable are these kinds of characters in general?" and work from there.
From my understanding, going off Core Classes in Record Keeper is basically saying "we're analyzing garbage filler"
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I'd note that the Black Mage's ability to be a secondary healer is not really all that much there, courtesy of the stats a BLM and WHM would be working off of respectively; BLM spells work off of Intelligence, while healing (such as the cross-classable Cure and Physick) works off of Mind, which increasingly falls out of favor for offensive casting classes, so trying to use BLM as a clutch healer won't find use too often.
(Not to say it doesn't always. It is viable in situations up to Aurum Vale. Trying to do it in a post-50 dungeon will only lead to pain, however)
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Black magic in Record Keeper starts off relatively unimpressive (hits weakness for medals, so still useful!) but scales up pretty rapidly lategame. This is because the INT on Rods scales up at roughly the same rate as Attack on physical weapons, but ability multipliers scale up much faster with magic. For instance Fire/Fira/Firaga Strike (the latter still unreleased in global RK) are 1.5x/1.8x/2.1x multipliers, whereas Fire/Fira/Firaga/Firaja are 1.5x/2.85x/4.875x/8.775x. Now, these can't be compared directly since the Spellblade moves are direct multipliers on a regular physical while the latter are pretty arbitrary outside of the exact damage formula, but you get a sense of how higher level BM scales up much quicker ability-wise.
(Incidentally, this means that -ga spells should be prioritized over -ra strikes and -ja spells over -ga strikes (when the latter are released) so long as your supply of the relevant Black Orb level are still limited)
This, along with a lowish soft cap for the attack stat (346) than magic/mind (~700) means that mage heavy parties are generally the best for DPS in the more advanced Japanese build of RK. Global hasn't reached this level of power yet, but the really high level people should be there in a month or two. The Manafont II Record Materia, as well as its White Magic and Summon counterparts, has a big part in this too, obviously. Right now you need physical attackers to clean up the waves of random enemies while mages hoard all their charges for boss fights, but that all goes away if you can use Quake + MT summon every single battle.
As for actual Black Magic users, I missed out on all the event ones besides Vanille who's a White-leaning hybrid, so I'd have to go mainly on theorymon. Also there's a whole bunch of them, especially counting Japan-only ones, and I don't feel like theorymonning them all right now.
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First off: pet peeve, it's IZJS, not ZIJS. >_< Moving on to actual content...
FF5 Black Mage does have one niche that Summoner can't cover, which is ST damage, and there is one boss in the game where this actually matters (the seal guardians in the Forest of Moore). Trying to MT them is asking to be murdered since they all have brutal limit phases and they all have different elemental properties.
As for 12, you summed it up really well. In vanilla FF12, damage magic is generally the best way to do damage in the game overall at most points; the speedrun, for example, never uses a physical attack again after about 40% of the way into the run, and kills almost all bosses via Reflect-bombing with MT spells. Even without abusing Reflect-bombing though, FF12 magic is really good, only really held back by the damage cap (breaking 9999 on Firaga is trivial thanks to Oil status). IZJS removes the damage cap, of course, so you can do full damage with Scathe (though it's such a slow spell, animation-wise, that it's often not worth using - this matters because its animation delays basically everything that isn't a physical attack due to the way FF14's animation queueing system works) and oiled Firaga (which is generally the money move if it's not resisted/immuned). I ran Black Mage in my main party in my last run of IZJS and was not disappointed.
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As for Knights in Record Keeper, there's a subset of physical abilities specifically named "Knight", which helpfully lets us minnow down the endless list of armor wearing physical attackers. The only one available right now in global RK is Guard, which grants the user Protect. Considering everyone is limited to only two ability slots, this is basically never worth using or crafting.
Much more interesting is the currently Japanese only ability Taunt, which IIRC attracts all ST moves towards the user for a period of time. That's nice enough for protecting squishy party members, but the real fun part is combining it with the Samurai ability Retaliate, which gives the user perfect evade for about 2.5 turns and counters every physical aimed at him with a basic physical. Taunt+Retaliate redirects all ST physicals at a physical immune char who will promptly counter all those attacks, a really popular Japanese strategy only usable by the game's unofficial Freelancer and the recently released Gilgamesh (!!!)
Current characters who can equip Knight abilities:
Tyro- the aforementioned unofficial Freelancer, should be saved for whenever Meeple gets around to that class.
Knight- Core class, which means it is totally awful. As in, less HP and attack than dedicated healers like Aerith and Lenna. Doesn't even have a Record Materia out in Japan right now, so right now it is 0/10 and less useful than Jogurt.
Paladin Cecil- Has the stats you'd expect out of Cecil: great HP and defense, good attack, decent mind and resistance. Speed is low, but speed isn't very important in RK due to how it implements ATB. Great equipment selection, especially now that the update added axes. Skillset is Combat 5/Knight 5/White 2, which makes sense flavorwise.
Cecil's biggest selling point is that having one of the best default Soul Breaks in the game, Rampart, which temporarily increases defense and resistance for all party members. This stacks with every other defensive buff in the game and is obviously great for any boss that doesn't just roll over and die. His second soul break, Sentinel, is essentially a longer lasting version of the unreleased Taunt ability mentioned above. Getting the shield for it is notoriously difficult like every other 5 star gear, but in this case it's alright because it's really most valuable as a Friend Summon. Have a Retaliator use it for a fun time vs bosses who rely on ST physicals.
Sadly Cecil's an event character and thus latejoiners like me don't have him, but his event should be back in around a month or so.
Warrior of Light- Statistically, he's pretty similar to Paladin Cecil except... worse in pretty much every single stat apparantly. Same equips too, now that axes were added to Cecil. Man, the non-event chars were kinda screwed on stats aside from Cloud. First Soul Break is Class Change, which buffs his attack/defense/magic (lol)/resistance temporarily. Nice, but pales compared to Rampart. Best part is bringing out the 8-bit sprite. Second Soul Break is a big ST holy-elemental attack. Like all the 5 star character-specific Soul Breaks it's way stronger than a regular hit, but stupidly hard to get and not particularly valuable by those standards.
Looking at upcoming characters, the ones who can use Knight abilities are Edgar, Leon, Steiner, Golbez (!!), Gilgamesh, Seifer, and... wait, Zidane has Knight 3? WTF DeNA.
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FF5 Black Mage does have one niche that Summoner can't cover, which is ST damage, and there is one boss in the game where this actually matters (the seal guardians in the Forest of Moore). Trying to MT them is asking to be murdered since they all have brutal limit phases and they all have different elemental properties.
Actually MT is very much one of the valid ways to blitz that fight. Set up all the crystals (or at least the three that don't absorb earth) to be just above 3000 HP, Titan them into oblivion. (Gil Toss/Zeninage also gets hype here for similar reasons, it's even better but more costly.) With good setup, two Titans cast back to back by different PCs will immediately kill the crystals in question. Summon also helps a lot in that fight if you have Golem, because it means you can pretty much mock the first phase.
Granted, Black Magic is safer at this same job (though it still needs two attacks to dodge the danger zone, it does so more solidly) but takes longer because you have to take out one crystal at a time instead of three. But Meeple already noted that Black Magic has more ST damage from Moore to the Pyramid. Most of the rest of the game, Black Mage doesn't even have more ST damage, though.
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Oh, one other issue Black Magic has in FF5 is that Spellblade is typically a more reliable way of inflicting Silence/Sleep/Break on bosses. Not having to make a magic evade/level-based accuracy check is almost always worth the tradeoff of not being usable turn 1 in-game. That just leaves Toad as a relevant status niche for Black Magic; thankfully it's more accurate than FrogSong, to make up for later availability.
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Honestly I feel the ability to use Break without a setup turn on randoms (Kuza Beasts, Wyrms, Blue Dragons) is fairly big. Yeah the accuracy isn't perfect, but it's notably above 50 which is all it needs to be to outperform Spellblade. It's certainly the black status spell I've gotten the most use out of (although you can argue Sleep vs. Atomos is the most important use). I definitely can't get behind hype for Black Magic Frog on the other hand... Frog (and Mini) just gets immuned by way too many things, and as far as bosses go I believe the only boss you can toad after getting the Black Magic variant is TwinTania's charging phase (whom you can wreck with a dozen other things anyway).
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This skill set is bad because it takes a turn or two to completely trivialise some bosses
#ff5problems
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Wait, there are no Toad-vulnerable bosses after you get the spell? *checks* Aw man, I take it back then. At least Frog Song works on Galura.
I can't remember ever bothering with status vs randoms in a non-challenge run of FF5, and if I did it was probably Berserk for perfect accuracy+Golem mopping up the drawbacks. I did use Toad extensively on a Red Mage SSCC which probably skewed my kneejerk impression, but that's not a relevant experience to generalize from for a whole bunch of reasons.
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At the very least, Red Dragons are vulnerable to toad (...and are weirdly tagged as Undead).
...at least, for those who have issues with running from battles.
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Red Dragons are in fact immune to toad. (Both the BMG and the GBA bestiary agree on this, so I've not known either to have errors in this regard.) The main status you might exploit against them would be Stop (short duration), Berserk, and Control, although with their three elemental weaknesses + Requiem vulnerability I find most parties can blitz them down with damage pretty well.
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Huh. Thought it worked in reverse as displayed by the Alchymias in Istory Falls.
I look like an idiot then. XD
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... wait, Zidane has Knight 3? WTF DeNA.
Zidane does get a cover skill in FF 9 while Steiner doesn't, so it's not like there's 0 basis.
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Steiner gets Cover in FF9, as does Freya. Zidane gets the lesser version, Protect Girls.
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So having just finished Black Mage and me being late, it's obvious which job we should do next! The direction is unarguably logical and makes perfect sense after doing Black Mage considering the similarities and the consistency the job has of appearing throughout the franchise! Of course I am referring to...
(http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111202165056/finalfantasy/images/8/83/FFTThiefFemale.png)
THIEF
...what? Thought I was going to do White Mage!? HA! Jokes on you! ...ok I didn't really fool any of you as you knew I was going for the bait and switch, didn't you? Bah, screw you!
Thief has been around since the beginning of the franchise. Thief's generally have top tier speed (if not flat out game best), specialize in using Daggers, and their trademark ability is Steal. Sometimes they can use other weapons like Boomerangs, get evasion builds, and often have SOME association with Ninja. So without further ado, here is the almighty Thief!!!!!
Final Fantasy 1 (NES/Origins): ...ok, using the term "Almighty" was bad when we start near bottom of the barrel. Let's face it, Thief is crap. It has worse equipment than both Red Mage and Fighter (...then again, what DOESN"T have worse equipment than Fighter?), and lacks the former's access to Magic and the latter's raw stats. BUT IT CAN RUN FROM BATTLES MORE COMMONLY!!! Uh, yeah, totally a losing trade. I'm not going to look at Thief in the Ninja state because that's like a whole new job, but really just looking at Thief based on the first half of the game, it's awful.
Final Fantasy 1 (Dawn of Souls/PSP): So FF1 lacks a legitimate speed stat, so how do we make Thief not suck while not stealing (...no pun intended) from a quirk of the other jobs? The answer apparently is "let him have the highest accuracy, which by extension means he hits the most." This is immediately notice-able since Thief gets 2 hits right out of the gate and is actually a better damage dealer than the rest of the party, and he's capable of keeping up in damage as a result of being consistently ahead in hits. He also got better equipment, relatively speaking. The Mythril Sword in Elfland is no longer available until significantly later (Crescent Island I believe), so his weapons lag for way shorter period of time, in addition to the Soul of Chaos dungeons popping up. These grant access to a handful of weapons (most notably the Kotetsu from the FF3 Bosses) that make the "can't use Mythril Sword" factor not nearly as big a deal. Thief's still probably worse than Warrior, but at least he doesn't embarrass himself the way he did in the original FF1 Incarnations.
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): Thief is generally an under-appreciated job in FF3. He joins the same time as a bunch of other physical jobs and you see he doesn't have any obvious perks, so many overlook it in favor of Knight or Karateka, and lacks an obvious "use this now!" moment the way Dragoons have. In truth, Thief is actually very effective for the window of time right after you get him. Amur gives him access to Boomerangs, which means he can be a strong back row physical damage dealer with no real downsides, as well as he gets some unique armors that make his defensive stats decent enough. As an added perk, Thief can unlock doors, which exist throughout the entire Mid-game, and it generally has equipment that keeps him up to speed until around the time of Cave of Darkness. This may sound like a limited time of use, but the way FF3 is structured, that can be said for a lot of jobs, as only a handful are actually consistently good.
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): So now Thief is gotten immediately instead of halfway through the game. Sounds good and all, except Thief is pretty clearly bad when you first get it. Weapons are lackluster, has no real redeeming qualities other than being able to use a lot of the same armors as Warrior, and really just has high speed. Does this mean Thief is bad then? Absolutely not! Thief is an oddly good project job in this game. If you consistently use one through the Floating Continent, which is more reasonable than it sounds, it'll build up a lot of Job Levels, and then Amur kicks in which, just like the NES version, grants Thief access to some significant equipment upgrades. From this point onward, Thief is pretty clearly an effective job, having high speed and competent damage. Add in consistent weapon upgrades throughout, and we have a pretty good speedy damage dealer. An added perk Thief has on top of this? Steal has some actual niche uses. Two main uses are Gungnir for Dragoons, and being able to increase your stock of damage dealing items for Scholar (you can steal Bomb Arms, which cast Firaga, fairly early even), which is nice because that's your best way to do Magic Damage endgame. Overall, Thief is a good job that just has a rough beginning. If I had to pick a downside for endgame, it'd be that Thief competes with Ninja, who covers a very similar niche, but can do some other quirks, though Thief isn't completely outclassed here given the JLevel difference is going to be massive.
Final Fantasy 5: Ok, let's just address the Elephant in the room first: Edge is not a Thief! He's a Ninja who just equipped Steal as his secondary skill-set, because FF4 lacks Thieves. Got it? Good! Now, FF5's Thief is...er...a total support job. As in, it has a bunch of convenient perks for dungeons, but nothing it grants you is really significant for battles. A lot of the things Thief gives are generally not worth equipping, since who wants to waste an entire skillset slot on See Passages? To be fair, Thief has a lot of these innately, so just having one for convenience is a perk, as well as mastering one so your Freelancers/Mimes get all these perks is a bonus too. Another reason to bother with Thief for mastery purposes is game best speed, though not a huge jump over Ninja/Mystic Knight(/Gladiator.) As far as Steal is concerned...well, it's the only way to get a large number of items...the problem is most of them aren't worth the bother. Yes, Dragon Lances are good on Shinryu, pity you're going to get Elixirs 15/16th's of the time (...to be fair, Elixirs are hardly bad, and Reset does exist.) So Thief has it's quirks, but I hesitate to call it a "Good" job. To it's credit, it does get some ok damage with things like Twin Lance, a weapon most can't use, for a brief period of time, but probably not enough to save it.
Final Fantasy 6: For he will argue otherwise, Locke is totally a thief. He has just about everything you associate with Thief with the game best speed, uses Daggers, Boomerangs, etc. He also can use some heavy armor, and a fair number of swords. The logic behind that is simple: balance purposes. Locke doesn't have a strong special command, and his Magic Power is subpar, so they needed to give him something that lets him stand out, so the focus was going to be on his equipment options, so they decided to tweak them and let him use more than expected, though some of the choices are completely arbitrary (case in point, he can use Mythril Blade but not Regal Cutlass? Alright, makes sense; he shouldn't have access to the stronger one. Thing is, later one, he can't use Epee, but can use the superior Elemental Swords? At this point, I'm pretty sure they just dart boarded what Swords Locke can and can't use.) Locke also has high evasion in versions not the SNES or PS1 version, since he has naturally 15% and weapons that boost evasion though this really doesn't come up often. The question is, however, how is Locke as overall!? The answer is...two sided. He's kind of crappy in the WoB. There's really nothing he can do that someone else can't do better. Sure, he can be effective with Genji Glove + Atlas Armlet, but so can everyone else in the cast save Gau, the difference is they either don't need that to do damage or become useful. It almost feels like they forced you to use Locke a lot because you probably wouldn't (ok, I know the real reason is because "he's designated as the male lead and it fits his character to tag along" but hush!); Hawkeyes get Hyped, but they're just a random chance to do something that most of the rest of the cast can do consistently, without sacrificing any form of defenses. His only real saving grace in the WoB is that because of so much forced time, he'll have one of your best spell selections, and possible to get his magic up good with Esper Boosts.
...then the WoR kicks in and he rejoins with the Valiant Knife. This weapon is single handedly Locke's saving grace as once you get the Offering, Locke can be set up to do some really incredible (consistent) damage and doesn't really have to sacrifice much beyond Front Row to get it (and there are ways to mitigate that.) Add in access to Illumina on top of that, and suddenly Locke's a lot more impressive of a character. So by end game, Locke's actually pretty good! Sounds like the FF3DS Thief, except doesn't require consistent usage of him.
Final Fantasy 9: As I've said before, FF9 has only 4 real classifications of characters, and Zidane falls into the "Physical Fighter" classification. He has game best speed but lol speed in FF9. Steal is kind of cool in this, especially since Bandit insures your first Steal will have 100% success rate, and What's That!? has the perk of resetting your formation in one casting so we can get those Mages back into the back row. The rest of his skillset is basically filler, and while his Trance is really strong, it's also an FF9 Trance, so "notreliable/10." A lot people think think Zidane is only good if you boost Thievery, but this couldn't be further from the truth; Zidane's good if you keep his weapons up to date, which requires some synthing, though it's always between 2 of Zidane's daggers, and I believe all his daggers are storebought, usually in the same place the synthing exists. With that, applying the usual "MP Attack" (available early Disc 2), and the primary slayer skills I mentioned above, Zidane's a consistently solid hitter, capable of doing 9k+ damage with his basic physical come endgame (yes, that high; DL Stat Topic remember doesn't factor in those 2 important damage boffs, hence why Zidane's damage seems so low in the DL.) He also generally has good HP since he's in your team pretty much the entire game, thus lots of stupid FF9 Strength Buffs, which puts his HP above most characters (though he misses HP+10%.) Overall...Zidane's an effective physical fighter who can get some neat stuff here and there.
Final Fantasy 10: Rikku is debatably a Thief, and I'll be yelled at if I leave her off so...I'll cover her thief-like qualities I guess! She's fast, she can steal, she's damage anemic on her own Sphere Grid, and that's about it for Thief stuff! Being fast means she's good to start any battle, since you can swap in, say, Auron or Lulu, and not worry about them going AFTER the enemy, Steal is a nice "Free action" for cheap AP on her, that also nets you some potentially useful items (or just garbage like an Echo Screen <_< >_> ), especially since the first use is guaranteed success. It can also kill a handful of mecs, which is both a good and a bad thing. Good because, well, the enemy is dead! Bad because it means you can't steal from them AND Overkill unless you use Mug...and Rikku is not good enough at damage for Mug to overkill for most of the game. Honestly, I'm just going to leave it at that because a lot of Rikku's best qualities don't stem from her Thief-like ones, but rather the whole package (she is just as much "Chemist" as she is "Thief" frankly.)
Final Fantasy 14: Rogue is a thing but it's really just proto-Ninja so not going to really count it. That and I have no clue what it can do besides "not take fall damage." Seeing as Classes don't take traditional FF Names (save Archer...which is a job that's NEVER had a consistent name...)...look, just shut up and ignore this one ok?
Final Fantasy Tactics: Just when you thought Thief had finally gotten past it's sucktitude, HERE COMES THE FFT THIEVES! They rely on Daggers, a shitty weapon that has low WP and half relies on Speed making it's damage harder to increase. Steal Heart can be fun, stealing equipment allows for some nice trophies, Poaching can get you nice stuff but honestly a lot of that just leads to "more trouble than it was worth" or in Poaching's case, only a handful of enemies actually give something meaningful and only sometimes! Caution is kind of ass without a Shield or a Mantle and even then it's probably not worth the JP, Catch is a novelty reaction but not really a good one unless you're trying to make an army of Chaos Blade/Excalibur wielding Special PCs or something. So does this job have ANY Qualities? ...Move +2. That's a legit movement skill that's probably the best reason to use them. Also one of the only jobs with above average Speed Growth, so that's a thing! Yeah, really, it's hard to defend using Thief other than "something you use to unlock jobs that need it as a pre-req" because let's be honest, FFT Thieves suck.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: ...apparently they realized Thieves were bad so they made them a little too good here. See, Thief is basically the way you get a lot of the really good stuff in FFTA that lets you, you know, destroy the game. Their damage is better than you'd expect, but more important they have Steal Ability, and remember that on top of this, FFTA uses FF9's "Learn stuff from equipment" meaning getting better gear is especially important. So basically, Thief is kind of integral to doing anything interesting in this game.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: And apparently they realized that Thief was TOO important in FFTA1, so they tried to find a middle ground between FFT's "Suck" and FFTA1's "almost required" and came up with...kind of forgettable? Thief isn't bad but it's also something you can just kind of forget you have. It gets nice stuff, but a lot of items can be gotten in other ways that it's no longer integral.
