I've begun (and, frankly, made significant progress through) Final Fantasy III.
If FFII chose to tell a darker story and eschew classes in favor of a gradual skill-based progression system, the third game in the entry seems to pull the ripcord and go in the utter opposite direction. Once again you have four characters from the start who don't really have any distinctive personality - the first character in your lineup simply speaks for the rest - and the story is once again about four elemental crystals and some kind of balance between light and darkness. Also, shockingly, spell slots are back.
When the game starts, the four party members are all "Onion Knights," which is apparently an idiomatic expression in Japanese referring to, essentially, "newbies." (I think it's kind of "green" like a green onion, roughly.) However, shortly after the game begins, you encounter the Air Crystal and unlock the first "jobs," aka classes. These are the Warrior, Monk, Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage - five of the six options from the original game.
These jobs can be swapped between any time outside of combat, meaning that your characters can play different roles quite easily. Every five actions you take in combat, your "job level" with the current job that character has will level up (though I think you can never gain more than one job level per encounter - otherwise it would be tempting to go to a low-level area, have a Viking spam "draw attacks" and the rest of the party defend and just turn on the auto-battler and go get a sandwich).
What these job levels do... is something I don't entirely understand. Having had two of my characters stay as Black and White Mages for the vast majority of the game (I swapped the Black Mage briefly to a Geomancer) they've done a decent job accruing spell slots. My top-position character started as a Warrior with brief forays into Monk, then went Knight upon getting access to the second set of classes, and now I'm kind of swapping him between Viking, Dragoon, and Knight. My bottom-position character has swapped the most, starting as a Red Mage, then spending a lot of time as a Black Belt.
I think what it does is A: improve the kind of thing that the class is supposed to be good at and B: determines which stats improve as you level up.
I'm not sure if this is a game where you can kind of trap yourself with bad choices - the wisdom I've seen online is that you should feel free to swap jobs whenever you want. One thing I'll caution is that if you swap from a spellcasting class to a non-spellcaster, you'll lose your spell slots and not get them back when you switch again.
Plot-wise there's definitely more going on than the first game, though it's not a huge leap from the story of the second game. One thing I greatly appreciate is that there are somewhat fewer random encounters, but they're also a little more challenging (which was a big note I had for the second game).
The biggest downside is that I think this game encourages (and maybe requires) a lot of grinding. The first game maybe needed some near the Marsh Cave early on, but I felt quite powerful about a third of the way into the game. Here, not only is the experimental nature of the Jobs something that will encourage you to grind a lot to try them out, but also, maintaining equipment for all of your jobs will drain your gil like nobody's business. A dungeon I went into recently seemed designed to kill my White Mage, but with generous use of Phoenix Downs I pushed my way through.
Swapping jobs will automatically equip you with "optimal" gear, but sometimes this can be a little counter-productive. For example, the Viking class, if you use it for its "Draw Attacks" feature (which admittedly seemed to work far better when I first got it - I wonder if its chance to succeed improves as you level the class) it could be reasonable for you to dual-wield shields, but in my experience, the game always has you dual-wield weapons (now, granted, I think Vikings get such serious damage reduction that you might still be fine dual-wielding - as long as the attacks are physical, I basically always take just 1 damage).
Another slight annoyance is that some jobs you get aren't really "online" when you get them. For example, Invokers (or is it Evokers?) are the first job to introduce summoning to the game, with folks like Shiva, Ifrit, and Ramuh making their debuts in the series, but you don't actually have access to any of the summoning spells when you get the class. Likewise, while the Dark Knight claims that it can wield boomerangs and swords, it seems that the actual selection of weapons they have is far more limited - and at least at the point I'm at, I can't find a single one of them.
Still, overall, I've been really enjoying this one. The world is far bigger - after you explore much of what you'd expect is the world map, you discover that it's actually a floating continent, and there's a whole second world map below. I've also been through three airships, and have started getting hints about a fourth one. The current one can go underwater (though there's not been a ton of underwater stuff to explore other than a dungeon).
What I've heard is that V expands upon the introduced Job system seen here and does it better. I'll have to wait and see that, but I do really love that non-spellcasters are starting to get more interesting abilities.
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