Anticipating and Imagining Tweaks to the Soulknife

 The Soulknife is my favorite Rogue subclass, and so I'm fairly excited to see the subclass getting a revision in this year's Player's Handbook (I'll be sad if this means the Swashbuckler gets cut - honestly, I wouldn't shed a tear if the Assassin got cut instead, though I think the Assassin really deserves a good rework to be an actually good subclass).

The Soulknife is super cool, but there are some rules hiccups and balancing issues caused by the way that the rules are written.

Let's talk about the big one first:

Soulknives are built around Psychic Blades, which are effectively hybrid melee/ranged conjured weapons that deal a damage type that very few things resist (Psychic) and from which the Soulknife cannot be disarmed. It also doesn't leave visible wounds, allowing for some great plausible deniability if the Rogue needs to go take down an NPC without leaving any evidence. With a flat 60-foot range, you no longer suffer disadvantage that you might from throwing a dagger at a similar distance, as well, and the main-hand one does a d6.

The weapons are conjured when you take the Attack action - and this is where the first big problems come up. The weapons vanish after they hit or miss, which means that after you've made your attack, your hand is once again empty. Because it takes the Attack action to conjure the blades, this means that you won't be able to have those Psychic Blades in hand for any reaction-based attack - most obviously an Opportunity Attack, but also in situations such as if you have a Battle Master with Commander's Strike.

The fix here is easy, though: simply have the blades appear whenever you make a melee attack and are not carrying a weapon (or, probably better to say you "can" have the blades appear, as you might have some reason to want to make an Unarmed Strike). Another option would be to say that the blades persist indefinitely, and can be dismissed at no action cost.

The next issue is one that I think could be solved with special magic items:

We've already seen Monks receive an item, the Wraps of Unarmed Prowess, which correct the lack of +X weapons for their unarmed strikes. But as far as I know, there aren't equivalents for subclass-derived weapon attacks, such as the Natural Weapons (which aren't technically unarmed strikes) for the Beast Barbarian or the Psychic Blades for the Soulknife.

I'll contend that this is less of an issue for Soulknives, given that at least in terms of damage, they're relying less on their modifiers to the damage roll than other classes. But in terms of their accuracy, it would be good to let them keep pace with other Rogues (and not have to rely on Homing Strikes to make up for this deficit).

These two changes I think are all that are needed to fix the clear problems with the subclass.

But let's dream a little bigger:

Cunning Strikes is a new Rogue feature that allow you to sacrifice dice from your Sneak Attack hits to fuel additional effects. A few of the subclasses for the Rogue introduced after this addition also gain new Cunning Strike options. In my mind, this feels like a great way to give every subclass a way to interact with this very cool feature.

High-level Soulknives can potentially stun a target with their Psychic Blade sneak attacks, but I could also see this transforming into a Cunning Strikes option (though perhaps that would be too powerful without a resource limiter). But I could see doing things like Dazing targets, maybe inflicting a confusion-like effect, or other mind-altering hinderances.

And there we have it - I'm really looking forward to the new core books, and I hope we'll get some hints at what kind of tweaks are coming in the next few days.

PHB24 on the Path to Finalization, with Some Revelations

 With the Unearthed Arcana process complete, and the first of the new core rulebooks due to arrive in early Fall, WotC released a video talking about coming to the final stages of editing and formatting the new Player's Handbook before it gets sent off to the printers.

While we're naturally not going to get details on every bit of text in the book, the interview (hosted as usual by Todd Kenreck and featuring Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford) did serve up some interesting details.

Naturally, we've seen different subclasses suggested and cut from various classes. I believe the plan is still to have four subclasses per class in the book - an upgrade for most, other than the Cleric and Wizard.

Previously, the design goal as stated was to have these subclasses reflect dichotomies, at least as best as they could. For example, you have Illusionists and Diviners for Wizards, those who conceal and those who reveal, and then Evokers and Abjurers, those who assault and those who protect.

At the same time, my contention has always been that the Player's Handbook options should represent the most classic, archetypal versions of these class tropes.

So, it comes as a bit of a surprise to see that the Soulknife is now being included as one of the base options for the Rogue - don't get me wrong, the Soulknife is my favorite Rogue subclass (and one that I'll be using when my Rogue hits level 3 in our Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign,) but to my mind, the Swashbuckler is the most obvious subclass among all classes to add to the Player's Handbook, being a subclass that represents an archetype that is so foundational to the fantasy genre (I realize the story of Robin Hood is not technically fantasy, but it's certainly one of the stories that set the tone for the genre, Arthurian legend being probably the other most central influence).