Final Fantasy 10-2: Thief has high speed, and a passable early game physical due to two hits and a bunch of weird crap that you probably won't be using too much. It has First Strike which is cool, which like with Rikku in FF10, means you can swap into something more useful immediately and not worry about that Job's stats. It's other best use probably stems from Pilfer MP, allowing you to refill MP on jobs that need a lot of it (Pilfer HP is kind of a joke by contrast.) Honestly, I'm looking at it's skillset, stats, etc., and I'm not really seeing it as a very compelling or strong job. I know someone argued that it's a useful job but I remember trying these tricks in-game and not being impressed on my second playthrough.
Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light: Yes, I'm talking about this again so quiet and stop your bickering! Bandit, as it's called here because reasons, is useful for one very specific reason: It's the first legitimate physical job you have access too. No, I'm not kidding; before this you get Freelancer, Freelancer+ (Wayfarer), a bunch of mages. It's fast, it can steal, and you need to steal to get through some parts of the game because this game is stupid. Then you get more interesting jobs and stop using it unless the game demands you steal. SO MOVING ONTO SOMETHING BETTER!!!
Final Fantasy 12 Revenant Wings: Vaan is basically a Thief in this game. He's about speed, and stealing stats from enemies because conventional items don't exist. Vaan's useful in this game for one very important reason: For a large part of the game, he's your only Melee class character. You get a bunch of ranged characters and 2 fliers, but you don't get a 2nd melee character from between when Bag'gamman leaves and Basch joins. I probably shouldn't count this, but shut up, I am!
Bravely Default: And we end with Bravely Default! Thief here is a fast job with an S in Daggers, decent levels in Bows allowing for a strong weapon without Double Grip, and Steal can net a fair number of cool things. It gets all the Speed +% abilities, justifying spending some time in the job, Abate Wind if wind damage is causing you problems, and Lifesteal works for doing damage and healing in the same turn if you really need that. Not the greatest or most interesting of jobs, but it's not downright horrible too, just kind of limited.
Theatrhythm: Thieves in this game are those I would identify by getting Treasure based skills like Treasur Hunter, Steal, among others, which usually is based off the characters who, get this, were thieves in their home game! That mostly applies to Zidane, Locke and Vaan here. Vaan just kind of sucks; he's an FMS PC with low speed...do I really need to say what's wrong with this? Locke's a pretty standard "only good in FMS'" which means you won't use him in Dark Notes because some BMS PCs like Terra or Shantotto are fast enough to reach the end which is all you need. Zidane, however, is actually decent; while being a mostly FMS PC, he's not a deadweight in BMS', so can actually play the role of Party Leader needed for Dark Notes.
Curtain Call: FMS PCs are more meaningful because more item tricks and they keep track of how far you go so you can treat them kind of like BMS' with a different goal rather than just "you got far enough, who cares about anything else!" Anyway, the 3 above return, joined also by Rikku (10-2) and Yuffie. Honestly, not much has changed; you use them mostly in FMS' to get good stuff, though Zidane's no longer particularly worthwhile in BMS. You basically are going to use these characters for purposes of high distance coverage and/or lots of items.
And with that, my analysis of THIEF is finished! Tune in next time for *omitted because decision yet to be made*
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FFD: Thief is fighting for game-worst class but it's still not the worst in the series. It DOES have access to Katanas, which all hit species weakness, so that's cool. And it can use boomerangs but you won't be seeing those for most of the game. It's mostly a support class, with abilities that help one find items or flee from battles. Stealing doesn't completely suck on this game, but it's hardly a requirement until post game when you're hunting for rare items to trade or synth into the über weapons for the superbosses. Outside that? The only thing people use Thief for is Speed+10%. Which admittedly is great in a game where Speed actually does things! Just not a class you'll be keeping once you have Ninja and mastered the Speed boost.
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FF1 NES thief actually CAN'T run from battles more commonly. That's right, the one core feature the class is supposed to have doesn't work. Nasir code is amazing.
FF5 thief doesn't have much going for it besides the Chicken Knife and other jobs can use it as well/better. You CAN get pretty decent damage out of thief by sticking Barehanded on him, though (to be clear, still using a weapon, just using Barehanded for the STR boost).
Re: Locke, the "Epee" was the "Great Sword" in the Japanese version, which pretty cleanly explains why Locke can't use it.
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Barehanded Knife Thief doesn't even do as much damage as support-less Knight (similar Str, swords > knives) so let's not go overboard hyping (essentially) untwinked FF5 physicals. The ChickenKnife hype for Thief is not because it's a knife (as almost every job can use knives in FF5) but because Mug negates its downside, and is easier to learn than Rapid Fire, reliable unlike Dance, and goes off instantly unlike Focus or Jump. While most people would probably (rightly) side with Rapid Fire or Dance as the best ways to use the Chicken Knife, Mug still does deserve a little bit of note for that.
But overall, Meeple's assessment of the class is correct, that it is primarily cool for some utility perks (ambush immunity, Dash, Find Passages, a few cool steals) and having the best speed mastery in the game, but at least it doesn't completely embarrass itself otherwise.
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FF1 NES thief actually CAN'T run from battles more commonly. That's right, the one core feature the class is supposed to have doesn't work. Nasir code is amazing.
As someone who played a shitload of FF1 NES, I can guarantee you that Thief runs from battles more commonly. There is a *huge* difference in run success rates between a party that has a thief and one that doesn't.
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The truth is somewhat complicated.
Running is always successful in a preemptive attack, and never possible in
unrunnable battles. Running is successful if:
Luck > 0...[Level + 15]
However, running is bugged on the NES and it loads something else instead of
the runner's level:
Slot 1: Slot 3's Status byte
Slot 2: Slot 4's Status byte
Slot 3: Identifier for entity that attacks third, either 0-8 or 128-131
Slot 4: Depending on the one's digit of Slot 4's HP, 128-137
So, someone in Slot 1 or 2 will usually be able to run if their Luck is 15 or
higher and the character in slot 3 or 4 has normal status.
Running was supposed to have been fixed on the Origins version, but it
succeeds much less frequently than one would expect given the formula above,
and without apparent regard for luck. It appears that running is bugged in a
different, unknown way on Origins.
In short:
-In order to be good at running, you need to be in slot 1 or 2.
-At low levels, Thief is indeed better at running than other classes, provided he is in slot 1 or 2, due to starting with higher luck.
-You only need 15 luck to achieve the maximum run rate, something that every class does by around Level 14-15 (~Earth Cave levels). From then on, it no longer matters what class you are.
So there is in fact some truth to Thief being better at running, but it comes with a bunch of big caveats (the difference is only significant at very low levels and vanishes entirely by midgame, and it only applies if the fragile Thief is in one of the party slots which draws most attacks) which is why Thief's running ability is rightly antihyped. Contrary to my previous belief, though, being a Thief is in fact good for something as far as running is concerned; I thought that Luck was what was bugged in the routine, instead of Level. (Sorry about that, Meeple.)
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Throwing out random thoughts.
FF5 Knight is reliant upon an evadable physical attack for damage. So it has issues dealing with high evasion enemies later in the game or enemies that employ nasty counters to the Fight command.
In addition to its other disadvantages, high evasion shuts down the entire skillset of FFT Knight. They also have the misfortune of relying on a 1 range physical attack in a game where every monster has innate Counter. Innate shield usage has interesting niche uses except Geomancers and Lancers exist as well as special classes with ranged sword skills. There are a handful of battles where Break skills are handy. Otherwise in vanilla FFT, damage beatdowns tend to be superior.
FFT Thief: It's the class one uses to pick up skills that other classes use better. The only time I've really found Thief as a class effective is Agrias with Equip Sword and stacked with PA boosting gear before Knight Swords appear. (even then, Attack UP Geomancer is superior)
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I actually wish to ammend a statement of mine in the Black Mage part, namely FF3NES section.
Having just replayed the early game, I think calling Black Mage "useless at first" is unfair. It's straight up better than White Mage during this arc because while both are inferior to Red Mage, Black Mage can pull it's weight better with low MP thanks to Bows + Holy Arrows (the first dungeon it's in has a lot of Undead), allowing passable damage and back row. White Mage, by contrast, only has the MP Advantage, at a part in the game where it maybe accounts for 1 or 2 charges of level 1 spells at best. Considering that using a Red Mage probably means a durability push and enemies dying faster, I think I was underselling Black during this arc.
...granted, this amounts to literally one dungeon of content as after this dungeon, W. Slayer stops being meaningful, MP differences start being meaningful, and yeah, the rest of my statement remains true. Just noting this because we'll get to White Mage sooner or later, so it puts my comments there in better context.
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Time for an update because I've been slacking!
Last time, we talked about Thief, which means we have done 3 out of the 7 (...yes, 7; Ninja is his own thing for these purposes) classic classes established in FF1, which is of the course logical way to start things since it's the beginning. So which way am I going this time? Will I go with a physical one? A Magic one? The one with the best hat?
Well, after much thinking about it (by which I mean spent 30 seconds on it), I have decided the thing I will talk about is...
(http://cdn.i.ntere.st/p/9645120/image)
EXCALIBUR
(You have Mandy to blame for the image on this one)
Yeah, decided to go with a weapon this time for a change of pace. Don't worry, next time we'll get back to your regularly scheduled class of...something or other...but it will definitely be a class/job/whatever you wanna call it! Anyway, Excalibur is a recurring weapon in the franchise, usually being an end-game sword with something relating to holy elemental. I don't have much else to say about it other than it's totally named after King Arthur's sword and...ah hell...TO THE GAME'S THEMSELVES! I am going to skip games like Dissidia where it's just there for flavoring and such, because we'll be here forever.
Final Fantasy 1 (all versions): Unlike other aspects, weapons didn't change in FF1 between versions. The only difference is a relative worth thanks to the existence of Soul of Chaos dungeons, but I'll be ignoring that! Anyway, Excalibur (or Xcalbur for those NES fans)was the 2nd strongest weapon in the game, with the 2nd highest Crit Rate because FF1 is glitched and stupid. It's usable only by Knight, a job that didn't need any help to be awesome already, and in versions where it works, it can hit all species/elemental weaknesses...which doesn't really amount to much since the attack bonus is so small relative to the damage it does. If you have even a single Knight in your team, you will be using this weapon, as chances are you'll be giving Masamune (the one weapon that outclasses it) to a different character to have 2 comparable physicals. In Dawn of souls, there's some competition like the Ultima Weapon and Ragnarok, but one is at the end of a 40 floor dungeon (and like Masamune, can be used by anyone, so you'll probably hand it to someone else), and the other involves beating Shinryu, one of the hardest fights in the game, so good chance you'll be making some use of this anyway.
Final Fantasy 2 (all versions): Hey look! I can finally acknowledge this game! Excalibur is pretty much in the same boat it was in FF1, being "the #2 weapon behind Masamune." You get it before the final dungeon, and it's in a weapon class that you've probably had at least one character raised in because Swords are good. I hear it has a special effect but no one seems to have consistent sources on this; I think someone told me it resists all status, but don't quote me on that. In Soul of Rebirth, it's the strongest weapon you'll get outside of Uniques, which is to say, Josef probably will end up using this since he doesn't get a unique weapon, and shields are awesome! PSP version adds things like Ragnarok (Firion unique), but involves doing bonus dungeon stuff you might just skip anyway.
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): Excalibur was one of the Eurekan weapons, meaning it's a weapon you'll be using end-game on one of your Ninjas; before Ninja, it's an excuse to use Knight since only he can wield it, probably alongside one of Ragnarok and Full Moon. I have not much else to say about this; it's a strong weapon and you'll be using it if you know what's good for you.
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): Excalibur here is a little different; it still kicks ass having high attack and +5 to all stats, but the chance you'll be using it is lower now, because of the draw of characters. Knight still gets it, but Knight isn't as good as it was and so not a given. Another user of it, is of all things, Red Mage, who can make use of it with Stoneblade for a physical fighter who has a decent Magic Defense score (this is a surprisingly valuable niche), as well as a healer who can do legitimate damage. So what's the issue? There's a non-negligible chance you won't be using either character. to be fair, Excalibur is one of the saving graces of Knight, since he's the only one who can wield it and Ragnarok at the same time, which is 2 weapons of high attack that grant +10 stats across the board total, so I suppose that's a notable fact, but beyond that? Strong weapon with limited usability due to lack of users.
Final Fantasy 4 (all versions): While Final Fantasy 4 DS changed a lot, this was not one of those things. Excalibur is Cecil's 2nd strongest weapon, is Holy elemental which is good in the 2D Final Dungeon (save for Blue Dragons) and sucks in the DS Final Dungeon (because it's stupid.) Not much else to say other than that it actually works for an Ultimate Weapon, kind of, should you miss Ragnarok, as while not ideal, it's strong enough to be convincingly an Ultimate...which begs the question of "What the hell were they thinking with Kain's Holy Lance?" DS version granted makes the Holy Lance significantly stronger but shh! It's also a rare sword that only Cecil can use but Kain cannot, I guess, establishing the "Knight Sword" class seeing as it and other Cecil-exclusive swords all have a unique icon.
Final Fantasy 5: Excalibur is probably the strongest sword you'll be getting in this game. It's also usable only by Knight (and Freelancer), like a lot of end-game swords, further showing "hey look, Knight Sword!" As a result, Excalibur is one of the best weapons you'll be wielding alongside Spell Blade. It's also stronger than it looks since that +5 Strength adds an extra multiplier to damage, I believe, putting the damage above weapons that are stronger on paper like the Dragon Lance. It is Holy elemental too, but this rarely comes up especially if you're using Spell Blade. Excalibur does lose some use in the after game of FF5a, when Apocalypse and Ultima Weapon show up, but there's still a large amount of time before that kicks in. Excalibur deserves notes as being the weapon Gilgamesh thinks he has but totally doesn't.
Final Fantasy 6: And...we have our first crappy Excalibur. I get what they were going for; a high end sword with balanced stat boosts, Pearl elemental is rarely a bad thing, and it gives +20% Evade (...which works only in some versions), but honestly this is so meh in FF6. First off, it's gotten stupid late; getting it from Goddess means you'll have it for maybe 3 more boss fights and then the final boss. Secondly, an FF6 weapon based entirely on raw attack without any bonuses (save Elemental weakness) is kind of scrubby. This isn't even factoring in that FF6 has weapons like Illumina running around that just make Excalibur look bad. Overall, poor showing. Excalibur gets a 2nd showing in FF6a, through Gilgamesh as one of the summons. It's a high powered Holy elemental attack MT attack which...well...it's good enough that when it shows up you won't complain, if not the ideal move...basically what I'm saying is "it's not Excalipoor."
...I am not including Knights of the Round technicality for FF7; if you want Knights of the Round with Excalibur, just watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail or something.
Final Fantasy 8: Gilgamesh comes, hits something with Excalibur for damage, it's lower than Masamune because I guess that was based off FF1/2, and then goes away. I have nothing else to say other than "it's free damage."
Final Fantasy 9: Excalibur teaches Steiner Climhazzard, an awesome MT attack that deals near max damage that you won't care about because most of what you fight after you get the sword are of the "large sacks of HP" thing and Steiner's basic physical can do that much for less MP anyway, let alone things like Shock exist if you get Ragnarok. That is actually not Excalibur's use though; Excalibur's real use is that it's deceptively Steiner's best weapon for Non-Speed Runs. On paper, it should be worse than Ragnarok, but because it's Holy Elemental, Steiner can equip a Holy Elemental boosting equip (which yes, he gets) and that pushes Excalibur to be on the same level as Zidane's Ultima Weapon (which is significantly stronger than Ragnarok.) As a result, Steiner can now pump out 9k+ damage for low MP costs as opposed to 9999 with high MP costs off his low MP. Of course, worth noting Steiner's FRUE ULTIMATE!!!! is Excalibur II, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: Excalibur but better. The problem is you likely won't get it because the requirements are stupid.
Final Fantasy 10: Excalibur is Tidus's basic Break Damage Limit weapon. This basically means you won't get it unless you're lucky enough to see it dropped by Nemesis, or are an idiot and spend time farming Dark Matter to make a custom weapon for Tidus with Break Damage Limit (...look, I've done it myself, so I have every right to call people idiots for doing it because...just shut up.)
Final Fantasy 11: Reading the wiki, it sounds like it's the 1H Sword Relic weapon which...I don't know a damn thing about other than apparently these are stupid hard to get since FF11 hates the idea of you having free time. Apparently those who use it are Red Mages and Paladins...just like FF3DS...not sure if that has anything to do with anything.
Final Fantasy 12: Excalibur requires an FAQ to find like most things in this game. Once you get it, it doesn't seem that special; high powered 2H Sword, sure, but there's better stuff...but like Final Fantasy 9, that Holy Elemental thing kicks in, and with a Holy Strengthening equip (like White Robe), it's suddenly on par with the strongest weapon in the game (Zodiac Spear.) This makes Excalibur worth grabbing if you have any interest in doing post-game content...except that Yiazmat absorbs Holy and thus hates your life (he's weak to Dark though, so you can use those Ninja Knives for something!!!)
Apparently FF13 lacks an Excalibur...meh, I blame Jihl Fanboys or something.
Final Fantasy 14: Excalibur is the Paladin's Zodiac weapon in it's pen-ultimate stage, with Excalibur Zeta being the ultimate. It's...basically the best weapon you'll get for level 50, making it the best you'd have gotten before HW appeared and thus made all that hard work pointless! But who cares, IT'S FREAKING SHINY AND LOOKS COOL SO WORTH GETTING FOR GLAMOUR PURPOSES MWAHAHAHAHA!
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest: This is Benjamin's Strongest weapon and it gives +5 Speed. So why would you not use it? Well, Dragon Claw gives +5 Magic so it improves Benjamin's strongest damage, Giant's Axe can hit weakness on things though by that point you don't care, and Mega Grenade is Multi-target. Basically what I'm saying is FFMQ made all 4 weapons useful.
Final Fantasy Tactics: So...how do you make a weapon stupid broken? Give it high attack, Auto Haste, have it absorb one element and strengthen that same element, the element in question being the one commonly used in Math Skill, and then make this weapon usable by Swordskillers who can give it's Brave mechanics the finger, the Main Character who is likely going to have maxed Brave, and the optional character who relies on a skillset that doesn't give a rats ass about Attack, mostly just spams status....and it's just handed to you for free when you get far enough into the game, on the character who has excellent stats and moveset to back it up. Oh, and Balthier can use it too, as can Luso who is "a clone of the Main Character I just mentioned" (except with Male stats instead of "best of both worlds.") Yeah, Excalibur in FFT is stupid amazing. It feels like it may have been balanced if it was legitimately usable only by Knights, because they're so flawed that an amazing weapon like this might balance out, but you get so many alternatives in special PCs, it's hard to hide the fact that this weapon is stupid good. I don't really have anything to say other than if you aren't doing a theme based game or a challenge, not using this weapon is a bad idea!
Final Fantasy 10-2: While this game lacks weapons, FF10-2 found a way to get the likes of Excalibur and a few other FF Mainstays in. In this case, the Warrior's strongest attack is called Excalibur, which is also Holy Elemental. Not much else to say other than that.
Final Fantasy 13-2: Giglamesh uses this weapon on you. Allegedly it's design is based off the FF9 version and he stole it from Alexandria but I'm looking directly at both weapons and they don't really look the same at all, so I'm calling bollocks and that FF13-2's Ultimania was trying to explain something that really shouldn't have been explained and doesn't even begin to fit at all. No, sorry Ultmania writers; this is a completely new design for Excalibur and the weapon never had a consistent design, don't pretend it's something it's not. And it's not Excalibur 2, since that's basically "Excalibur but Green" and looks LESS like the weapon.
