I think my total play time of Final Fantasy I was like twelve hours. The subsequent games in the series have generally taken longer, but naturally the big leap into the Super Nintendo era with Final Fantasy IV seemed like it would be the most noticeable transition.
And yet, I think (and I don't have the specific play time I had in IV) that V has had me playing much longer.
Now, I think a big culprit here is the Job system. There's been some grinding, yes (though technically today's session was trying to steal the Murasame off of a Rukh near Crescent, after getting it once and then dying and realizing my quicksave was from before that fight). Anyway, different jobs take different amounts of time to Master. The Red Mage, for example, requires a full 999 ABP points (actually I think the P already stands for points) to get its highest level, which will take a long time when most fights give you just 1 (even if you use the Pixel Remaster's Boost feature... which I will confess to doing, though only if I'm specifically grinding gil or ABP - I've never turned it on for XP - it'll still take a long time) while Jobs like the Berserker and Dancer have, I think, only two levels (or three, if you count starting at zero).
Anyway, today my play time tipped over into 25 hours, which I think puts this at a similar play-time as Alan Wake II, a game I've spilled many a bottle of digital ink over.
And even if we take into account the grinding, I do think that V has surprised me in how much plot happens. I do genuinely think I'm in the endgame now, as I'm now going around collecting tablets that will unlock the 12 ultimate legendary weapons (it seems that there are four dungeons that each have a tablet, and each will let you take your choice of three of the weapons from their vault, so I think you do get all of them - I got Excalibur, Masamune, and the Magus Staff, of which I only am using one just because of the current Jobs I'm leveling).
Monsters are also giving up more ABP - while farming Murasame (which needs to be Stolen from a Rukh, most of which just have Hi-Potions - thankfully I had a dagger that sometimes casts Mug instead of attacking, so I could have multiple people attempting steal even with only one Thief in the party at the time).
I've actually gotten the full run-down on how Jobs, Mastery, and the Freelancer job work now, which basically suggests that at a certain point, if you're happy with the jobs a character has mastered, it's best to go Freelancer. Here's how it works:
Leveling up a Job unlocks different active and passive abilities. Active abilities always need to be equipped (each Job has a single mandatory active ability - or passive in the Berserker's case) but so long as you are, say, a Monk, you'll get all the passive bonuses you've unlocked for being a Monk, like Counter or Barehanded, etc. If you swap that character to be, say, a Black Mage, you only have your one ability slot to choose one of the active or passive abilities you've unlocked from any Job, so you could, for example, pick up Counter or Barehanded, but not both.
When you hit the maximum level for a Job (which, again, varies from Job to Job,) however, which means you've "Mastered" it, you get - I believe, a permanent boost to one of your stats if it's better than what you've gotten from other Jobs (for example, I think the Summoner has the highest Magic stat boost). But on top of that - again, if I understand correctly - you will also get all of the passive abilities from that Job when you take the Freelancer job (also the Mime, though that's the one job I don't have yet).
In other words, it seems that the best possible scenario would be to master all the Jobs on every character. Practically speaking, though, you'll want to find the Jobs with passives that are good, and by "endgame" (whatever that is,) your Freelancer is going to be powerful in myriad ways.
So, for example, the build I'm using on Faris is to eventually get the Mystic Knight's Spellblade ability and the Ranger's Rapid Fire as my active abilities, and then make use of the Ninja's dual-wielding capabilities, and on top of that the Knight's "equip swords" feature, so she can dual-wield powerful swords and enchant them, and then use Rapid Fire, which I believe does twice as many attacks (so four when dual-wielding) for somewhat less damage.
But there are other things to get as well - the Thief's final passive you get when you master them is "Artful Dodger," which increases the rate at which your ATB meter charges - basically always helpful. And while it might not be an enormous bonus, I suspect that the Summoner's higher Magic stat will improve the Spellblade abilities. Monks eventually get a 30% HP bonus.
Is this all necessary? Perhaps not. There's a complexity to the optimization here that can also be brute-forced by grinding out all of these Jobs.
The other thing that's kind of silly about it is that the longer you spend leveling Jobs with passives you don't terribly need (the Berserker, for example, I think only gives the Berserk and Equip Axes passives - I assume this includes hammers as well, another weapon type that seems to be exclusive to them) the longer you delay actually getting to enjoy all the benefits of these bonuses.
I will say, too, that there's going to be some FOMO regardless of how you build. Between White Magic, Black Magic, Blue Magic, Time Magic, Summoning, and the Red Mage's powerful Dualcast ability, you're going to be hard-pressed to build a party in which you get to use all of those different types of magic. The Chemist is kind of cool conceptually but I just can't imagine I'm going to have space to actually give any of their features to a character in my final build.
Indeed, what I expect is that I'll have something like this:
Bartz will probably wind up as a Black Mage/Time Mage who maybe gets to wear good armor and wield a good weapon.
Lenna is probably going to be my main healer, but whether she can do that with just a Red Mage's Dualcast (not having access to high-level heals could be scary, but is two Curas in a turn enough to make up for not having Curaga?) remains to be seen - I'd really like to be able to use Blue Magic as well (and in fairness, I do have a powerful group heal and also a good group defensive buff in there).
Krile is the character I have the least sense of how she's actually going to wind up, but I think it's going to be some kind of tanky melee build.
And Faris, as I said before, is going to be a dual-wielding Spellblade, which should absolutely wreck house with Rapid Fire.
Looking forward to Final Fantasy VI, I'm curious to see how the Magicite system compares with this - naturally the characters in that have a more specific Job (Sabin's fighting-game-like button prompts make me nervous, as I've never been good at those) but I'm given to understand the Magicite (which allows for Summons) also teaches characters magic gradually over time. That then makes me wonder a bit about, like, whether Locke could be a good healer despite being a Thief. I mean, in fairness, in VIIRebirth I think Cloud is actually my most effective healer.
Anyway, I do think that because V has this system that you can pour almost an indefinite amount of time into, it's delaying my completion of the game. IV, with its fairly rigid character progression, did have the benefit of keeping you moving forward.
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