Having unlocked the Sage and the Ninja jobs, I think I must be near the end of Final Fantasy III (though I bet the final dungeon is massive). I acquired these in the Lost City of Eureka, which you need to complete a fairly intense dungeon just to unlock, and then another just to get into. Eureka also has a number of boss fights against what I'm given to understand are the ultimate weapons in the game.
My set-up going into the rest of the game is my tank character as a knight wielding Excalibur and Ragnarok, my Black and White Mages having done a little time as a Magus and Devout, respectively, are now both Sages, and I've got my fourth character (who has spent most of the game as a Black Belt) going Ninja, wielding Masamune and the Moonring Disk or whatever it's called.
While the Jobs are certainly the big innovation for III, the system is a little awkward - each time you unlock new classes, if you want to try them, you're kind of at square one. This feels pretty fair when it's a radical departure, like when you get the Ranger or the Thief or the Evoker, but when there are classes that are clearly meant to be upgrades to existing ones, such as the Magus for the Black Mage or the Summoner for the Evoker, it feels kind of crappy to start over at Job level 1, which I think can mean that your power dips a little.
Interestingly, when it comes to the Evoker and the Summoner, you use the same summoning spells, but the Evoker gets a random (though I think also contingent on the current state of battle) attack by their summon between two options - Ifrit might blast a single target with Hellfire or they might do an AoE heal on the party. But with the Summoner, all the summons just do one thing, which seems to always be an AoE damage ability - ones that will come to be their signature abilities like Shiva's Diamond Dust. (Also, for both classes, notably, other than the high-level summons that you need to beat in order to obtain, you actually get the same number of spell slots for each level above first. Thus, your Chocobo summon can fill the role of your cheap spell, but Shiva, Ramuh, Ifrit, and Titan are all basically equal in terms of your resources to cast them.)
Of course, we had class/job upgrades in the original Final Fantasy, but this was a single quest that just upgraded all four of your characters and it was a strict bonus - nothing to catch up on. You went from being a level whatever Black Mage to that same level Black Wizard.
There's a ton of fun to the flavor of these jobs, and I love how they start getting unique abilities (using the Monk's Kick could be pretty fun).
But overall, I think in these early days, the developers relied too much on the idea of grinding. That's, of course, something that game design has gotten better with (though I'll concede that as much as I love my Soulsborne games, I don't think I've ever played one in which I didn't try to do at least a little level grinding).
Anyway, the world of III is definitely more interesting than the previous two. The story's still not quite as interesting as later games would have (though I'll concede that I've got rose-colored glasses) but there are some really cool ideas here. My favorite is that the Invincible, the fourth airship you get (yeah, four of them!) function as your own little mobile town with a bed to sleep in for free, vending machines for items and lots of good weapons, armor, and spells, and if you're attacked by flying creatures on the Invincible, the battle starts with the ship barraging your foes with cannons, doing a modest but decent amount of damage to them. And you still have the Nautilus, the high-speed airship that can convert into a submarine.
Right now I'm trying to back out of what feels like the lead-up to the end of the game so that I can go find the Odin summon (I had gotten Bahamut and Leviathan, but missed Odin and was very disappointed when I got to the Sages at the end of Eureka and one of them said "hey, you've got to go get this other thing to get what I have to give you." That said, going through Eureka again should help me generate the funds to get better armor for my Ninja and possibly stock up on Shurikens (which are freaking expensive - I hope that means they're powerful).
No comments:
Post a Comment