(yes, I am bitter about such nonsense, deal with it.)
Lightning Returns: Apparently it's a DLC weapon; looking at it's stats, it seems to be kind of...meager. I seem to recall weapon attacks ending over 500 come endgame or some such, and it has 280, though it has healing which is kind of a big deal in this game, but meh, the fact that it's a DLC weapon and doesn't seem super awesome is...I don't know where I'm going with this.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: A weapon you can get from one of the bosses that teaches Holy Blade to a Paladin. Looking at it's stats, it seems to be one of the strongest, but it's way behind the 2 strongest...which fittingly enough one of them is Excalibur 2. I don't have much else to say here, I don't remember FFTA well enough.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: ...seems be basically the same thing as FFTA1, only Excalibur 2 doesn't exist, I'm not repeating myself here as a result.
Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light: It's basically the best weapon in the game, gotten when you do a 90 Floor dungeon and get to the bottom and...wait why am I talking about this game no one cares about? NEXT!
Bravely Default: When I stole this weapon from Braev, I was all "AWESOME! Excalibur! That'll kick ass!" I was dissapointed to learn it's weaker than the best sword you can buy in Norende, and there are other swords, weapons, etc. you can find hanging around that are overall better. So really, it's just a late game sword with Holy elemental (I think), and not really worth a whole lot.
And thus ends probably the least interesting update thus far! I swear, next one will involve something actually worth analyzing but I felt like I could do something different!
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And finally back to doing this topic and the next class because it occurred to me I'm lazy and should be getting back to it. This next one I'll just go straight in and not be a teasing jackass about it:
(http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130515104639/finalfantasy/images/b/bd/Lalafell_White_Mage_Artwork_XIV.jpg)
White Mage
The original and most well known healing job from the franchise, and synonymous with the "Healing Magic Class" when referring to the role outside of it, White Mage is pretty straight forward in what determines it. It uses lots of Healing and Defensive spells, usually has limited offense until endgame where Holy appears and suddenly they're actually quite competent at it, low defenses though better than Black Mages, and wields staves. Look, it's the White Mage; you know what they do, and what identifies as them, so without further ado...ANALYSES!!!
Final Fantasy 1 (NES/Origins): White Mage runs into a similar problem that Black Mage has here, namely "Red Mage does most of what White Mage does and a lot more." To White Mage's credit, more MP is meaningful here, and Harm is better for busting Undead than Fire...by which I mean Harm 1 vs. Fire 1; I'd be lying if I said the Harm series > the Fire series, that's clearly wrong with the 2nd and 3rd versions of the spells. White Mage starts the game actually not too bad offensively because Hammers are alright, but this really doesn't last. One thing White Mage does have on Red Mage though is access to Life before promoting, which is a handy bonus for Earth Cave through Ordeals. They also get Life 2 when promoting to White Wizards for a utility Red Wizard doesn't have at all. The problem is these utilities are either short lived, gotten too late, or far too limited. It's not as one sided as Black Mage vs. Red Mage was, but it's still an uphill battle for White Mage nonetheless here.
Final Fantasy 1 (Dawn of Souls/PSP): Remember how I said the new magic system greatly benefited the Mages here? Yeah, White Mage is a lot better here. As I noted, Int doing something means White Mage's healing is suddenly substantially better than Red Mage's, which can be crucial against some bosses. Having an MP system means the access to the higher spells is more meaningful, though Phoenix Downs do make Life less meaningful, but Full Life is still extremely handy for Mid-Battle of course, and unreplace-able. Item Casting running off Int makes White Mage better as well since they can do it better than Non-Black mages, giving them reasonable offense with stuff like the Mage Staff. The last significant advantage they gained? A high HP score. For the first half of the game, White Mage has your 2nd best HP behind Warrior, which I know sounds weird, but it's true. Second half of the game, Grandmaster goes on a crazy HP hike and will likely surpass them, but they'll still have a solid score and not be far from the 999 HP cap, which combined with Ultima Weapon if you get it, gives them a good weapon! Overall, like Black Mage, greatly improved compared to their original selves.
Final Fantasy 2 (NES/Origins): Minwu is like the sole character in FF2 with an identifiable class classification...well, ok, there's Josef, but shh! He joins with a crap ton of White Magic at good levels, getting basically everything but Holy, has high magic stats, and...yeah, you get the idea. Minwu is really good too, though this is mostly because he's built very Jagen-like. Before he joins, you have a brief segment in Fynn which barely counts as a dungeon, then he joins to basically help baby your low level team until they get something resembling competence. he has some unintuitive tricks like the Swap trick, Teleport for instant death, and...ok that's it but point is he's good!
Final Fantasy 2 (Dawn of Souls/PSP): I'm just going to cover his aftergame appearance because his main game appearance is basically unchanged. Minwu basically makes the first half of Soul of Rebirth bare-able because of all the support spells; it's very possible you have 3 characters with under-developed gear (Scott always joins with full Mithril set) due to FF4 "unequip all temps!" mindset, so Minwu having all that magic is handy. He also gets Ultima as a unique spell, which given how many spells he knows and their levels, he can get passable damage out of it. Yeah, I got nothing more to say beyond that...
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): White Mage starts the game being kind of really bad. Remember how I initially said Black Mage is meaningless at first because Red Mage does it? Yeah, I was misguided; White Mage is the one who suffers. The Spell Charge advantage White Mage has on Red Mage is meaningless early game, and while this is true with Black Mage, Black Mage can at least do meaningful things when it runs out of MP due to equipping bows, something White Mage cannot do. Also Magic Damage difference is more meaningful than Healing. Of course, this doesn't last; after you get to Dragon Mountain, the MP differences start to show up, Item Casting Staves show up to give White Mage something resembling offense (which still sucks but better than nothing), and Aero is a pretty damn awesome spell (it's almost as strong as Fire 2 and ilk, despite being 1 level weaker, and runs off White Mage's good stat.) By this point, you'll want to keep White Mage as a permanent staple, because healing is just too valuable. Even if healing isn't as strong as you'd like, the higher level spells give a huge sense of longevity, and this applies all the way through the Shaman arc. Obviously, Shaman gets 100% obsoleted by Sage, but Sage is an Uber Super Awesome Job meant to obsolete all mages, so not really fair. White Mage also has some nifty status moves like Confuse, and at higher JLevels, stuff like Toad can be legitimate accurate status.
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): White Mage's healing got a huge boost here, and it's damage is better due to Item Casting being more potent, and being able to use Rods to cast Aras. Problems? Red Mage is a lot better this time around, so legitimate competition. You have to choose between stronger healing off higher MP or a job that can do significantly more damage and have higher defensive builds thanks to shields. Also stuff like Scholar exist to make Items better, and has a small stock of low level healing (...which doesn't replace white Mage, make no mistake, so you could totally skip this!), and all that. Devout is...basically White mage plus; they tried to make it have a flaw relative to white mage by getting less Low Level spell charges, but seriously, whose going to care about more Cures and Curas when you'll never use anything below Curaga in-battle, every Boss Fight restores your MP so the Cure and Curas you have for Out of Battle healing are meaningless extras on White Mage, etc. It has competition with Sage, who has less healing but has something approaching offense, and a consistently built Red Mage is surprisingly potent, but Devout is definitely a job you'll want to seriously consider using just for healing purposes against the endgame arc.
Final Fantasy 4 (2D versions): Rosa and Porom are basically interchange-able here. In original versions, the two had no overlap, and in Advance version, the difference is basically "Rosa has more HP, Porom has higher magic stats, and better equipment" leading up to essentially "face it, you want one of these characters in your team...though not both, that's probably a bit redundant." That aside, how are they? Honestly, I've always felt the Healers in FF4 were a bit lackluster until Curaga is gotten. Part of this is the section where Cure would be good, Cecil's basically unkillable, and the other characters are so squishy, healing doesn't go very far. Cura from Rosa should be great when you first get it, but it's such a short section, you won't notice it. Porom gets Cure at a reasonable point, but she's high on the list of "likely to die" and then Tellah gets his large array of spells...off low MP. Then you lose Porom, and this would be the segment where Cura would be good except for a few problems, big one being your main healer is Tellah...do I have to say what Tellah's problems are? Rosa finally joins, but by then, Cura is starting to notably lag, she really works best as a battery healer. Curaga is when a spell finally shows up on a character you have for a decent length of time with actual stats to use it, that can keep up with enemy damage. From here, Rosa (and later Porom) is pretty competent at her job, and then she learns Holy, and thus gets actual offense if you don't mind blowing away MP. Oh, they also get status, which is cool except FF4 status is so unreliable given enemies seem to immune it so much. Protect/Shell are good early game, but lose meaning later on given the additive bonuses in a subtraction system, Haste isn't as effective it should be on paper though Slow is actually fairly good, and Reflect can be handy in a handful of fights...and Dispel is awful because some genius decided to make Dispel REFLECTABLE.
Final Fantasy 4 (DS): Healing in this game got hit with a major buff, to the point where even Cecil's in-battle healing can sometimes be meaningful. Protect and Shell also became way better, sometimes crucial (hi CPU!) because of a percentage damage reduction. Add in how Rosa has high Magic Defense due to high Mind stat and mage gear, in a game where Magic Defense differences are huge and Rosa's somewhat better...though they killed all her physical durability by the same notion and felt it necessary to kill her HP stat. On the upside, Pray is actually really good now, being % HP *AND* MP healing rather than a laughable free move. Downsides? Her status is worthless, outside of Slow, and her charge times can be a big pain. On top of that, Salve exists and combined with the Double Healing Augment, Rosa's more replace-able by someone like Kain throwing MT X-potions, despite the superior healing compared to the 2D version.
Final Fantasy 5: So remember how I said White Mage in FF3o had this issue of competing directly with Red Mage at first and is worse? Yeah, something very similar happens here but starts off later since Red Mage doesn't exist at first, and lasts way longer because it's not until World 2 where White Mage gets meaningful advantages. Honestly, White Mage has issues after early game for a large part of FF5 because Healing feels underwhelming, Red Mage can be an ample substitute while also having real offense (again, Offense difference between Red Mage and Black Mage is significantly greater than Healing difference between Red Mage and White Mage), and there's little incentive to use White Mage for skills because Red Mage gives you most of the same stuff AND Black Magic alongside it. Then you get to Moore, and White Mage learns Curaga, and suddenly White Mage is unparalleled at the whole "healing your team" thing. That spell alone really keeps them afloat, but they still get a few nice things later on, like Arise (albeit the existence of Phoenix mitigates this, but Phoenix isn't on a skillset with adequate healing so...) and Holy. So really White Mage is kind of forgettable outside of some situation-ally useful Level 4 spells once Red Mage pops up, then you get to Moore, and you suddenly really appreciate them and their skillset.
Final Fantasy 9: First off, no, I am not treating Aerith as a White Mage because she gets Healing limits. Got that? Good! Ok, FF9 is weird because you have two White Mages who are also Summoners...I'd focus on Eiko because she's clearly the character focused more on the White Mage aspect while Garnet is focused more on the summoner one. Heck, when you look at the two, 2 of Eiko's summons are support based (Carbuncle and Phoenix), and while Garnet gets magical nukes, except for one problem: I claimed FF9 has only 4 classifications and I'd be going against that to do that. The classification here is both Eiko and Garnet fall under "Healer." They have differences but in the end, you're most likely using one of them for their healing, which is really damned good in this game (Cura can actually last you until basically the final dungeon, which is about when Garnet finally learns Curaga, so the fact that she's behind Eiko on healing spells isn't a big deal), and they both have reasonable levels of offense, thanks to summons (and Holy in Eiko's case.) I guess I could cover their non-healing things...which suck. Might is a waste of a turn since the damage buff is probably better spent just doing damage outright, Haste, Protect, etc. don't last long enough and are single target, Garnet's status spells have accuracy issues, so really you'll just be spamming their healing and Life spells, with occasional offense tossed in. Another aspect worth pointing out is how FF9 Phoenix Downs really suck in battle, where as Life spells are significantly better, so the Resurrection element is even more meaningful.
Final Fantasy 10: Again, we have a White Mage Summoner. I'm going to focus entirely on the "if Yuna was only a White Mage" thing because her being a summoner is cheating. Also you can replicate that effect by sending Kimhari down Yuna's grid which is the White Mage grid. So what does Yuna have? Good speed, evasion, hates actually being hit with physicals, high magic defense and game best Magic. Her healing is pure ST (unless you count Pray, which works as a "Free Action for AP"), but it's effective enough, and Rikku can supplement on MT. Protect and Shell are very handy to have, and the Nul-spells can be useful when used strategically. Then she gets Holy and OH LOOK MORE OFFENSE THAN EVERYONE ELSE! Overall, despite having limitations prior games didn't have on White Mages, Yuna's actually very good at her job, and Aeons were basically just unfair overkill.
Final Fantasy 11: ...White Mage exists, I know jack and shit about it here...
Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac International Job System: White Mage gets all the White Magic spells which is kind of a really big deal. There's so many spells you'll want to cast from it like Protect, Shell, Cure series, etc. True, some other jobs get it like Knight gets Curaja, or Monk gets Arise, but to have all the necessities on one character just helps with the Micromanaging so much, and for that reason alone you'll probably want to keep one. They also learn all Green Magic spells meaning they get stuff like Bubble as well. They do look offensively poor though; no offensive magic until Holy (unless you count Drain), their only weapon class is Rods which can't do damage until late when they can use early Greatswords which is something, and yeah. They're a pure utility job and a seemingly very good one on paper.
Final Fantasy 14: The Conjurer/White Mage is one of your healing jobs, of which there are three, and most importantly, Conjurer is literally the only Classified Healer before Level 30, as Arcanist (class that leads to Scholar) is classified as DPS, so especially valuable for earlier sections (...ok, level syncing Scholars exist but shut up.) Compared to Scholar, White Mage's big thing is just having a lot of tools for healing; it also brings Protect for a long term buff, and Stoneskin for that artificial HP Boost, though both can be cross-classed, Conjurer gets credit for providing those skills. White Mage's thing is relying heavily on raw HP healing, contrast to Scholar which is usually Healing + Damage mitigation combo. Someone once pointed out the difference is essentially "White Mage is overkill healing, Scholar is a lot of bag of tricks." White Mage also has MT Healing which is good emergency move, but only emergency because pricey, and raises Aggro a lot and your healer is the last person you want getting aggro. For offense? Well, White Mage is better than you think; Cleric Stance allows it to sacrifice healing for better offense, it gets 2 DoT spells in Aero spells, it's water spell is free damage that cna piss off melee characters because it launches enemies, thus only useful when solo, and Stone spells are B&B damage spells. Holy is also a great AoE spell with high damage and Stunning everyone, but only worthwhile if you can hit a lot, and not good if you need resources since pricey. Overall, White Mage is a very effective Healer, though it's variety isn't as interesting as other jobs.
Final Fantasy Tactics: Priests or White Mages or Those Guys And Girls In White Hoods Who Wield Staves are...well...healers. The big thing White Magic has overall is Holy is the best Math Skill spell in the game! Also Priests are the fastest Mage class, but has the lowest MA. Cure spells are fine for ranged healing though Summoner getting Moogle mitigates the need for this, Raise is an alternative to Phoenix Down that restores more health but can miss, so it's not great for the whole "reset the counter" aspect, plus falters on low Faith units. That's an issue Priests run into in general; they're not effective healers on low faith.
Final Tactics Advance 1 and 2: I remember them existing and having healing but damned if I can remember how effective they are! Just listing this here because completionism.
Final Fantasy 10-2: Well, one quirk White Mage has is it's stupid easy to raise thanks to Pray counting as an action towards learning others. They also can't really do much else but spam healing, but hey, this is FF10-2; you put jobs that can do that on your Dress-sphere and swap according to what you need. What doesn't help, however, is the existence of Chemist, a class that can fill the same niche and generally does it better. Now I know there's a late game accessory that makes MP costs kind of die and thus turns White Mage into a faster version of Mega Potion spamming, but generally Chemist is just easier to use, and once you get it, you have little reason to care about White Mage.
Final Fantasy 4 The After Years: To be blunt, you'll want Rosa or Porom in your team in the 2nd half of the game because not only is healing really useful, but White Magic has a bunch of necessary assist spells too. See, Edward w/ the Item Doubling Ring can be a good healer, but he's only a healer. Kain and Ceodore get Haste and Blink, notable support spells, but they don't get actual healing, and none of them have Slow, another handy spell. White Mages get the best of both worlds, and have the resources to use them. Rosa vs. Porom is not really an argument worth discussing since, like in FF4a with those two as well as FF9's Garnet vs. Eiko, you'll want to use at least one or the other. There is a 3rd White Mage of sorts in the form of Lenora, but she's basically the Leonardo of White Mages (...odd how the names are similar) if Rosa and Porom were the Shinon and Rolf. She has lower HP, learns spells at a worse rate, and has to play more catch up, and even when caught up, she's still not good. SHE CAN LEARN BLACK MAGIC THOUGH! ...which matters for all of Aspir seeing as Porom and Rosa learn Holy before Lenora will get any meaningful Black Magic, defeating the purpose. Yeah, you basically just pretend Lenora isn't there and rely on Porom or Rosa for the late game stuff, because they're just better at the job.
Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light: Oh look, a job FF4HoL wasn't afraid to use the common name of! Anyway, White Mage's thing is basically "I can cast White Magic for 1 less AP" and that's basically it. It gets tricks that let healing spells work better, Hide which is a bard mode, and...you know what no one cares about this game. I could talk about Turkey Salad for the rest of this paragraph and no one would notice the difference.
Bravely Default: White Mage is possibly the single most valuable job in the entire game. For starters, White Magic healing is exceedingly valuable because there's really little comparable to it. You'll want at least one character in the team with a good Mind stat and up to date White Magic at all times just for that reason. Then you realize White Mage has a few other perks, a big one is Angelic Ward, namely a 1 slot skill that randomly halves incoming damage 50% of the time, which for the less math savvy people, means basically a 25% durability increase. Add in utility like MT Status healing with Esunaga, and Protect/Shell for some defensive buffs, really you'd be crazy to not be running at least one character with the White Magic skillset at all times. Generally speaking, White Magic is a good fallback for any character who isn't necessarily needing a 2nd skillset, just because the amount of utility it provides is invaluable.
Next up, I pick...yet another Final Fantasy 1 Class because we're not going on beyond that until it's all finished. ALL HAIL THE OG JOBS or something.
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For what it's worth FF5 White Mage does have a meaningful advantage over Red Mage in W1, that being Esuna, which is a L4 spell gained at the tail end of Karnak. It's extremely helpful against Soul Cannon in particular, since it's the only way to cure Old. Still generally your assessment of the class in FF5 is correct.
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I remember Esuna in W1 being a thing, but didn't remember it being meaningful, though I'll take your word for it.
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FF1: White Mage has one other advantage: the class is useful against Chaos, if only for wall. It's still a pretty terrible class, but hey.
FF4: Disagree with Rosa=Porom. Porom is pretty scrubby for the 4o arc, and in 4a she still has a much smaller pool of HP. That matters less in the aftergame, but I still find Rosa to be much better till then.
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FF1NES: I would agree that RM > WM, but I think that RM+WM >> 2xRM in practice for casual play.
There's two reasons for this. For one, as Meeple mentioned, having access to LIFE before class change is a Big Deal, considering the Ice Cave. WM's advantages would still begin to fall off after class change but for one more factor: if we're arguing theoretically optimal parties in FF1, it's pretty much between 2xFI/2xRM and 2xFI/RM/WM, and the cold fact of the matter is that there aren't 4 endgame-quality swords in the game - one fighter gets Masamune, one gets Excalibur, one Red Mage gets Defender IIRC, and the fourth member is screwed. So in light of that, ultimately the second RM and the WM end up with identical offense: itemcasting LIT2 forever.
However, it's not a clear-cut scenario, since 2xRM has notably better offense than RM+WM in the pre-class change game. Thus it does make for an actually interesting tradeoff.
FF12 IZJS: Rods are actually pretty decent damage in the early game and early mid game, then they start falling off once the high-end storebought weapons start appearing. They're still notable for being able to hit flyers in IZJS, at least.
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There's also the Sun Sword, which is about on par with the Defender (more Atk, less Hit), and Ice Brands aren't much worse anyway; all of them allow notably more ST damage than itemcast Ice 2 (let alone Bolt 2). It's true that itemcasts are cool and help WM close the offensive gap, though.
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As a general comment, I find White Magic in games with large MP pools (so not FF1o, obviously) a nice safety buffer to be a nice safety buffer for initial runs when I still get lost in dungeons, be overly conservative with offensive resources because I don't know where the boss is (or how much HP it has), etc. WM was significantly more valuable for me in my first playthroughs of both FF4 and FF5 than in subsequent runs (and with FF5 I've done lots of SCCs with no WM at all).
FF5: WM also faces stiff competition for a long time from the Healing Staff, which is basically an infinite ST Cura for Summoner, Time Mage, or Red Mage. Free itemswitching in-battle means you aren't sacrificing any damage for this, either.
That said, since secondary skills exist and the longterm payoff for investing in White Mage is definately good, I tend to work the class into my party rotation a fair amount even before Moore, even if it's generally not an optimal pick in a vacuum. Not hard to find room for White Magic as a secondary somewhere, and it takes way less AP to get White Magic Lv 3 or even Lv4 learned than Red Magic Lv 3.
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The Healing Staff doesn't have the MT option (which is what you'll be wanting against various W1 bosses who use MT attacks) and it doesn't have Raise (a spell which somehow costs less than a single Phoenix Down), either. It also can't be used for out-of-battle healing. It's cool and all but I don't think it terribly devalues White/Red. On a "normal" run of FF5 (i.e. not a challenge run, but not breaking the game with every obscure boss status hole either) I'd be pretty surprised if someone didn't use one of White or Red in W1, myself.
One interesting contrast between FF5 and various other games like it (Bravely Default and Final Fantasy Dimensions are the most obvious, but things like FFT apply here too) is that other classes can use White Magic at virtually no loss of performance (Sage Staff Holy concerns aside, the only thing you lose is a small amount of magic/MP, and only if your White level is lower than L6). This both increases the value of white magic and decreases the value of White Mage as a carrier in FF5, compared to the other games. That said, I wouldn't call White Magic's value at its highest in FF5 just because the game doesn't call for copious amounts of MT healing as much as BD or FFD do, for instance; fiestas prove that you can often get by without.
Protect and Shell are two other tools in the white magic skillset which vary a lot in use (Meeple's comments touch on this). Out of the games where white magic is actually a thing, FF5's Protect/Shell stand near the top in terms of power, halving damage (or better!) and also reducing magical status odds, while being permanent (dispel aside, and dispel is extraordinarily rare in FF5, and only ST when it does exist). Shell is the difference between a 1600 damage Almagest and a 700 damage one, Protect is somewhat less valuable since physicals are easier to spoil in various ways but still good. Relatively speaking they're much less potent in games prior to FF5, and their duration wrecks them in FF9 (and to a lesser extent FFT, though there it's more the short length of FFT's battles at work). They're... okay in BD, but on HM at least I didn't find them that potent in the time before Performer obsoletes them. FFX is certainly the game where they're next most potent after FF5 (considering games with proper "white mages" only), though FFX bosses are much more built with positive status in mind than most games in the series so dispel/instant death/etc. to get around them are concerns. They're still great, though.
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My kneejerk is FF3 or FF4 for White Magic's peak value in the main series, trying to rely on item based healing alone in either feels like it'd be infinitely more painful than in FF5 with its status loopholes and often easily blitzed bosses. Rough guess is that 3 would be the worse of the two, since Sylph exists at least. Eventually.
I guess this conversation raises the point that while While Mage itself is a subpar class for much of the game due to lack of rods/daggers once you realize how element strengthening works, White Magic itself is a pretty cheap secondary option for much of the game (just 60 AP for L3) with no real downsides vs using a WM proper, a niche in which Red Magic can't hope to compete (160 AP for Lv 3 Red, yikes). Red Mage is pretty much limited to a carrier in FF5, a role in which I have a lot of issues with it that I'll bring up when Meeple gets around to them.
My kneejerk is that FFT is a game where White Magic is generally better off on a different mage class; slightly above average speed is often not great with FFT charge times (though admittedly less of a problem with healing/supportive stuff) whereas the higher MA multiplier on other mage classes is pretty much always helpful for both Cure spells and Holy. Rod-wielding classes get better +MA equips than Priests do, for that matter. Oh, and Priests have a weirdly high PA multiplier for a mage class that does basically nothing for them, not even relevant for staff pokes. Best use I could ever think of for it was Geomancy secondary with a Mace of Zeus but that is totally a gimmick.
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I want to call out how amazing White Magic is in FF8. 30 AP after you get Siren you should refine Tents into Curagas and then be able to spam Limits while in a safe health range and that will last roughly 3/4 of the game as a perfectly viable strategy. Oh did you take damage? Use one of your highly available over healing spells.
Which is to say, White Magic isn't good, Curaga is good and it is available half an hour into the game. Also Protect and Shell aren't bad in FF8 either, but lol who cares. They (along with Reflect) also are pretty sweet Junction bait if you want to never die since Vit and Spirit scaling are dumb especially with aforementioned HP pools).
I kind of disagree on the FF5 statements. I think Red and Red Mage are no where near as powerful or relevant in my experience, the short term gains of White + something else versus Red + something else (or piggy backing something off RM to use it as a carrier and get AP for Dual Cast) isn't worth the opportunity cost in my experience. I would much rather pinball someone between Black/Summon/Time and White than spend time in Red in World 1. As a late game carry to sink in the 1500+ JP you need for Dual Cast it is a bit more tolerable (since its a much lower % of the game). Even if it isn't FF7 level white magic, the healing in FF5 is still pretty representative of FF healing, it is strong and efficient.
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FF4: Disagree with Rosa=Porom. Porom is pretty scrubby for the 4o arc, and in 4a she still has a much smaller pool of HP. That matters less in the aftergame, but I still find Rosa to be much better till then.
I covered that White Mages are pretty blech during the early parts, because White Magic isn't really good until Curaga, and the segment Cura would be fine at, you don't have a proper White Mage, just Tellah who has resource issues, and Cecil whose stats aren't anywhere near good enough to be workable.
And I completely disagree that Rosa is "much better" until the after-game. A big thing Porom has, and this matters way more than the HP on average, is resistance against all 3 elements without using a Protect Ring. Rosa's HP actually comes up against one fight on average, and that's Zeromus. Porom's ability to resist all 3 elements? Matters the entire dungeon. You have only 2 Protect Rings, and potentially 4 characters slots over them, turning that into only 3 is kind of a significant detail. Porom's also got a significant speed edge on Rosa, both because of a notable speed advantage but higher Will makes her magic come off faster.
That HP Pool really isn't notable outside of Zeromus. I think there's like one boss that uses Non MHP Gravity (as in, Ogopogo doesn't count) on you, and it's Dark Bahamut, who on average, 2 shots both Rosa and Porom anyway. True, his opening Mega Flare runs risk of possibly killing her, though chances are with her Game Best Magic Defense, and game best Magic Evasion, the RNG will likely fall on the lower side of things for her.
I'm not saying she's better than Rosa, I'm saying you're really selling her short. Heck, after game, the only thing I see Porom gets is a further speed bonus on Rosa. Either way, Porom has legitimate advantages, just saying "Rosa is better because HP, end argument" feels close minded, seeing as in most scenarios, Porom has things to supplement or it's mostly a non-factor.
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DLCon's coming, so I'm sneaking one of these in right before it starts!
(http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111127220618/finalfantasy/images/archive/8/81/20120502155625!VI-shadow_sd.jpg)
NINJA
You tell me a better SNEAKY UPDATE job? A job that has been around since the beginning of the franchise, even though it wasn't one of the main 6 because promotions exist. Often characterized by high speed, Ninja-knives, being able to throw things, sometimes Ninja Magic, and often middling to lowish durability. Without further ado, here's the NINJA Analysis.
Final Fantasy 1 (NES/Origins): Ninja first appeared as a promoted version of Thief, as a result, just like Thief, I will only look at Ninja's worth as Ninja, NOT as Thief. Unlike Thief, though, that does have to be taken into account, because you can't get to Ninja without suffering through Thief, so it's worth is hurt notably by this. Ninja's big thing is being able to use just about any weapon save Excalibur, has a defense stat that's actually not half-bad, and can use up to level 4 Black Magic, which is meaningful since he gets Fast. Sounds pretty good right? On paper, sure, but there's a number of problems. While Ninja is the only one with a defensive stat worth a damn besides Knight, the difference between Ninja and Knight is kind of major so it's still a huge drop in durability. Likewise, the offensive drop is pretty darn big too, especially when Excalibur enters in; Katana was suppose to be similar but crit rates don't work that way sadly. More to the point, Red Wizard is capable of doing most of what Ninja can do, is capable of doing it way earlier, doesn't require the assy Thief, and trades in durability for a large number of White Magic spells (like Life), and a few more Black Magic spells like level 3's. While the two can be comparable, in the end, Red Wizard doesn't require a really crappy class for half the game, Ninja does, and that alone just kind of kills any incentive to use Ninja.
Final Fantasy 1 (Dawn of Souls/PSP): Just like Thief, Ninja got buffed. Hitting more times than Knight while using a lot of the same weapons means his damage is generally better, at the cost of durability. Add in how Temper actually works in this game, and more defensive gear that he actually shares with Knight (like Genji stuff) and suddenly Ninja works as an interesting alternative to Knight. Also the Dawn of Souls dungeons means more weapons for Ninja to use, such like Muramasa is closer to Knight's Ragnarok than Sasuke's Katana is to Excalibur, meaning the weapon advantage endgame isn't as big. So a combination of Thief not totally embarasing himself, and Ninja getting some mild buffs, it's actually worth it.
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): Ninja is the ultimate physical jobs. There's really not much else to say; it can use everything without the word "Onion", has highest stats of all Physical Jobs, and the precursor of Throw exists in this via Shurikens, an expendable you can equip 2 at a time (one in each hand) that do more damage than just about any other weapon in the game. Kind of pointless to say much else because, well, "Ultimate Physical Job, and game doesn't pretend anything else" speaks for itself.
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): Ninja here is comparable to Black Belt in that it's meant to be a Thief upgrade of sorts that is hindered by lack of Job Levels. Except for one major difference, that being Ninja doesn't suck. See, Black Belt NEEDS JLevels to not suck, and it doesn't have them. Ninja actually has the stats to get away without them, and compared to Thief, it gets access to Dark Swords, giving him a weapon advantage to offset the JLevel advantage some, keeping the two comparable. Another major point in Ninja's favor is access to Genji equips, making it way more durable than Thief, at least before Crystal Tower and the Fuma Garb kicks in. Another perk Ninja has going for it is Throwing Shurikens, handy for Bosses as it means it can jump in Back Row, and still deal notable damage, something very few Jobs can do without sacrificing something, an especially nice perk with Genji Shield allowing for a durability push without sacrificing offense.
Final Fantasy 4 (2D versions): Edge is...er...Edge. He's fast, but the speed only goes so far because of the wacky ATB. He's got a basic physical, which is...a basic physical. He can use Claws for status which are cool, but don't really come up unless you plan ahead with them, or do Sylph Cave ASAP. Ninja magic helps compliment Rydia for screen clearing but his lack of MP and the fact that Flame sucks (Flood and Blitz are notably better) makes it limited. Throw is cool...for the final boss because you don't get enough ammo and Fumas are too expensive to be worth on anything else. He gets durability...in the final dungeon. Yeah, Edge is kind of just there until late game where he finally picks up, since he doesn't really have much to stand out, but he also has notable flaws.
Final Fantasy 4 (3D versions): Well, the game did make Shurikens store-bought and cheap much earlier, so he can spam those from Back Row! The damage is disappointing. He got a whole bunch of new elemental spells! ...in a game where Int matters more than ever, weakness hitting sucks, and the multipliers aren't very good. Yeah, I'm just going to say Edge hasn't really changed much, going a lateral shift. Oh yeah, he lost access to claws, which hurts in a number of ways, and the mage Masher strategy I failed mention earlier is kind of worthless since species weakness is 1.5x damage instead of 4x.
Final Fantasy 5: Tied for #2 in Speed and having Dual Wield, Ninja is a job definitely worth mastering if only because both of those are things you'll want out of Freelancer, especially if you don't invest in Thief (...though, investing in Mystic Knight or Gladiator merits the former pointless but shh!) Dual Wield makes Ninja one of your better physical damage dealers for a long time, especially if you hand it an Equip Skill, and Ninja Knives and the Dual Lance give it actual weapons so it doesn't rely on Daggers (which are admittedly better than you'd expect), and Throw can deal some really nice damage on occasion, especially when you factor in how good Scrolls are overall. A solid Job, in the grand scheme of things. Oh yeah, they can use Boomerangs for back row damage if you care.
Final Fantasy 6: Shadow is the FF Ninja. Shadow on paper should be amazing in the WoB. Throw Shuriken does more damage than Edgar's Drill, and is targettable, and is dirt cheap, Skeans are fantastic MT damage, and Interceptor can even sneak in extra damage if the enemy doesn't fly. The problem is Shadow basically doesn't exist for most of the WoB, and one of the times he does (Zozo) he's a liability due to randomly leaving, on top of costing you money. WoR, Shadow's not quite as good since Skeans aren't as strong (though, they'll last you a while), and others can match Throw Ninja Star and such, albeit, being able to target his damage is a nice perk compared to things like Bum Rush, and it's consistent unlike Setzer's Fixed Dice. His equipment is meager but not horrible, he can use Thief Knife to be a makeshift thief (no, I didn't forget this on Edge, it's just FF4 Steal is LAUGHABLY BAD), which is also probably his best weapon (pre-Dragon's Den), and he's not as frail as you'd think (...outside of the DL <.<; ). Overall, he's a pretty average character who looks a lot better on paper than he is. I do think it's odd Shadow can't use Boomerangs but I guess they wanted to keep it a niche for Locke.
Final Fantasy 7: ...I'm just listing Yuffie for the sake of completion. She's called a Ninja in game because Wutai, comes with Throw, her weapon is a Shuriken/Boomerang/etc., and her stats are similar to a Ninja. I'm ending it here because I'm reaching now because seriously, it's FF7!
Final Fantasy 9: Armarant...shouldn't count as a Ninja. The only thing he has in common is Throw; otherwise, his stats and skillset are more reminiscent of Monk, so I'm more noting this just to explain why I'm skipping him!
Final Fantasy 11: Ninjas were a tank class here because of an exploit unintended that Square-enix just kind of rolled with, allowing for an evasion tank. Yeah, not really intuitive, but that's all I know about the darn things.
Final Fantasy 14: Ninjas are a DPS Job from Rogue and I know jack and all about them. Someone whose played FF14 as a Ninja, please fill in the gaps because **** if I can.
Final Fantasy 4TAY: So...Edge is a lot better in this game. His magic is meaningful, he gets better weapons to work with (or more accurately, weapon competition is lesser from the higher end stuff such that he performs better), gets a mild healing spell, ATB is less ****ed so his speed is meaningful, etc. He's one of the better characters in the game certainly. The same cannot be said for his sentai team. Ok, I'll give credit to Gekkou; he gets a reasonable weapon in Axes, has a nice high HP score which makes him good for tanking those meteors in the face and he gets a watered down version of throw that's good enough for these purposes. The other three? Are just inferior versions of another character, be it a lesser healer, lesser mage, and lesser Kain...and these are significant.
Final Fantasy Tactics: When it comes to Physical jobs in FFT, there's very few actually worthwhile generics. Ninja is among those. Boasting amazing speed, Two Swords, high move and jump, and a ranged attack to compliment, Ninja is an ideal physical job. Giving it Martial Arts on a good Brave unit can yield some monstrously devestating results. On top of that, it even offers some neat perks like Abandon for a Brave-less reaction that works well with a feather mantle or a shield, or 2 Swords because...well...2 Swords. If you're using a physical job in FFT, chances are you'll want to invest at least SOME time in Ninja, because it's pretty darn good.
Bravely Default: High speed, evasion based Job that gets Dual Wield to mitigate the penalty of dual wielding. That's pretty much Ninja in a nutshell! Well no, I should note what makes these things good or not. Dual Wielding has this cool perk that it means you get 2 Specials (or double the credit for a single weapon) allowing for easier building and if you're not Dual Wielding, chances are your damage is taking a notable hit. Shippunjari insures you'll always get damage in, which is nice if used with a slow job, Transcience is handy for giving you a physical defense move that can be used the same time as brave, as well as outright evade specific nuisances like the Dragon Breath Attacks, Kairai can be used as an alternative to Provoke style moves, to insure a specific character is targetted, and that's basically it. A solid job overall, thought it is held back by it's weapon ranks since Daggers are the only thing it's good at (second best is Katanas with a B), but a Weapon Lore can help fix that.
If this sounds rushed, that's because it is. So feel free to set fire to this, rip it apart, and criticize it to all hell, fill in gaps, etc.
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Final Fantasy Dimensions: Ninja is a Dark Warriors-exclusive job and is the sole reason why Dark Warriors own for physical damage. Dualwield is stupidly good in this game and would be reason enough to invest in this class, but it's also got great stats, a solid varied skillset, and access to Katanas for species-weakness-hitting of all flavors. Also Throw for endgame bosses if you want to hit that sweet 9999 cap from the backrow for a hefty price. They are also great for Fusion Abilities. Pretty much any job you pair with Ninja will get a decent F-Ability to round out your skillset, though you can min-max for better ones, Ninja's almost always a good choice. You might have several Ninja on your Dark Warriors team if you find yourself displeased with any of the other job options. And that's not a bad strategy if you have the Katanas for it.
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Dual-Wield is honestly less good in FFD than it often is in FF games (it comes with a damage penalty built in), but it's still good and Ninja still owns due to the speed + useful skillset + shockingly good HP for a ninja. I agree with Djinn that it gives the dark warriors a leg-up in physical bruising just for that (though if that's not enough, Dark Knight and its Backliner ability is also dark-exclusive).
Regarding FF5 Ninja, it should be noted that scrolls are amazingly good. They're a 120-power no-split magic attack gained in World 1. That's stronger than Titan, stronger than split -aga spells, stronger than Wind Slash... i.e. stronger than anything against multiple enemies until World 3 (where high-end summons are better), and you get them in three elemental flavours. Running off ninja magic stat tempers them some, but they're still very good even then for a while, and the twinking possibilities, i.e. any magic skill on a ninja, or better yet Throw on a rod-using mage, push them into crazy good territory. The cost is pretty negligible, too (by contrast, shuriken-types are overpriced and not very useful as such).
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Interestingly, I thought I acknowledged Scrolls in my rant, but apparently I didn't! Was definitely thinking about them when writing it, but given I was writing it in a hurry, probably thought "Already covered" when I apparently didn't. No real excuse other than negligence. I'll edit that in at some point, because yeah, really should have been there and I had full intention of at least giving it a nod.
I did mention "Throw does really nice damage" on occasion, which perhaps at the time I was thinking that it was an umbrella that scrolls fall under but you're right in that Scrolls deserve special acknowledgment.
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Yes, I'm later than usual, no I will not apologize, this is entirely the fault of that person over there. Without further ado, let's move onto another FF1 Job because really, what do you expect?
(http://www.geeksundergrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Final_Fantasy_Black_Belt.gif)
Monk
Originally called Black Belt, then promoted to Master, made it "Karate" for Yang, eventually retranslated as Monk and has been that ever since...except FF3DS where they made Black Belt the "improved' variation but you know what? I'll cover THAT when i get to it! Monks are identified as that job that punches thing. Really, not much else to say about that! Ok, fine, generally there's other features. They often have above average speed, high HP, wear light armor making them not as durable as you'd expect, limited equipment selection, high physical stats, and that's about it. They also generally have a recurring aspect of being fairly Low Maitenance Jobs in the sense that you don't have to put a lot of extra effort into them, just general usage. This of course could be me speaking out of my ass, so let's get going! Oh yeah, they usually use Claws too...just saying...
Final Fantasy 1 (NES/Origins): Monks were the single most 1 dimensional class in the game, to the point where the Master (their promoted form) didn't actually IMPROVE anything...I think they technically got worse actually due to lower Magic Defense growth? I'll get to that oddity in a bit. They start the game using crappy Nunchakus, because Nunchakus are inaccurate, then they punch things and generally have good offense the entire game...unless there's high defense then their damage falls because they were highly hit dependent (contrast to Fighter/Knight which was a combination of Hits and Power.) Oddly, their HP was kind of middling in this game, since they weren't Knight. The big things about Monk were that they had the highest damage potential at levels "too high to care" I believe, and you didn't really have to spend any money on them making it easier to support other jobs. In what is absolutely bizarre considering later renditions, Monks also had the best Magic Defense in the game due to their growth. They're also the only job that doesn't get Magic even post promotion. Basically, the only reason to use one is because they're cheap to maintain...on the otherhand, they're a physical job that "isn't Fighter" so you're at a losing trade already!
Final Fantasy 1 (Dawn of Souls/PSP): Monks get way better here. Their Nunchaku era is shorter lived since level growth is much faster so they get to the "Punch things hard" era faster. They now have bad Magic Defense since they're a Physical class and that's basically how FF1 distinguished Magic Defense scores and their HP...is weird. They start the game having fairly bad HP for a long while, then their HP growth mid-game skyrockets and they end the game top tier. Yeah, I don't get it either. What I do know is that they're legitimately the best physical Power House in the game thanks to the rebalancing, Temper working properly, Knights being nerfed, etc., so there's a far more desire-able reason to use them now since any team without one does take a notable loss on ST offense. So yes, they're better, pity this version of the game is too easy to care in most cases.
Final Fantasy 2 (NES/Origins): Another oddity, Josef is clearly built as a Monk. He joins with Fist levels and practically nothing else, and he hits harder than characters using other weapons as a result. He really exists to emphasize that yes, Unarmed does damage...but you'll never want to use it because it means no shield, which is not obvious this early granted, and then Josef disappears forever!!!
Final Fantasy 2 (Dawn of Souls/PSP): ...until this aftergame where you play as him dead. He still punches things, gets a unique accessory, NOT weapon, which is a losing trade since you can't use fists with Shields and the others get "better than Excalibur!" level weapons (Masamune not in aftermgame), so while he hits hard, he's also your frailest. And now that boringness is discussed....
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): So when you start the game, you need to pick jobs. There's actually very little reason to choose Monk over Fighter at all in the early game, since Fighter is basically straight up better, except for one detail, and that goes back to the "low maintenance" deal. Monk is competent as a physical fighter, but requires way less to maintain and doesn't mean there's competition for good weapons, nor do you have to buy more. In FF3, saving money is a big deal, and Monk generally gets most of it's gear through chests and items, and after a point, just uses it's fists anyway. For this reason alone, you'll probably field a Monk on the Floating Continent (at least, most of it) arc as a second fighter, since the other options are Mages or forcing competition among equips. Also Nunchakus do kind of suck because of accuracy and you can't wait til fists compete just for consistency purposes. There is an upgrade to Monk as well in Karateka/Master/whatever you wanna call it, I'm going to call it Bob. Bobs can use Claws, which are like Nunchakus except they can actually hit things, making Bobs during their pre-Unarmed section way better than Monks are. Bobs also introduce for the first time the ability Build Up which in this version, lets you skip up to 2 turns (3rd and you explode) for increased damage. This would be great except Bobs get their defense lowered to 0 while building up, so only really useful against splitting enemies. They also have high HP Growth. They're a solid job, but tend to be a bit overrated as many tend to make them sound like a must have, when really so many other jobs can perform similarly, and on the long term!
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): Monks are somewhat better here than in the NES version for two reasons. First off, crappy Nunchakus are replaced with early game claws, so Monks don't lag on offense. Secondly, Monks are actually decent the entire game now, or at least until close to endgame. A quirk Monks have in this game is if you are job Level grinder, they can become really good...but I never did bother grinding Job Levels so claws basically always outdamaged them so that factor never kicked in for me, hence why I specify "Grinder." See, in this game, Monks unarmed damage was based on their Job level, not standard level, and the game also lies outright about attack stat, giving you a completely useless Attack Stat for unarmed damage that seems ludicrously high but is not reflective of damage at all; yes, that stat is completely useless. It'd be understandable if it was a way to get a sense for Claws vs. Unarmed, but nope, doesn't reflect even reflect damage, much less get used in the formula. Monks still get their upgrade job in this game, called Black Belts...which are outright awful. Black Belts have higher stats than Monks and Build Up (Monks have a counter stance), so on paper they should be better! They're not; Job levels make a big deal in this game, ESPECIALLY for Black Belt. Black Belt's thing was doing ridiculous damage with lot's of Job levels...on a Job gotten in the Earth Crystal. "But Meeple, ninja is too and you said that was good!" Ninja, unlike Black Belt, actually had advantages over Thief and Dark Knight (the two Jobs it's essentially a hybrid of), combining the speed of Thief with the gear of a Dark Knight, allowing it to actually function well in-spite of it's lack of JLevels. Black Belt does none of that; it has nothing to offset it's JLevel deficit on a job very dependent on it. It does, however, have GAME BEST HP GROWTH!!!! ...again, on a job gotten as late as it is.
Final Fantasy 4 (2D): Yang is the game's Monk here, and basically has all the standard traits, though they gut the crappy weapon phase entirely and just make his unarmed damage solid throughout, instead giving him Claws that allow various properties to his weapon. He also brings a non-fail version of Build Up, which is great in the advance version for beating down Behemoths due to avoiding counters. He gets Kick which seems cool at first but it's not long til you realize the MT damage just really isn't worth bothering with, and lastly, he gets Endure which lets him...buff defense of himself...to be fair, this is decently potent early on due to additive nature, but still completely arbitrary. Yang's effectiveness somewhat hinges on one factor, that being how much you're willing to micromanage his equips. He can hit a lot of weaknesses, elemental and species, and hit them really hard, but you have to pay attention. Without that, Yang's passable but nothing special, at least until Endgame where his late game equips kick in and he's got by far the highest DPS for a physical character thanks to the raw speed + damage combo.
Final Fantasy 4 (3D): Honestly, I think Yang's basically the same here. Kick's better but now has a charge time, making it not as good at least in Yang's hands. Now on Cecil with Draw Attacks, Counter and replacing Attack with Kick? Much different story! But we're talking about Monks, not moves derived from Monks. One thing that really hurts Yang is how they completely gutted weaknesses. In 2D versions, they were either 2x damage for elementals, or 4x damage for species or "Major" weaknesses that a handful of enemies have; no weaknesses are 1.5x damage regardless and often just aren't worth bothering with. One thing that does help Yang indirectly is how Paladin Cecil is really gimped on damage during this section making Yang's physical damage all the more meaningful, and Cecil really won't catch up on damage until about Tower of Bab-il. All in all, yang is forgettable in this game!
Final Fantasy 5: Monk's are big physical powerhouses out of the gate and murder things really fast for the early game. This doesn't last the entire game and eventually they fall behind, so that makes them kind of Jeiganesque. Given their lack of variety and the way their structured, Monks need some incentive to use later on and they actually do have a few! Namely they have game best Strength, game best Stamina (which by extension means game best HP), and Counter, all which can be passed onto Freelancers and Mimes if you master them, so that makes them a job worth considering. Another thing they have going for them is Brawler, a skill that just about any job can benefit from early game. Even jobs that get good weapons benefit since it boosts their strength to Monk level, so it's certainly a viable option for something like Ninja or Dragoon, whom can't make use of Double Grip (though, the boost may not be worth using over just handing another skillset and increasing variety, but I digress.) So what we have is a strong class out of the gate that gets progressively less good, but has a few quirks that give you a reason to continue investing in one in the long run. As an interesting factor, Monk's I think are the only job with a completely unique skill, in that no other job can use it under any circumstance (...Mimic not withstanding), that being Kick. I didn't say it was a GOOD skill mind you!
Final Fantasy 6: Sabin is...very unconventional for a Monk. Ok, at first glance he has all the tell-tale signs of a Monk. High physical stats, solid speed, low Magic stats, top tier in Extra HP (...which is meaningless granted but shhh!), gets light armor, uses Claws as his weapon though the game lacks an unarmed Mechanic so they just made claws a more conventional weapon here, and that's about it. So what's different? Blitz gives Sabin an actual skillset of sorts, and in truth, despite how he appears, Sabin's really a Mage in disguise, since most of his major Blitzes are magical. This makes me want to punch TOSE further for the God Hand fiasco making it a PURELY PHYSICAL WEAPON with no real special qualities to make caring about ON THE CHARACTER WITH HIGH FREE OFFENSE. Which ties into Sabin's point: Raw damage. Sabin starts the game top tier for ST damage (albeit not as meaningful as it sounds since many can ST OHKO, most obviously during the Phantom Train arc where it's 3 guys OHKOing enemies), gets Fire Dance a few dungeons later and becomes one of your best MT damage dealers, then people start learning Magic, a Fire Dungeon kicks in, and Sabin stops standing out. Early WoR kicks in and the entire segment feels tailored for Sabin's purposes, and I mean that kind of seriously since it feels balanced around "this part is intended to not be too difficult for a potentially underdeveloped Celes and Sabin, so here's a bunch of enemies who are murdered by Fire Dance." Getting Bum Rush and Air Blade basically makes Sabin a raw powerhouse, but he hits his cap, others catch up, and when they do, Sabin doesn't have much going for him other than a probably beefy spell set due to lots of usage. All in all, Sabin's a decent character, and has obvious uses, but he's far from an overpowered monster. He also gets 2 Healing Blitzes that no one ever uses because Mantra is situational only and Spiraler is both high leveled AND kills Sabin. Also he suplexes trains.
Final Fantasy 7: Yep, for once I'm actually addressing this with a straight face! See, unlike Yuffie who is "Ninja in flavoring only", Tifa actually feels like a legitimate Monk in as much as FF7 can make one. Notably, she's capable of being an amazing physical powerhouse as early as Nibelheim, and before that, she has Limit damage a clear step up compared to everyone else...at least once she gets to her level 2s, as her level 1's are clearly weaker than others. The Powersoul nonetheless hits way harder than basically everything in the game until Ultimate Weapons kick in and even then, it competes, and she upgrades that to Master Fist too, and Cursed Ring only makes them crazier. To further demonstrate this, Tifa also has game worst magic by a long shot come end game. Her best magic weapon is +34 Magic; the 2nd worst "best Magic" weapons for characters are a tie between Yuffie and Cid at +42 and on weapons with more Materia to boot. On the flipside, Premium Heart is actually one of the best Ultimates in the game if used properly. Basically, Tifa's the one character in FF7 who can be truly treated as a physical powerhouse through a large part of the game, which is about as close to Monk as a game like this can get...also she punches things, and can suplex walls. Ok, she does have low HP for a Monk, but she's also the first female Monk so uhh...something?
Final Fantasy 8: While Tifa feels like she actually fits the Monk, I'm struggling to justify Zell beyond "he punches things" and "his Duels are inspired by Sabin's Blitzes, which in turn were inspired by Street Fighter." His stats are completely un-noteworthy (like most FF8 characters), he lacks any identifying features beyond his limits and...you get the idea; basically, he's a Monk in as much as Yuffie is a Ninja, it's mostly a flavoring thing. He'd be better if his weapon was a hot Dog cannon that he used to kill enemies for having them choke on them.
Final Fantasy 9: As I said, Armarant is a Monk w/ Throw as a secondary and here I'll explain why! First off, his weapon is claws. Secondly, his stats. He gets #2 in speed (#3 in practice due to FF9's wonky stat system often puts Garnet above him), though you could argue "Thief > Ninja" is about as common as "Ninja > Thief" in this regard, but I digress, he also has good HP, something Ninjas generally don't have but Monks do. Flair is a skillset that kind of fits Monk, with Chakra being just like the FFT Variant, No Mercy being basically a Ki Blast and you get the idea. Ok, so that justification aside, HOW IS ARMARANT!? ...he falls under the classification of "Fighters" which as I said there's only 4 character classifications in FF9. Armarant looks varied on paper but his variety is superficial outside of Trance He gets a lot of cool stuff UNDER Trance, but it's hard to respect Trance given how unreliable it is in FF9, so while Power Up MT Chakra is actually kind of neat, the chance of you getting it at a moment where it's useful is not something I'd bank on. Also Throw is pretty strong I suppose.
Final Fantasy 10: Mostly addressing that no, I don't think Rikku qualifies as a Monk. She uses fist weapons, but her skillset, stats, etc. are reminiscent of a hybrid between Chemist and Thief. As a result, I'm moving on!
Final Fantasy 11: Monks are a thing and I know nothing about them here. Don't know why I even bothered!
Final Fantasy 12 International Zodiac Job System: Monks are in this game, and I can only hope they improved Bare Handed mechanics because they sucked here. They can also use Poles, which ok, that's a big plus I guess! They also get some a lot of White Magic meaning they can work as healers if I'm reading this right, crap ton of HP Augments (all of them I think), and...yeah, look, I'm not really sure beyond that. They seem to be Pole Users who can fight Unarmed or something and has healing. I guess Bravely Default was using something as a base!
Final Fantasy 13: Like with Rikku, mostly noting that Snow really doesn't fit the Monk mold outside of "he punches things." I addressed this earlier.
Final Fantasy 14 A Realm reborn: Monks are a DPS Job taken from Pugilists. From what I can tell, they are a very involved DPS Job, being reliant on positioning, a lot of stance changing, and a bunch of micromanaging and are a counter-point to "DPS are just fool proof role!" because near as I can tell, maximizing Monk takes a lot of work. I do know they were ideal for DPS but rebalancing has altered this and don't know where they stand now. It's also a job I have 0 experience in so...
Final Fantasy 4 The After Years: Yang returns and is basically the same as he was in FF4a, which is not a bad thing. He has competition however in his daughter, Ursula, who is similar to him, with less damage but higher Speed, and more importantly is Female, which means she can use the Minerva Bustier, a far better supplement for Brave Suit (which a lot of characters want) than anything Yang can use. Using either one of these characters is very plausible and not a bad idea either way, though both might not be the best of ideas. Yang also gets Counter Cover as a new trick that you don't see much use of but hey it's there!
Final Fantasy Tactics: You know when I first played FFT, I thought Monk wasn't very good because it punched something and did little damage...it was also a female and I don't remember her brave. Ignoring that instance, Male Monks with good Brave hit things very hard with their fists, and Two Swords makes them hit harder! Unfortunately, they can't use Helmets which compromises twinking, and by extension makes Ninjas better at the whole twink thing but that doesn't make Monks bad! Martial Arts has a fair number of interesting skills, ranging from some Ranged damage in Wave Fist and Earth Slash, Chakra for limited HP/MP Healing, and Revive for...well, take a wild guess! One of the better jobs on the Physical side of things in any event.
Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light: "Fighters" are Monks in this game and they kind of suck; I remember trying to show it off in stream and they were notably under-performing that everyone agreed it was a "screw that!" moment. Note there is a Monk in this game except it's not like Monk at all; it's a Mage job based on Undead Slaying or some such, "Fighter" is the Monk analog here because FF4HoL is stupid.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: There are Monk analogs in this game but my lack of knowledge of this game is failing me yet again, screw it, not bothering.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: ...see above...as usual, feel free to field this for me.
Bravely Default: Monk is the first physical job you get (FREELANCER DOESN'T COUNT!) The Unarmed aspect is...not that prevalent for a few reasons, most notably, Claws are usually stronger, and there's usually a Physical Staff which combined with Two Handed is better than both, and Monks have an S in staves. Monk is, honestly, not a very good job in this game. The difference between it and Knight is immediately apparently, and the moves it gets along the way are not very special. For example, Qiqong Wave sounds cool but Ranger already has that and requires no effort to raise, and gives higher damage buffing moves in the Slayer Skills. It gets a whole bunch of HP+% skills, and does have Phys Attack +10% for a 1 slot ability which are alright, but honestly there's so much better stuff to invest in, feels like a waste. Natural Talent has some builds it can be useful in I'm sure, but you get it late and at a point where there's so many other offensive builds that require you to sacrifice way less, I am not impressed. It's not useless, but it's not exactly very good either.
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I can add a bit on IZJS Monk: It's basically a tank job. They have the highest HP of any job in the game, Poles have solid evasion stats, and as mentioned they get some healing (and in FF12, having your tank be the main healer isn't a terrible strategy because you can set them up to gambit MT healing on their own HP being low and stuff). Unarmed is almost never worth using, but it's there. IIRC they have nearly the best damage of the Light Armor jobs in IZJS, though they still lose to Heavy Armor jobs in damage output because of lacking Heavy Armor's +STR.
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FFRK: Those characters that you said are kind of like monks get monk skills here. Josef, Sabin, Tifa, Snow out of the ones released so far. Josef is the best of the lot with second highest attack stat in the game after Sephiroth and two useful record materia compared to most characters having 0 useful.
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Also DeNA loses points for making Snow a generic monk and only very recently in JP giving him heavy armor + knight skills so he can tank like he's supposed to.
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Is this still happening? I liked this.
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So we have done all the jobs from Final Fantasy 1 with the exception of one job. There's a very clear angle to take for the next job, and that is definitely...
(http://www.ffxivguide.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ffxiv-dragoon.png)
DRAGOON
...yes, I'm skipping Red Mage, and before someone comes after me with a rusty spork and a sharpened tin can (yes, I'm referring to YOU), let me explain why:
Red Mage, despite what you may think, is not as common a recurring job. in fact, many games you'd think it'd show up it actually hasn't; to give you an idea, there's not a single Red Mage character in the franchise yet (there are ones who come close like Terra/Celes or Lightning, but no actual Red Mage), which is why I'm skipping that and going onto the most emo of jobs...you'd think that'd be Dark Knight but this job tends to attract the emo freaks, so we're going to it!
Dragoon is best defined by being the Lance wielding guys who can use Jump and...honestly, that's about the extent of them! They usually are Dragon themed, sometimes have some move that effects MP, and generally use Heavy Armor making them sort of tanky. How do they hold up through the games? LET'S FIND OUT!
Final Fantasy 2: Ok, technically, Ricard was the first one and it started here, so I feel obligated to at least acknowledge him. Thing is, besides design and plot, he has nothing that really suggests Dragoon. Heck, in older versions, his primary weapon is a Sword, not a spear though in Dawn of Souls and later, he has a bunch of spear levels, joins with a spear, and Wyvern Lance is his ultimate aftergame. Not much else to say; he's an FF2 character after-all.
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): Dragoons are garbage until Saronia; this is intentional since you get no gear until then. At Saronia, you either use 4 Dragoons or die a horrible death to Garuda. After Saronia, Dragoons are...actually not half bad. They have low Vitality so they're not as tanky as you'd expect, but with Blood Lance (which is really good here!), and Jump (which is 3x damage), Dragoons are definitely a viable choice, and some bosses can be cheesed with multiple Jump shenanigans. They're workable the entire game once they get gear, which is a win for a game like this.
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): Well, Dragoons are useful out of the gate thanks to Thunder Spears being available immediately. They still get Blood Lance which is still good, but otherwise, outside of Garuda and the ability to murder things weak to Wind, they're not all that great...unless you get Gungnir which is really damned good of course, but that's a big "if" seeing as it's either grind Thief, hold off on Odin, or pray the RNG Gods are nice to you. To Dragoon's credit, in the final dungeon, they can item cast Holy through the Holy Lance (something unique to them due to how Item casting works), which while not usually good, is handy for that physical immune tentacle and does big damage. Otherwise? Dragoons mostly exist for Blood Lance jump cheese and little else here. Also, they retain their "frail by armored class standards" distinction here.
Final Fantasy 4 (2D): Ok, so I have to talk about this in 2 parts, because the Advance version made significant changes here. First off, the original! Talking about Kain anytime before he rejoins is pointless; the early game is basically "Enemies suck" so Kain vs. Cecil is pointless here. Between Zot and the Sealed Gate, Kain's not that bad actually; elemental weapons can be used to exploit weaknesses, he's a 2nd character who can take a damned hit which is rare in FF4, gets elemental resistances which is nice for the likes of Rubicante, and overall just works as a warm body. Then he leaves, and rejoins and he's...pretty bad. See, one major thing that changes between leaving and rejoining? Damage standards. Cecil has gotten some major upgrades (Excalibur) and is still got one more coming, Rydia is starting to get her high level spells, Edge finally is getting store-bought shurikens and his weapons are stronger combined with better speed (thus more hits), Kain...rejoins with a weapon that is worse than potentially what he left with (namely Defender). Avenger, which is a damn nice weapon mid-game, is suddenly not going to cut it anymore, since you're basically forcing Kain to act in a way that compromises his tanking just to be subpar. Then he gets Holy Lance, a weapon that is barely stronger than the Defender, a weapon available before he leaves that gives a stat boost, and even with Jump, Cecil w/ Ragnarok out damages him. The only good things about Kain there are his ability to take a hit, but now Rosa's healing is way better, Edge is not as frail as before, so Kain's really just there for a 5th slot...
...and this stands out way more in the Advance version where suddenly competition exists and just about all 5 of them are cleanly better, as are the other 3 of the original final 5 (Cecil is forced.) His failings are just more obvious and you really have no reason to use him other than unlocking his challenge in the aftergame dungeon.
"But Meeple, Abel's Lance is super awesome!"
You're right, it is really good, but it's not saving Kain for all of the following reasons:
-Kain's Trial is one of the later trials in the dungeon, which means you're stuck with Kain not using that weapons until then.
-To get Kain's Trial, you need to beat Zeromus with Kain in your team. This means either being forced to use Holy Lance/Defender Kain, which we just established is pretty bad, or get a weapon like Piggy Stick or Gigant Axe which makes him passable but still-worse than every other character, and then beat the final dungeon a 2nd time, which kind of defeats the purpose.
-Even if you get a Piggy Stick or Gigant Axe, there's still a non-negligible part of the dungeon you're required to use Kain with pre-aftergame weapons
And to make all this worse, there's nothing Kain can really get in terms of RNG to save him. Yes, there's the Dragon Lance which helps against Dragon opponents but that's final dungeon only and against enemies that only really appear in the latter half of the dungeon, when you don't fight many Dragons anymore.
Basically, Kain's solid in the mid-game, and pretty bad in the late game, with a saving grace that comes too late to really do him any good.
Final Fantasy 4 (3D): ...and unfortunately for him, he's not really much better here, but for different reasons. They did fix his weapon issue such that Holy Lance is now only marginally worse than Ragnarok instead of laughably worse, so his damage is better, but different problems arise, namely new algorithms. On paper, he should still be a tank, but his vitality is way worse than Cecil's that it's notice-able how much worse he is at taking hits. On top of that, you only need one tank in the game thanks to Draw Attacks and Cecil is a hell of a lot better at that. Weaknesses are much worse so having that Ice Lance vs. Rubicante won't mean much, nor that Ogre Axe for the occasional Ogre enemy. Add in how his low magic defense is now obviously notice-able and he's not really reliable on durability. He can use the Onion Equips which is cool, but good luck getting them, and to his credit, he can get a lot of elemental resistance to pair with a Cursed Ring for the final dungeon, so I guess he's not all bad in that regard, but my point is basically "no they didn't really fix him." I'll give points to the fact that he has plenty of room for a combination of the double item effectiveness + Salve combo making him a makeshift healer off his decent speed, but otherwise, there's little to really argue on his behalf. What should be a 2nd tank to alleviate Cecil's job just doesn't pan out.
Final Fantasy 5: ...and just when you think I couldn't make Dragoons seem worse than Kain, THESE GUYS pop up. At least Kain had windows of moments where he was good and was a better warm body than most of your team at most points, but here? Dragoons are just bad. So first let's talk about the good! Javelin is a damn good weapon available early that if you can get 2 of them and Equip Lance OR Dual Wield early, (...yes, I'm being unreasonable, shut up), you can make a lot of use of them. Also, Dragon Sword is a free action to restore MP on Mages, that's a thing! Otherwise? We have a Job that relies on a weapon that can't be double gripped, has no real statistical advantage (worst Vitality and Strength of armored jobs save Mystic Knight with no passives to pass to Freelancer/Mime, so literally no reason to master it other than completion), and skillset that is utterly limited. The only reason this isn't the "Worst Job in the game" is because Berserker exists, and Berserker is only arguably worse than Dragoon. Let that sink in!
Final Fantasy 6: I probably shouldn't count this since it's more a set up used by Mog, Edgar or Imps, but it's there so I feel I should acknowledge it. Basically, it's a decent physical set up end game and little else to say about it.
Final Fantasy 7: Just like FF6, probably not worth mentioning but Cid is clearly inspired by Dragoons, using a Lance, getting *3* Jump based skills, and Dragon is even reminiscent of Dragon Sword from FF5. I wouldn't say Cid is a Dragoon but he's clearly Dragoon inspired, and thus feel I should at least give him the HM.
Final Fantasy 9: Freya is the Dragoon here and falls under the "Fighter" classification. She does have some odd quirks like Reis' Wind for early MT Regen (during an arc where you have no dedicated healer to boot), and Luna is basically an Auto-Battle skill if you just want to finish things fast. Also, Dragon's Crest is overhyped, I cannot emphasize this enough. You get it when you get the Holy Lance, a late game weapon that is actually Freya's real Ultimate if you can get Strength Holy (which yes, she can get, if limited options), and she can plug out pretty sick numbers with her physical set up properly. Dragon Crest requires 100 Dragon kills to get 9999, but hey, you don't need 9999, just some high damage right? Well, the thing is, the high damage only comes when you get close to that 100 kill; at 50 kills, you only do 2500, which Freya has absolutely no problem beating out at that point with MP Attack. So no, I don't want to hear hype about this if we're not talking challenges. That said, FF9 has 4 classifications of characters still, and Freya is still the "fighter" class. Ok, FINE, she also has White Draw for MP Healing but I never got a lot of use out of it.
Final Fantasy 10: Like Cid, Kimhari definitely takes cues from Dragoons despite not being one himself. He has Lancet, spears, and Jump is his starting Ronso Rage. Call this an Honorable Mention.
Final Fantasy 11: Dragoons are a job in this game and hell if I can say anything about this; it's FF11, I know jack and all.
Final Fantasy 12 ZIJS: Ulhan's are Dragoons without Jump...which is seriously why they're called Ulhans. As a result, I am not mentioning much beyond that!
Final Fantasy 13: And again, another Dragoon INSPIRED character in Fang, so...yeah, leave it at that!
Final Fantasy 14: Dragoons are a DPS Job that can use Middle Armor giving them higher physical defense and lower magic defense than non-Tanks. They do a lot of positional damage, Jump and variants exist for extra OGCD damage that often gets you killed more than dodges damage so screw defensive measures, they use a lot of Heavy Thrust to get their damage up and generally are one of the highest DPS' in the game. Apparently they use to be really damned awful but lots of balance tweaks have since fixed it.
Final Fantasy Tactics: Lancers are Dragoons under a different name because Daravon. Jump is one of the few 8 Range abilities in the game, and works as a nice utility if you know how to use it. Lack of clothing sucks though and they can't get any real way to make use of Robes save Holy Lance random Holy castings with Wizard RObe...yes I'm reaching, SHUT UP. Javelin II is pretty fantastic if you get your hands on it, but that's another "if". They also have one of the higher PA Growths, and Lances do have 2 Range letting them avoid counters in most cases. They also have Ignore Height, which would be more meaningful if Teleport didn't exist but to Lancer's credit, Teleport is on the opposite side of the tree so very reasonable that you could access it on that character before Teleport (and Fly is naturally much later so that never counts). While not a fantastic job, they don't embarrass themselves and can have some uses.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: They exist and are a Banga Job but again, I don't know enough about this, I will just acknowledge their existence here...
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: ...and here too!!!
Final Fantasy 4 The After Years: Evil Kain is a pretty stock Dragoon and he's OP because overleveled for like the 10 minutes you have him. Kain himself when he becomes a Holy Dragoon is...actually pretty darn good. Notably, he's physical character who has good enough equipment in terms of quality and flexibility (though missing Lunar gear does suck), gets Haste and Blink allowing him to help the White Mage in supporting, gets some key Bands. His main competition is Ceodore who sacrifices the physical stats in favor of more White Magic, which is a fair argument for who is better at that slot, and he's pretty cleanly better than Cecil.
There's also a Ninja who pretends to be a Dragoon in Zangetsu...he sucks, and you should never use him outside of Edge's story.
Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy: I've been bad and not been acknowledging this game in previous jobs and need to make up lost ground. As a result, the first person to respond to this post will be set on fire for the joy of the rest of the topic! Anyway, Kain is one of the last characters you'll unlock, and he's clearly meant to be this SUPER AWESOME PHYSICAL CHARACTER! ...and he's not. On paper, he looks awesome because near Maxed Strength and Speed? YAY! Then you remember Strength Up lowers Speed, so that combination of both is wasted. Then you remember that if you get him, you probably are mostly finished with Dark Notes, and he's underleveled anyway, so not doing much help there. AND THEN you realize he has 2 Reactive and 1 Proactive meaning you can only use 1 Strength Up on him, while Firion, Cloud and WoL can use Level 2 and 3 together, and Cloud also has a Limit, as well as Squall using Level 1/2 combined gets a similar boost and Lionheart more than makes up for the rest (Focus kind of sucks.) So basically, Kain is intended to be awesome and is demonstrably average, with a huge "joins too late to give a crap" penalty.
Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy Curtain Call: Kain's a more normal character here so it's less hilarious that he's not nearly as good as the game wanted to pretend he was in the previous game. Ultimately, Kain is utterly generic; he gets a Limit which is something, but he's otherwise a fighter who misses out on key abilities like Added Cut with no real gimmick whatsoever.
Bravely Default: Valkyrie are the Dragoon Stand-in; they're basically Dragoons without the Dragon association and with a clearly gender specific name that can be used by the opposite gender...yeah, they really needed a better job name for it, but I digress. Valkyries are pretty good, having an MT attack that costs 1 Brave with a weapon class that increases damage of MT attacks, so it's even better in practice. Jump is a neat skill because it's apparently 3x damage, so it does in fact do more damage, Piece Default can be useful against specific bosses that abuse Default a lot, Spirit Barrier is a nifty defensive trick seeing as they don't use MP much, and...basically, the point I'm getting at is Valkyrie is a good job to invest in and one of the higher points of Dragoons despite not being a Dragoon.
I feel like I'm forgetting stuff but whatever. And yes, the next job will also be something not FF1-related.
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Final Fantasy Dimensions has a named Red Mage character! So... there's at least one!
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FINALLY moving on. This entire post's delay is the fault of the FFRK crew! You know who you are, and thus it is only natural that I use THIS for the next image!
(https://cdn-image.pf.dena.com/b0bf411b1e59ff824059847b9384dcc0134c5eba/1/31870025-ce76-3817-818e-c214ad461bc0.png)
SUMMONER
Summoner, the job that...well...summons things. This one I will handle a little differently. Summoner is a fairly frequent class, but the aspect of Summons themselves is all over the place and sometimes not isolated to a class. As a result, I will be covering summons as a whole in any games they appear in, on top of the job. Don't like it? TOUGH!
Final Fantasy 3 (NES): The first game with summons, two jobs being discussed here! First off, let me note that Summons are stupid good; big MT damage that is better than ST damage in most cases and ignores split damage. Which is why Summoner (and Sage) is a late game job, whose only real flaw is MP is a bit limited. Anything Ramuh or higher pretty much sweeps enemies, Sage turns that into Shiva and turns even Chocobo into half-decent damage for randoms. The MP is a bit limiting but only for Eureka. They did make a lesser version of Summoner in Conjurer. Conjurer has the same MP issues as Summoner, but clearly less effective, since it's effects on Ramuh and Shiva are either "something gets killed" or "entire enemy field disabled." Ifrit's healing is pretty though the damage is good, Titan is really good for ST damage, and Odin+ you don't really use much. It works until Summoner, in any event, and keeps Summons balanced.
Final Fantasy 3 (DS): Ok, so Summons are similar to the original version but worse in practice for a few reasons. First off, that near perfect status rates by Ramuh and Shiva? Now are pretty bad. Titan's damage got nerfed considerably, being the weakest summon (but 100% chance of damage) instead of the strongest of the initial set. Reflect works like typical reflect thus gets healing too instead of being straight up positive, so Odin is nerfed. One thing FF3DS does have is Bahamut and Leviathan's conjurer effects being meaningful thanks to Sage, though that's not much of a bright side (especially since Bahamut's Rend has crap accuracy.) Another major nerf is the 3 enemy cap. This makes MT damage far less meaningful, especially in the final dungeon where fights focus much more heavily on high HP single enemies, making MT matter even less, turning summoner into a cannon with limited resources, contrast to fighters which can do similar damage for no MP and take physical hits way better. As a result, Summoner is overall mediocre; Evoker is alright for a stretch, but nothing special.
Final Fantasy 4 (2D): Rydia is the summoner. She starts the game with one Summon which is her best ST damage so I guess that's fine, then she rejoins later and Summons are...the polar opposite of Chocobo: Rydia's best source of MT damage (save Quake...no, Meteor doesn't count.) Generally, they're more expensive, higher charge times, and not stronger enough than Black Magic to be worth it on bosses, so she's better off using her Aras despite being weaker there, and using summons for crowd control. Leviathan of course exists for a big middle-finger to large groups until you get Bahamut, whom exists to be shear awesome that makes Meteor completely pointless (Yes, Meteor is stronger, but when Bahamut can hit 9999 regularly under the right set up, who cares?) She also has some shaky support in Asura and Sylph. All things considered, Summons are one of your best sources of offense, matched only by Black Magic...which is also used by Rydia...
Final Fantasy 4 (DS): Summons are first seem somewhat better than they are in the 2D version. Same power as Aga spells gotten earlier, ignore reflect, and Rydia even joins with better gear! Then you slowly learn that Magic has been nerfed, and summons are no exception, such that their time in the sun is pretty low. On to of that, charge times are significantly worse, down to Bahamut now being a Meteor clone in every-way, making it go from effectively Rydia's ultimate attack to a big novelty with little practical use. Sylph's heal for less now due to worse damage, Mist Dragon is just another element instead of having a gimmick of ITD damage based on Rydia's HP. Overall, Summons have a good initial impression when Rydia joins but overall they're worse and Rydia ends up unimpressive as a result.
Final Fantasy 5: So...Summoner at first isn't very good...and by at first I mean about 5 minutes after getting it. Then it gets the 3 big elementals (Ifrit, Shiva and Ramuh) and suddenly it makes you question why Black Mage is there, with elementals being stronger than Aras and split-damage ignoring...and reflect ignoring...and on a job that has higher Magic. Look, I'll just be straight forward: Summoner is stupid good and one of the best jobs in the game. On top of good damage, it also has a few other tricks like Golem and Carbuncle. I could go on about all the things it has so instead I'll just mention the one thing it doesn't have: A worthwhile mastery skill in !Conjure. Granted, with game best magic (save Oracle), you'll probably master it anyway.
Final Fantasy 6: Summons in FF6 were regulated to once per battle (GOGO DOESN'T COUNT!) and generally were unimpressive on offense. I feel like that was intentional though; summons were meant to be hold over actions until you learned the spell, so they were weaker moves you had immediate access too. Exceptions exist, like Alexandr and Bahamut are clearly better than their spells, but otherwise you won't use Summons at at all for damage. The support ones, meanwhile, are actually neat. Zoneseek, Kirin, Phantom and Carbuncle are MT effects of spells that are ST only, Fenrir and Golem are good anti-physical tricks, Starlet and Seraphim are healing that ignores Reflect (and Runic), while Siren and Stray are MT status moves. So summons are still handy (if easily overlooked), just more for support purposes for once than shear offense.
Final Fantasy 7: Summons are pretty much awesome MT damage that just gets progressively better throughout (with weaker spells getting obsoleted). A few have alternative uses like Choco/Mog's paralysis. The only other note-able thing is they are limited of castings, so they don't obsolete offensive magic like in some other games, particularly on bosses which can survive summon onslaught.
Final Fantasy 8: FF8 has a bajillion ways to break the game, GFs are probably one of the more obvious ways that even a casual can stumble upon. Big MT damage that lasts the entire game that either is draw-back free damage, OR has a long charge time that isn't as bad as it sounds because it offers an HP buffer for the character. On top of that, there's also ones like Cerberus for MT Double/Triple, Carbuncle for MT Reflect, and Doomtrain to insure you have access to Vit-0 at anytime without using your Meltdown stock. To be fair, for FF8 game breaking, GFs are on the lower end, but they still break the game so they're obviously still very potent, and that's more a testament to just how much ridiculous stuff FF8 has. FF8 also has Auto-Summons in Odin for "everything dies before you act", Phoenix for MT Resurrection that saves you, and Gilgamesh for random damage/instant death/hilarity, because that's exactly what the game needed!
Final Fantasy 9: As I keep saying, FF9 has only 4 kinds of characters; in this case, both White Mages are also summoners. Garnet's in particular have the effect of making Vivi seem less meaningful for most points, since she can do the same kind of damage but also heal, and has more health. Eiko more relies on Madeen for her summon damage, but also gets MT positive status through various versions of Carbuncle, and MT Resurrection in Phoenix. I wouldn't call them broken but they're potent enough and being put on your white mages, you'll probably be using them at least somewhat.
Final Fantasy 10: Yuna is broken because she has summons. That's really all it comes down to. Big meat shields that protect your entire team capable of good damage with absurd finishers (Overdrives have too much recharge time to be much else), there really isn't much else to say.
Final Fantasy 11: Summoner exists in this game, don't know anything about it, I think they get adorable carbuncles...so here's an FF11 Carbuncle Picture!
(http://zam.zamimg.com/images/f/d/fd3525ea42080a3be86bddb42fe27f3f.jpg)
Final Fantasy 12: Summons exist in the form of summoning the FFT Zodiacs, FF1-5 Final Bosses, and some pointless newcomer who no one cares about. This sounds cool on paper but in practice it's not worth much, the issue being that you lose everyone but the summoner, and the big attack being used isn't as strong as you'd like. You generally blow too much resources on it as well. I hear IZJS buffed summons notably and removed the damage cap making their big final attack actually meaningful.
Final Fantasy 13: So Summons are a thing you can do that cost 3 CP and the closest thing the game has to Limit Breaks I guess. It leads to getting a temporary ally who is really good at insuring your point PC doesn't die, then you have the option of going into a super form that is basically invincible and free damage. I honestly rarely used them outside of Adamantoise hunting with Vanille because of the automatic toppling, but someone with more experience to FF13 may beg to differ!
Final Fantasy 14: Summoner is one of two jobs offered by Arcanist, the pet class that gets adorable Carbuncles. Summoner's case, they can summon mini-versions of Ifrit, Titan and Garuda for extra damage, tanking or support (which is just ranged damage) respectively. This makes summoners quite good at the whole "DPS" thing on top of Summoners having a lot of Damage over Time skills, a resurrection spell handy for getting your healers back if you lose them, more Damage over Time skills, and moves that assist your pet Summon like telling them to use a big awesome move once every few minutes! From what I understand, because of all the variables, Summoner has some of the highest DPS since Heavenward.
Final Fantasy Tactics: Summoners are really good here, with Summon being one of the best skillsets in the game. 3 Pane damage that is cheap, effective AND lacks friendly fire, some healing, a full screen anti-physical move, status, even a boss buster in Lich, Summon has everything! It also gets some 4 panel attacks later on like Bahamut, because why not. Summoners themselves are alright, but unlike FF5, there's a bigger reason to care about the Black Mage analog and that's because they do the whole summoning thing better than Summoners due to higher MA. Granted, this still means you'll be using Summoner a lot just to learn skills and Summoner isn't exactly a slouch at it, and unlike Black Mage, they can run something like Summon, Math Skill AND still have adequate stats on top of that. Basically, it's a repeat in the other direction of what I said for Black Mage in FFT: Similar to the FF5 scenario only not as nearly one sided since Wizard has it's niches over Summoner.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: Summoner in this game appears to be a toned down version of the FFT one...and also has Phoenix which is Holy elemental (as opposed to the usual Fire) because why not? I forget if they have friendly fire but the range of the attacks seem pretty crazy if I'm looking at this right. They also have a number of positive status moves on top of that...and only Viera can use them because reasons.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: ...seems pretty much a repeat of FFTA1, which honestly isn't really shocking, so moving on!
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7: So sometimes during a Modulating Phase, Zack's Limit will be replaced with Summon mode, letting him summon Ifrit, Bahamut, Bahamut's Fury (...seriously, Kitase and Toriyama, stop making up Bahamuts and just use the ones that already exist! FF7 ALREADY HAD 3 FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, THEN YOU ADD A BUNCH MORE IN THE COMPILATION AND FF13-2! STOP THAT!!! And that's not even factoring in Lunar and Dark Bahamut of FF4...), Odin and Phoenix. The first 3 are just raw damage, MT damage at that, which is free so cool unless Ifrit is summoned on something that resists Fire. Odin is instant death, which you don't want against bosses because that means he interrupted ANOTHER potential limit, and Phoenix is fire damage (see Ifrit) but with adding Reraise which is awesome.
Final Fantasy 12 Revenant Wings: Shouldn't bring this up but the entire game is about summoning espers and sending them out as an army and...yeah, kind of integral here, is what I'm saying!
Final Fantasy 4 The After Years: So Rydia loses her summons like immediately, doesn't get them back until halfway into the game at which point I believe she learns Quake soonish and summons kind of are uninspired as a result. Leviathan's her best overall for power and MTness, as you won't get Bahamut until stupid late. Seeing as how limited you are to using them, there's not much else to say about them and it's very possible to miss summons outright since you have to not kill them.
Dissidia and Duodecim: Lumping these together because it's easier! Summons in this game mostly exist as a Brave fluctuating action that can have varying effects. Everyone can use it once per battle, and the effects vary from "random chance to break" to "swap brave' to "lock brave" to "Ultros comes out and inks the field making Brave invisible because he's a freaking troll."
Theatrhythm and Curtain Call: Summoners in this game I guess are defined by those who get Boost. The problem is you don't care because Boost is generally strong enough to one shot any enemy anyway, so it's a waste of a slot. Summons are really strong when they activate (once per BMS) but they have the downside of capping damage to one enemy, so any overflow is ended, which can suck at higher levels. Curtain Call had an extra gimmick where stronger summons were more strict to summon and failures were chocobos. So yes, KotR is stronger than everything but if you hit a single "Good" during the highlight phase, you've failed. Conversely, Ifrit isn't special but you can fail a few notes and still get him.
Record Keeper: Summons are big MT damage, sounds good...until you realize how hard getting the good ones are and how they have half the charges of like every other attack. On top of that, Black Mages with 4* or higher get access to potent MT damage anyway, so the Summons here don't mean much. The best use of Summons tend to be from what I can tell stuff like Carbuncle for MT Buffs that can be handy against particular fights.
Bravely Default: So you get this big expensive awesome looking attack that is MT in the game...only to find out that it's not as strong as you'd like and clearly overpriced. That's BD summons in a nutshell. They're not horrible but they do tend to disappoint and there are a bunch of other avenues to do big damage, and unlike Black Mage, they don't really have MP flexibility unless you sacrifice their skill-set specifically to something else, at which point I feel you might as well use that base job and put something more conventionally useful. Of course, there's a 2nd summoning job, CONJURER! ...which is gotten REALLY late and all it does is big buffs on self and isn't really good enough to justify being gotten late. Not exactly Summoner's finest performance here...
I think that should cover them all!
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That is a lot of games... no wonder this update took forever.
FF Dimensions: Summoner is 'other option for healing' class. If you don't want a White Mage for whatever, Summoner is basically your only choice. Works nicely as a secondary healer. Has a solid damage skillset, though the cast times are kind of a downer. Best use of the Summoner seems to be to get awesome mid-game F-Abilities.
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I feel like FF5 Golem deserves some extra love for being the clear king of anti-physical options in a game that has a ton available. It absorbs (Lvl + 20)*50 HP worth of physical damage, which is way more than squishier classes will have for pretty much the entire game, plus it means you won't suffer from any status effects attached to the physical so you basically auto-win vs the Dragon Pod boss. It singlehandedly invalidates pretty much any boss that relies on physical damage, as well as anything vulnerable to berserk (except Shinryu, and Golem can even work there with some planning).
FF6 and FFT Golem are quite good in their own right, but the former is OPB and the latter is more limited on what it can absorb compared to its FF5 counterpart. FF5 Golem is one of the best support moves ever, the sort of thing that could singlehandedly salvage a mediocre skillset by itself. Instead, it's attached to the single best offensive skillset in FF5.
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Yeah Golem is pretty amazing. I also feel the need to point out that even the pre-elemental stage of Summoner isn't that bad, Chocobo is a 30-power move which outdamages L1 spells and all-pre-fire-crystal weapons usable by non-freelancers, and Remora is the best way to inflict paralysis until World 3.
FFD summoner is the best source of MT damage in that game, but actually balanced about this unlike FF5 (via charge times and enemies having more HP). I'm a bit less sold on it as a healer because of its higher charge times than white magic (dragoon and dancer cover the alternate healer role better because they lack these), but it does help round out the skillset certainly. BD probably a went too far in the FF5ish attempt to balance Summoner, although at least its MP costs aren't as bad in practice as they first appear because you start getting Chemist/other sources of MP healing soon after.
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FF5 summoner is like the only class you ever need. I'm not even entirely sure you need healing up until you get Golem and Carbuncle, if you were doing an SCC, and after that you really don't need healing.
You keep saying that FF9 has only 4 classes. Can you elaborate on that? I mean I get that Garnet and Eiko are basically the same character, but I thought there was some variation in the skills the physical characters got at least?
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It's because the 4 Fighters all ultimately end up being very similar and their differences are minor. When all is said and done, they all end up having their optimal damage be fight. Yes, Steiner has Shock, but who cares about 9999 damage off an expensive move when he does almost as much damage with his basic physical set up properly? Yes, Armarant has a healing move...which kind of sucks and doesn't see use. Freya has MT Regen that doesn't last long and obsoleted by Auto Regen, etc.
All the perks people bring ultimately end up being very minor and when all is said and done, Garnet and Eiko had similar differences as the fighters had: they're both healers who can use summons for damage but Garnet has more summons/status and less support, Eiko otherway around, but they are very minor factors overall; you're using them, it's for the healing + summon damage combo.
Vivi and Quina are the only 2 characters who really stand out. Vivi's a primary source of Elemental damage for a large part of the game, and has things like stop and Break, ways to get AP without EXP IOWs should that matter. Quina has a whole bunch moves ranging from actually useful (White Wind and Angel Snack some MT Healing tricks), sounds great but really isn't (Mighty Guard, for example, sounds amazing but given the MP Cost and the duration, you almost never find a practical use for it) to gimmicky (L5 Death as an obvious example) to flat out bad. Nonetheless, the two actually stand out. The 4 Fighters all end up being very similar in the grand scheme of things with minor gimmicks that don't really make a whole lot of difference, and I think Garnet vs. Eiko is pretty self explanatory.
The variation is bigger in challenge playthroughs I suppose, things like LLGs where suddenly Dragon's Crest is meaningful because it's damage is independent stats and levels, when in a normal game it's absolute garbage. The DL also makes some bigger deviation since a lot of quirks about FF9's skill system are ignored, such like how all fighters are really running off 2.25x the physical damage listed in the topic due to MP Attack + Beast/Bird/Demon Slayer covering almost every enemy in the game.
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TIME FOR AN OVERDUE UPDATE! Call this a Happy Halloween thing, which actually fits given one of the classes we will be talking about! Which one you ask? Why, none other than...
(https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQFvFVR_frI40jj3k8W8mtchvC73-W6RfMLIf7VHxAnWGMchvL6Bg)
BLUE MAGE
Like Summoner, I'll actually be handling not just the job, the corresponding skillsets. Blue Mage isn't that common of a class in the franchise, but Blue Magic itself very much is, so I'll be jumping between the class and the skillset based off the situation.
In any event, Blue Mage or Blue Magic is defined by that skill-set learned from monsters in a way. The traditional method is being hit by it, and being all "hey, I got nuked by a spell, I KNOW THIS SPELL NOW!" How this works, I don't know, it's fantasy logic, and the first person who tries to explain it in a rational way WILL be subjected to the pit of Eternal Brahne...and yes, that still exists.
There are some mainstay spells, or themes throughout the series, like L# Spells, White Wind, Goblin Punch (aka a spell that sucks but does ludicrous damage if target's level = caster's level), etc. Frankly, a lot of these moves are so oddball they'd fit into Pokemon...which actually makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. Without further ado...THE ANALYSIS!!!
Final Fantasy 4: ...what? Yeah, ok, no traditional Blue Magic, but I felt like I should bring it up since there was very much a precursor to it. Rydia's Monster Summons do show shades of ideas that would become Blue Magic, for example, the Goblin Summon functions pretty much the same way as Goblin Punch, and Bomb is basically Proto-Exploder/Self Destruct/Sacrifice...without the downside. Not much to say, this is more an honorable mention than anything else.
Final Fantasy 5: And this is where the concept really began! Blue Mage is an early obtained job that is decent at first glance, and downright absurd with knowledge of the game. Enemy spells were clearly not built with fighting enemies with immunities in mind, but geared towards PCs with limited amounts, and it shows. This is part of why I believe Blue Magic is so crazy. The number of ways around bosses and holes in their resistances and tricks you can exploit thanks to Blue Magic is outright ludicrous, such like Dark Shock + L# Spells being one of the trademarks. It also has the Aero series which while Aeroga is a little weaker than the Agas, it's got the advantage of being boostable by just about every Job thanks to Air Knives, and is still passable enough on damage to get away with it, White Wind for MT Healing that's legitimately good (circumstances permitting), which is a big deal given the stretch between Cura and Curaga has limited healing, even 1000 Needles sees some use due to it's early access.
But it's not just Blue Magic that's strong (...understatement...), Blue Mage itself is fairly competent itself, being a rather well rounded job. First off, it gets Rods, so it can sling Black Magic and Summons just fine thanks to strengthening them, as well as break Rods for big damage early. Next off, Shields, so it's tankier thank it appears at first glance, and to top it off, Swords. Yeah, crappy strength, but a legitimate weapon means it's damage at last registers for randoms instead of being laughable, giving it a free option (also, it can make use of Excalipoor's attack with Goblin Punch as a bonus perk, so it can have a legit weapon in World 3 even if you don't sequence break for Enhancer.)
All in all, Blue Mage is ridiculously good; it very much reminds me of Knight in that it's initial showing is arguably it's best...oh yeah, I didn't mention Mighty Guard did I? Because that's totally awesome too!
Final Fantasy 6: ...pity that they recognized how unfairly good Blue Magic was balanced in FF5 and thus hit it with major nerf sticks across the board. Ok, I'll be fair to Strago, in that Lores in and of themselves aren't actually that bad. Aqua Rake is stronger than Level 2's, and hits 2 harder to apply elements, Aero is an Aga level spell that can be obtained early, Big Guard is MT Shell and Protect, two spells you struggle to MT, and Grand Train is actually not half bad as an ultimate. So what's Lores problems? Magic skillset exists. Lores compete directly with Magic, and generally lose in most areas, more so than other skillsets at that. At least with abilities like Blitz and Tools, they are free or use a different resource, but Lores really are just "alternative to Magic" and in most cases not a good one, since Magic does most of what Lores can do but better. That wouldn't be so bad for Strago if Strago himself was a better Mage, but he's shockingly kind of iffy at it. Magic isn't as high as you'd expect and he joins late, and isn't an early recruit for most people in the WoR, lacking an incentive the way Cyan or Umaro do (awesome rewards along the way) nor being trivially easy the way Gau or Terra are. Strago and Lores ultimately are a case of "they look fine on paper, but are just kind of outclassed notably."
As for why Lores are unimpressive? Well, for starters, L5 Death now hits resistance so it has to make both a level check and instant death check, L3 Muddle is a more restrictive version of one of Edgar's Tools AND one of your Espers, both available earlier. Exploder and Pep Up are laughable, Revenger is bad too, Blow Fish gotten well after 1000 damage is worth something, Force Field gotten too late to matter, and Quasar is literally worse than Grand Train in every-way that matters just adding a redundant skill to a skillset that needs stand out abilities. I could go on; that's really Lores problems. Too many catches on moves, and the ones without them are just kind of ok, and it compares unfavorably to a universal skillset that stronger characters can use. To strago's credit, it is easier for him to learn Blue Magic, since he simply has to be alive without a handful of a specific status when the spell is cast. Doesn't even have to survive the encounter!
And let me address the elephant in the room: GAU IS NOT A BLUE MAGE!! Yes, he uses Monster attacks but it functions completely differently than how every other Blue Mage or Blue Magic in the series. He is his own thing and is not being covered here for that reason.
Final Fantasy 7: Enemy Skill Materia is the stand in for Blue Magic, and goes back to the "Must be hit by the attack!" standard, as well as going back to being stupidly good. Unlike FF5, FF7's variation is more straight forward in how good it is, being more about "wow, these spells are strong" or "that effect will be handy!" instead of obtuse tricks the game wasn't prepared for. The real kicker though is it's all placed on ONE MATERIA. You get the same variety you would from the Magic Skillset, and in many ways superior tricks (Big Guard obsoletes the Barrier Materia save for Reflect for example), but you only need one Materia slot. To add insult to injury, it's a Materia that doesn't use AP, so shoving it on a Growthless Slot has no negative impact, and it's not like it caps out early or anything either. Beta and Aqualung compete with the level 3's (Trine to a lesser extent too), Magic Breath is even better, and Pandora's Box competes well with Ultima, albeit gotten somewhat later, as does Shadow Flare with the ST spells. White Wind is an MT Healing spell that also heals status, only catch of course is can't be used by low HP characters (well, the Esuna aspect can be!) Magic Hammer for limited MP Healing, Dragon Force for Defense twinking...really, the list goes on! It's like they felt they went too far in FF5, so nerfed it in FF6 and realized they went too far there, and then tried to rebalance it...forgetting WHY they nerfed it in the first place. I'm not sure it's BETTER than the FF5 version, but how it's good is a lot easier to demonstrate and a lot more obvious about it's strength.
Final Fantasy 8: I feel like Square threw their arms up at Enemy Skill after making them too strong in one game and not strong enough in another and just decided to balance it by making it a Limit Break now. I guess it worked though it's also unmemorable. It's functional, has some gimmick tricks like Disintegrator and is generally consistent, even has a good ultimate attack in Shockwave Pulsar which has BDL (granted, most Limits can BDL due to multi-hits, so not as big as it sounds.) Not much else to say other than it exists. I guess I should note you get it via items.
Final Fantasy 9: Quina has probably the most annoying method for getting Blue Magic, namely Pokemon style on a character whose damage is random and often sucks. That aside, Blue Magic to me always felt underwhelming. As I explained in the previous post, Quina has a handful of good moves, but a lot of things ranging from "good on paper but not really", "only good in challenges" and "outright bad" so refer to my previous post about a lot of that. Quina him/herself doesn't really have much going for him/her either; Gillionaire is a quirk I suppose, but as a whole, Quina lacks damage unless you build up Frog Squash rather high and conditional damage in FF9 tends to be the slowest form of damage building (Thievery and Dragon's Crest aren't much different in this regard.)
Final Fantasy 10: Kimhari is your Blue Mage here. Kimhari's an interesting character in that he can be whatever you want and how good he is depends really on what path you take him down and how quickly you break him down there. As a result, he's a pretty damn big wild card. His Ronso Rages are...kind of underwhelming I feel? Sacrifice is legitimately really strong but has the obvious downside, so it's a "use sparingly" move not that FF10 Overdrives can be spammed (ENTRUST DOESN'T COUNT!) His method learning is pretty simple and straight forward: Use Lancet on an enemy that has the move, get it, and even gives him a full gauge to practice the move right after! As an added perk, FF10 is generally very good at the whole "KIMHARI CAN LEARN THIS!" thanks to Scan.
Final Fantasy 11: Blue Mages...are...a thing...that exists. Looking at the game, it seems Blue Mages have a hell of a lot of spells and I don't know how someone can keep up with that nonsense. I don't know much about FF11, but I do know Blue Mages in this game have a very unique aesthetic at least?
(http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110414185001/finalfantasy/images/c/cb/Mithra_BLU_%28FFXI%29.png)
Final Fantasy Tactics: Mostly noting that yes, there are ways to learn spells Blue Mage style, and Ultima is one of them, but no, Blue Mages as we conventionally know them or Blue Magic doesn't exist. I personally blame that guy.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: Lookinga t Blue Mage, they have a lot of the usual skills you expect them too, like White Wind, Bad Breath, Mighty Guard, etc. I can't speak for how effective they are, but apparently it's worth noting that to learn some of these skills, you must have a Beast Master to make monsters use them on them. Worth noting that a number of Blue Mage moves are physical as well as magical on damage, so that "mixed fighter" vibe is there. Weapon wise, they're similar to FF5 except no Shields, and they have a specific kind of sword in "Sabre." Also, they're isolated to Humes.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: pretty much the same as FFTA1, since the games didn't really change much!
Final Fantasy 10-2: Gun Mage is the Blue Mage, even down to learning moves the old "Get hit by" it method. They have your standard "weird gimmicky moveset" a Blue Mage has but also can do 4x damage vs. various species with their Non-Blue Magic. I seem to recall them being effective so yeah.
Bravely Default: Vampire is a Blue Mage...though really more of a "Blue Fighter" because everything they have is physical, but the idea is very clearly there. Vampire is a pretty damn strong job, only thing holding it back is you get Dark Knight before it and Vampire is a pain to get, so you might be turned off, but as a late game job, Vampire does have a lot going for it. High MT damage, lots of Debuffs, parasitic healing for HP and MP, among other things. Interesting to note that Vampires have an S in Rods despite being clearly a physical job (though they do have an S in Knives and an A in Swords, so it's not like they're totally gimped), stats are fairly middling overall too. They learn magic in the traditional "get hit from move" way. It's a very solid job in it's own right and as I said, the one thing really holding it back is the existence of Dark Knight, a job that is stupid good and yeah you get the idea.
And that, as they say, is that </Maechan>
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This is all you need to know about why Quistis is the best blue mage and why she is the best character in FF8. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqHSZbHIJkM)
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(http://pre04.deviantart.net/5c22/th/pre/f/2015/087/e/3/whatever_intensifies_by_nebezial-d8nj28m.jpg)
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I realize I left off Gun Mage from FF10-2, which is very much 10-2's Blue Mage; I'll add that in when I have time, but for now noting "yes, I screwed up."
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Re Yang in FF4: One thing he really deserves credit for (And Edge to a much lesser extent) is trivializing Evil Masks. I think he's better than even Cecil at the end in 4a/PSP just for the evil things he does to some of the top tier randoms in the final dungeon.
*Stare* That FF 8 comic... actually that explains way, way too much about Squall and the game in general. Dear god.
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Bravely Default: Vampire is a Blue Mage...though really more of a "Blue Fighter" because everything they have is physical, but the idea is very clearly there. Vampire is a pretty damn strong job, only thing holding it back is you get Dark Knight before it and Vampire is a pain to get, so you might be turned off, but as a late game job, Vampire does have a lot going for it. High MT damage, lots of Debuffs, parasitic healing for HP and MP, among other things. Interesting to note that Vampires have an S in Rods despite being clearly a physical job (though they do have an S in Knives and an A in Swords, so it's not like they're totally gimped), stats are fairly middling overall too. They learn magic in the traditional "get hit from move" way. It's a very solid job in it's own right and as I said, the one thing really holding it back is the existence of Dark Knight, a job that is stupid good and yeah you get the idea.
Vamps -can- learn Magic-based Vampirism skills off wandering Norende Nemesises, who have the best Black Magic inexplicably reclassified as Vampirism - Firaja, etc. One of the Nemesies that slings this isn't a grossly overlevel aftergame enemy, too (like ~L30 or L40 or so?). If you can grab it, then Vampirism suddenly becomes the best Magic skillset and obsoletes Black Magic & Summon (Firaja is forced MT, no split damage penalty, and better than Dark / Firaga), and is probably better than Time Magic too, off just 1-2 totally broken spells. Balance!
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Random scattered thoughts:
FF4 Dragoon: Much as I enjoyed jumping with Blood Lance for draining and self sustaining attributes, it gives up damage and durability. So it may not help reduce Rosa's MP consumption in the end. Oh well.
FF6 Jump: Has command priority which at least has some unique defensive gimmicks like sending someone in the air while Nerapa is Condemning the party. Or is all command input disabled before he's done; been so long since I played unmodded FF6 that I forget.
FF8 Blue Mage: Players are unlikely to have Shockwave Pulsar unless they specifically grind for it due to the requirements (Lv 100! Siren and 100 Curse Spikes). Ray Bomb is FAQ bait and White Wind is out of the way and easily missed by someone not deliberately seeking it out. Chocobo World can get around this though how many people have access to that?
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Late, but the Blood Lance doesn't even heal Kain a good amount given how much damage he does. It kills his stats, accuracy, and well...just about everything all so he can break Flan defense IF the thing decides to hit (Blood Lance is one of the very few fighter-weapons that can actually whiff entirely without Blind status. You may have noticed that a "miss" only comes up when using a Bow, or a Rod or some such. Blood Lance is kind of really special in this regard), it's an abysmal weapon and probably one of the worst non-joke weapons (eg Excalipoor doesn't count) ever created in the franchise. No surprise the weapon has very limited appearances after FF4, if ever appearing again (Blood Sword by contrast keeps popping up)
Anyway, I'll have an update for tomorrow. Sorry I've been lagging but work and such.
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I'm going in a completely different direction in this update...it's a one time thing but damn it, I wanna do it because reasons! Anyway, today we are talking about...
(http://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.Ma4e420dd99de1a905de07564b7fd6d17o0&pid=15.1)
...pretty much exactly what the image says...well more focusing on the parent thing. Anyway, I'm looking at the protagonists in the series, and their parental situation and basically assessing how good/bad (usually the latter!) they had it. I will factor in adopted parents, not sure about orphanage situations...shut up FF8...
Final Fantasy 1: These characters are made on an assembly line, therefor doesn't count, NEXT!!!
Final Fantasy 2: Apparently, backstory factors of FF2 from the Novella are canon even though the novella changes the story directly...yeah, I dunno, but this is FF2 so I have nothing to work with so damn it I'm going with it! Anyway, Firion apparently had actual parents and grew up with them...then they died in a plague when he was like 10, so old enough to actually care, lived on the streets, got found by Maria/Leon's family, and was adopted by them, and lived happily with his adopted family (which eventually included some crazy wild boy who can talk to animals because apparently that's totally safe...it actually worked out here but shut up)...until they were brutally slaughtered by the Emperor and they ran to Fynn. Luckily, he was 18 by then, so old enough to take care of himself! Yeah, I dunno; on one hand, he lost *2* sets of parents so it's pretty shitty, but then what jRPG character lacks tragedy? Outside of that, he had a pretty ok-life; losing his birth parents sucks, but he managed to move on and form a second family with Maria's, and apparently was content there, so he's probably one of the better ones off in this regard.
Final Fantasy 3: Whether it's the Onion Knights or Luneth, it doesn't matter; they have the same backstory...well, no, because the Onion Knights were brothers and Luneth is an only child, but I digress, we're going to simplify this to Luneth. Luneth lost his family at an age "too young to remember anything" and was adopted by people in Ur. Considering this, he's got it pretty well off; it's sad he doesn't remember his real birth parents because he was too young, but he was raised by a loving mother and father, and worth noting BOTH SURVIVE to the end of the game, with not a single ounce of tragedy. Simply says "bye mom, going on an adventure!" and then comes back "hey mom, guess what? I saved the world! Also I befriended a princess...no, we're just friends, and she's totally going out with her body guard anyway."
Final Fantasy 4: I'm assuming the DS version backstory here because FF4 2D gives us very little to work with. I'll just note what it does tell us is KluYa existed, he was from the moon and Cecil SOMEHOW ended up in Baron...don't you love total lack of information? Anyway, FF4DS tells us that Cecil's mom died giving birth to him, and his father died on the same day by an angry mob. Well, isn't that pleasant? Oh, it's ok though, he has a brother, who totally wants what's best for him...oh wait, Zemus is telling him to be bad and fucking everything up, god damn it Zemus you're bad and I don't mean in the evil villain sense!
Anyway, as much shit as this sounds, it's nowhere near that bad, because despite Zemus trying to be all BE EVIL!!! to Theodore (aka Golbez), Teddie Harvey (...wait, is that his last name?) does actually do the responsible thing of putting Cecil under a tree but in a way that's in PUBLIC NOTICE so someone will find him, and watches until someone does find him! ...look, this is FF4's world logic, so this is totally responsible because baby Cecil could get mauled by a giant bird and he'd "get better" from dying, since that's a thing in FF4 if you are below the age of 60.
ANYWAY, jokes aside, Cecil does get found by THE KING OF THE BIGGEST NATION IN THE WORLD who immediately adopts him and raises him as his own son. Oddly, while Cecil does view King Baron as a father figure, I don't think he ever calls him father, and the game makes it clear that he basically is "Prince in all but name" since talking to soldiers are all going "hey Cecil, you're totally the only one qualified to take the throne now that the king is dead!" (which is why Cecil does take the throne.) So Cecil gets practically adopted by a king, raised as a prince, lives in a castle, and the only angst about his family comes up when a disembodied voice calls him "my son"...yeah, I think Cecil had is pretty damn well despite both his parents literally dying on the same day from completely unrelated incidents.
Final Fantasy 5: Bartz grew up with his birth parents until he was like 10....that's pretty novel! Then his mother died of something completely random and he then goes ADVENTURING!!! with his father until he was 17, when his father dies of an illness (I think he's 17 anyway; wanna say the incident happened 3 years prior FF5, and Bartz is suppose to be 20.) All things considered, by jRPG Main standards, Bartz had it pretty ok. Death in the family sucks, but he at least got to know his mom, and his father still took care of him throughout the rest of his childhood, and when he died, Bartz was of an age (by RPG standards) that he could deal with it and take care of himself. On top of this, Dorgan was shown to be a pretty upstanding man, so Bartz probably was raised with proper values too...unfortunately, it seems "basic education" was not on Dorgan's agenda is Bartz's intellect is any indicator.
Final Fantasy 6: ...and here's where things start getting really depressing. Terra's born to a human mother and an esper father, we all know the drill. At 2 years old, her mother is killed, her father is shoved into a glass tube, and she's brought to a lab where she's experimented on for...pretty much her entire life until Kefka decides to mind control her. Hey, it took 2 years before all the horrible stuff happened, that's something right!? ...no, not really, Terra's basically got it as bad as you can get. I mean, yes, her father did survive all those years...only to be killed right before reuniting. The one remotely positive spin to Terra's parental situation is despite her father dying, an esper dying still means apparently they can talk, so Terra could still talk to her dad...for about a year, then he disappears from existence permanently...and that implies Terra held onto Maduin's Magicite when the world exploded, which given her emotional status, I assume she didn't since I get the feeling if she had her father to bounce off of, she'd have come to a realization much faster, but now that's just speculation. POINT IS, Terra's parental situation is really damned depressing and full of tragedy.
Final Fantasy 7: At first glance, you'd think Cloud's is awful, because Cloud strikes you as someone who'd have a really bad childhood...and he kind of did! The thing is, it wasn't related to his parents; it was related to young Cloud being the awkward little kid who had no friends...but that's an aside. On the parent side of things, though? Cloud says his father died when he was "very young" and doesn't remember him, so ok, sad, but Cloud doesn't seem bothered by it. This is normal for someone to not form emotional connections with someone they barely remember. His mother, however, raised him as a single parent until he was 14, and they seemed to have had a decent relationship. I think it's not unfair to assume the one part of the Nibelheim Flashback that WASN'T completely wrong was the flashback stuff with Cloud's mother (and maybe Cloud going into Tifa's house, into her room, playing her piano, finding her orthopedic underwear...LOOK THIS IS ALL IMPORTANT TO RECAP OK!?), and based off that, she seems like a pretty normal mother in that regard. She stopped raising him at 14 for positive reasons too, namely Cloud decided to move to Midgar and try to live out his dreams...didn't go as planned granted, but point is she didn't die...immediately. No, she died 2 years later because a crazy bishie burned down Nibelheim, which while sad, Cloud did go into a coma for 5 years after, so didn't really mourn the death too much, he was too much built with rage trying to MURDER THE OVERPOWERED SUPER SOLDIER WHO BURNED DOWN HIS TOWN IN SECONDS...and somehow succeeded too...
Final Fantasy 8: If there's anything to sum up Squall's parental situation, it'd be "complicated." I think Squall is like the only character I can think of who is an orphan despite his father being fully alive, well, and capable of raising him. Then again, his father is Laguna, and nothing logical works there, so "orphan with a single father" somehow makes twisted sense for his son's bio. Squall's mother, Raine, is stated to have died in childbirth...how sad. To Squall's luck, he did get to see his mother through Ellone flashbacks at least! That's something right? Ok, not really, because I'm not sure Squall ever actually learns that his father is Laguna, or at least the game never addresses it, just gives the player details so they know. I'm sure it doesn't help the situation that Squall views Laguna as a complete and total idiot, and he'd probably be outright embarrassed his father is Laguna...despite Laguna being PRESIDENT FOR LIFE OF THE BIGGEST CITY IN THE WORLD...on shear dumb luck granted...
On another note, Squall was raised by Edea in an orphanage because reasons, then at 10 I think it was, he went to Balamb Garden where he had a shonen rivalry with Seifer. Yeah, this part sucks because seriously, it's related to the FF8 Orphanage.
Final Fantasy 9: Zidane doesn't have actual birth father; he's a test-tube baby NO GARLAND DOESN'T COUNT. He does have a functional adopted father in Baku, which based off the "Totally not a story about my past!", Zidane does actually view as a father even though he doesn't say it to Baku's face. Baku does seem to raise Zidane based on the logic of "tough love" granted and Zidane generally responds in-kind, but hey, it's not like he's abusive...or tries to attack Zidane and his 3 best friends wearing a dragon mask wielding a HUGE FREAKING SWORD!!! ...I should probably move on...
Final Fantasy 10: Oh god, what have I gotten myself into!? Yeah, this is the one people were waiting for...the relationship of Tidus and Jecht, aka the one Father/Son relationship the franchise gives a large amount of focus. Ok, so Tidus hates Jecht, I don't have to say this; a thing to note that I don't think Tidus ever calls Jecht "Dad" or "Father" until the very end of the game, always referring to him as his "old man." From what I can tell, this is the game's way of telling us that Tidus is not in denial about his father, but at the same time, can't bring himself to call him something remotely positive so uses a stand-in that could be considered insulting. Maybe the line used in Japan is somewhat harsher, and "Old man" was just the best english equivalent they have that still got the relationship point across. To Tidus' credit, a lot of the Jecht hatred is somewhat deserved; Jecht was a borderline abusive father afterall, emotionally anyway. He would drink, come on, go on about how awesome he was, didn't respect his son's opinions, and then put him down at other moments. On the otherhand, it's also implied that Tidus may have overblown some of it due to his (somewhat admitted) Oedipus Complex as a kid. According to Tidus, his mother was fine until Jecht got home, then the two were inseperable, and he felt ignored. This suggests that his mother was pretty bad too, not properly balancing her husband and her son, but again, we only see it from Tidus'PoV, so we don't know how true things were, and Tidus even admits there's bias on his end, as he eventually reaches an epiphany that Jecht may have in fact cared about him more than he thought, evidenced by how Jecht would tell his mother to pay attention to him, albeit in a backhanded way ("Oh go to him, he'll just cry if you don't!")
The end result is they wanted to display that Jecht WANTED to be a good father, but didn't know the first thing about parenting and his ego kept getting the better of him. Spira happens and we see Jecht say things like "I'm proud of you, son" and Tidus of course by the end finally recognizes that maybe Jecht deserves some credit, finally calling him "Dad" right before he has to KILL HIM, finally saying to Jecht "I hate you" when ironically, he's come to the understanding that he DOESN'T hate him, and can actually forgive him, followed by a "For the first time, I'm proud to be your son" and then it ends with a undead High Five!
...oh yeah, Jecht also leaves Tidus at age 7, but this wasn't Jecht being irresponsible so much as fate decided to dick Jecht over and shove him into Spira, whoops! To Jecht's credit, he did have the forethought to send Auron to Zanarkand so Tidus could have at least one positive male figure in his life (and Auron is a pretty good choice for this all things considered)...and then he becomes a KILLER FLYING WHALE MURDERING EVERYONE!!! But hey, because his son is trying to save the world, it gave him all the more reason to try and NOT kill everyone in Spira.
All in all, Tidus and Jecht have a completely batshit insane relationship, that in the end becomes positive. Not much to say about the mother since we only see so much of her and it's entirely from Tidus' perspective, who is completely biased and even admits things are going to be skewed to fit his needs (he is only human, after all...well, ok, he technically doesn't exist, but shut up.)
Really, there's only ONE WAY I can end this description of Tidus and Jecht's relationship...
(http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs43/f/2009/059/3/8/Dissidia_FF__New_Moms_by_meru_chan.jpg)
...so let's move onto something FAR SIMPLER!!!
Final Fantasy 11: ...don't know, don't care, fuck the Chebbuki-trio of Chains of Promathia. No, they're not protagonists, but they do have a father-substory involved and they're awful characters, and damn it, I need a reason to randomly tell them to flip off!
Final Fantasy 12: So vaan apparently had parents who died in a plague, was adopted by Penelo's Parents alongside his brother Reks, those parents then died in a war or another plague or something and they got raised by Miguelo who was a kind hearted Banga that owns a shop...uh, yeah, see what I said about Firion? It's that only with less "your home town is set on fire" involved.
Final Fantasy 13: Reading the wiki to refresh myself, Lightning lost her father at a young age due to plot, basiaclly, and her mother at 15 due to unknown illness, and she raised Serah from there. That's really all we learn about their parents...I guess Lightning was hit emotionally hard enough to change her name to Lightning because "It's a strong name!" and she later realizes that was a mistake but nope, too late to go back now! Yeah, don't got much else to go off of, it's another "parents died in backstory" thing. I guess she's on par with Bartz since she was mostly old enough by then and was able to take care of herself, but whatever.
Final Fantasy 14: Godbert Manderville is the greatest being of all time and Hildibrand should be honored to have a father like that! ...what? Hildibrand is totally the protagonist of his sub-story, and damn it, THIS COUNTS!!!! ALL HAIL THE MANDERVILLES!!!
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest: Benjamin lost his parents in a random catastrophe we never see. Also his allowance is only 2G a month. This is literally the entirety of his familial backstory we get...
Final Fantasy Tactics: Ramza was raised by his father for most of his life, his father dying shortly before Ramza left to the academy, and Ramza had 2 adult brothers who could take care of him anyway (even if one of them is Dycedarg's Elder Brother, and we all know what an upstanding person HE is.) Based off what FFT demonstrates, Balbanes (or "Barbaneth" for those who prefer FFTWotL's translation GOD DAMN IT WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE LETTER S!?) was probably a good father and actually a noble figure, since he's best buds with Orlandu and we all know TG Cid is actually a pretty cool fellow when he's not slaughtering armies opposing him.
Final Fantasy 4 The After Years: I guess Ceodore is the stand-in protagonist? His dad is Cecil, who is king and he's raised by him like a normal prince! The one thing the game implies is that Ceodore does have that inferiority complex of "my dad is a legendary hero that everyone loves, how can I ever hope to live up to THAT standard!?" but I don't feel they explored that well enough and it doesn't help that Cecil is mind-controlled for most of the game, then mute for the next large part. I guess it implies they have a positive relationship outside of Ceodore's inferiority complex...
...oh right, he has a mother too in Rosa doesn't he? Ok, screw it, I take back what I said, because Rosa is a worthless human being who can't live without another man! What I'm saying is if Ceodore were a daughter and not a son, Rosa would have killed herself on the spot because she couldn't refocus her neediness onto her child since Rosa needs a MAN!!!
That last part is a joke.
...you could argue Ceodore's real father is Kain and...ok, I'm stopping here...
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7: Both of Zack's parents are alive, well, and eagerly waiting him to come back! Yeah, Zack's pretty much got it all, in this regard. I think he might be the only jRPG Protagonist I can think of who is survived by his parents...
Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy 7: Vincent's Father's name is Grimoire Valentine and we have...no idea what kind of relationship they have. We just know that Grimoire was Lucrecia's mentor and as a result, she hates Vincent since she was responsible for killing Grimoire because he...decided to protect her from something that would have killed her. God damn it, Lucrecia, even in an analysis not about you, your Shion-tastic self manages to ooze out. Anyway, ignoring Lucrecia...yeah, really can't say much...other than his name is still Grimoire Valentine.
Final Fantasy 10-2: Ok, we spent forever talking about Tidus' dad, so now let's talk about Yuna's! Ok, Yuna's dad plays almost no role in FF10-2, but he was kind of important in FF10, and it's still the same character so MUST BE ADDRESSED! Yuna's dad apparently was a good father until Yuna was 7, when he went off and decided to KILL A GIANT WHALE...and succeeded...with the help of a douche warrior monk and a drunkard. Her mother apparently died via a Sin attack on the way to Home IIRC, but she knew her well enough to learn that Cid was her uncle or something. Sounds like they had a good familial relationship when it happened. After her parents died, Yuna was mostly raised by Kimhari, who was her guardian...this is actually a rare case where a character loses their parents and the caretaker has the term "Guardian" like in real-life. Of course, it wasn't just Kimhari, as she was raised in Besaid alongside Wakka, Lulu and Chappu, so she basically created a 2nd family for herself and seems pretty content with her life, as well as content with her father's death knowing that he died for a good cause AND the entire world respects his deeds. It's a nice contrast to Tidus really where-in Tidus is the son of a world-class Celebrity and hates every moment of it, while Yuna is in the same situation and couldn't be more proud of her father's accomplishments. Did I mention FF10 was great at this kind of stuff?
...yes, this is the FF10-2 part, but FF10-2 gives us nothing to work with.
Final Fantasy 13-2: ...this is pretty much a direct repeat of FF13's scenario since Serah is Lightning's sister; really the only change is Serah was taken care of by Lightning instead of having to fend for herself. There's really no point in repeating it, so I'll just go "see Lightning."
Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light: Brandt has a mom or something...and she turns to stone because...wait, what the hell am I doing analyzing this game!?
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: Marche has a brother, but we never see his parents...wait the hell am I doing analyzing this game?
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: Ok, Luso doesn't have parents and is raised by his grandmother. It sounds like the grandmother is one of those annoying, loud, angry authoritarian style ones, given that Luso's response to his Wizard of Oz scenario is basically "...yeah, I'm in no rush to get home, getting nearly killed sounds way more fun!" That's about all I got...
Bravely Default: Tiz had a completely normal life with a completely normal family with a completely normal OH GOD IS THAT A GIANT HOLE IN THE GROUND EATING HIS ENTIRE VILLAGE NO ;_;
Final Fantasy Record Keeper: His parents are a Loading Screen and a bunch of corperate jerks who refuse to let the RNG give me an Enhancer or a Minerva Bustier. I think that says EVERYTHING about Tyro's parenting!
Final Fantasy Type-0: I havent' beaten this but I did read every character's bio and it's basically all summed up as "the entirety of Class Zero are orphans who were taken in by 'Mother' and raised as a pseudo-family in the Academy." IOWs, it's FF8's plot but less stupid since the game comes out and tells you that's the scenario AND it's framed in an environment where it MAKES SENSE, since it's logical that a military academy would grab children of similar backgrounds like that because no one else is going to care about them...and there's none of this "we forgot it because plot convenience."
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...you could argue Ceodore's real father is Kain and...ok, I'm stopping here...
That's incest bro
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refuse to let the RNG give me an Enhancer Rosetta Stone or a Minerva Bustier.
FTFY
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Blue Mages in FF11 are weird. They learn like a billion skills but they have to pick and choose which ones they're going to equip at any given time. There's a point system for it or something, I never actually played that class. The point is, they don't actually have to juggle everything they know how to do, they pick skills depending on what type of role they're going for. They have a lot of flexibility overall but can't just do everything all the time.
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That actually sounds like the most balanced version of Blue Magic in the whole series... Why the hell isn't that how they always do it? :(
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That actually sounds like the most balanced version of Blue Magic in the whole series... Why the hell isn't that how they always do it? :(
Sounds like Harmony of Despair Soma, aka "most broken character in the game." It's still not easy to balance "pick your favorite 4 of these 100 abilities", I'd imagine.
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Late, but I just found this.
(http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/katietiedrich/comic352_zps29f09390.png)
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That actually sounds like the most balanced version of Blue Magic in the whole series... Why the hell isn't that how they always do it? :(
Sounds like Harmony of Despair Soma, aka "most broken character in the game." It's still not easy to balance "pick your favorite 4 of these 100 abilities", I'd imagine.
Soma's a weird case, because what makes him broken is his mobility combined with a few really good pieces of equipment. The vast majority of his damage skills aren't worth caring about. You take away the Dragon Helm/Valmanway/Berserker mail and he definitely falls back to the pack.
Though yeah, balancing that many skills is really tough.