Now, if this means that Rogues get five subclasses, then no problem.

We had already known that the Brawler Fighter was out - I actually didn't hate it conceptually, though my biggest issue with it was that it felt like it was getting to do things that Monks should be able to - and now we know what is replacing it to fill that fourth Fighter subclass slot: the Psi Warrior.

And yes, this means that we're going to be seeing all four psionic subclasses in the PHB: the Aberrant Mind, the Great Old One patron, the Psi Warrior, and the Soul Knife.

That's really all we have revelation-wise.

Regarding the Psi Warrior, I've never been too excited by it because of the existence of the Eldritch Knight and the Rune Knight, and honestly haven't thought much about how to use it. I don't really have a sense of how popular it is. I have a few players who basically refuse to play non-spellcasters, which limits the number of people trying out martial classes (also, I run long campaigns - we're over four years into the current one, with almost surely at least one more year left in it, so the classes people picked in 2020 remain in use. At the least I've gotten a ton of exposure to Artillerist Artificers, Grave Clerics, Storm Sorcerers - we have two - Whisper Bards, and Ancestral Guardian Barbarians).

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what other changes will be revealed before we have the books in hand. They have said that the Tasha's subclasses are getting some reworks, despite appearing without any changes in the playtest. I'm especially curious to see how the bonus spells for the Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul turn out - I like giving Sorcerers more spells (especially some more situational utility spells, which Sorcerers usually can't afford to pick up with their level-ups) and would rather see this extended to the old subclasses than having them removed from the newer ones (especially because Aberrant Minds would need a significant rework if they didn't have their Psionic spell list).

Final Fantasy IV Is Immediately a Massive Leap Forward

 Having finished all three of the NES-era (or I suppose I should say Famicom-era, given that only the first was released on the NES in the states) Final Fantasy games, I have moved on to IV, which was released on the SNES in the US as Final Fantasy II.

The one area where this version doesn't seem that much improved is its graphics - which is purely because I've been playing the "Pixel Remaster" versions of these games, which upgraded I-III with SNES-style 16-bit graphics. So IV doesn't look all that much better, which is fine. One thing I have considered doing is reverting the Background Music to its original version, rather than the modern orchestration, because 16-bit sound got way, way better than the simplistic 8-bit music.

But let's talk about changes:

First off, this has introduced the Active Time Battle system, which is certainly an adjustment to make. In the first three games, there's actually not really any reason for a pause button because nothing is time-sensitive. Not so now! You've got to get good at quickly navigating command menus. The only game I've played a significant portion of which such as system was Chrono Trigger, and that was about 18 years ago, so it's going to be an adjustment.

Perhaps the most welcome improvement here is the story. From the start, there's a more sophisticated cast of characters and more time spent on dialogue and scenes that flesh these people out than we've gotten before. FFII did give the characters some specificity, but just barely. Now, however, it feels like a real character-driven story is possible.

Our central character is Cecil, introduced already as a powerful Dark Knight and head of the Red Wings, the airship-based air force of the city-state of Baron, which has been engaging in an aggressive series of conquests to capture the elemental crystals (yes, we have elemental crystals again). Cecil and his soldiers are straight up murderous conquerors, but this weighs on his and some of his men's consciences. However, perhaps because of this doubt or, more likely, some court intrigue, Cecil is divested of his rank and sent with his Dragoon friend Kain to deliver an item to the town of Mist. Kain is your second party member to start with, but I'm given to understand that the characters in this come and go with the story, and Kain is not there for terribly long. I don't have a great read on Kain - he seems to share some of Cecil's doubts about Baron's imperialism, but shows hints of carrying a ruthlessness that Cecil seems to want to avoid.

To get to Mist, the two need to fight through a cave guarded by a Mist Dragon, which is your first boss. Upon arriving in the town, though, the item they were sent to deliver turns out to be a weapon, which unleashes a number of Bomb monsters on the town, massacring it. The sole survivor the two find is a little girl whose mother was a Summoner, and by killing the Mist Dragon she had summoned, Cecil and Kain inadvertently killed her. Kain says that the king decreed that all Summoners have to die for the safety of Baron, but Cecil tries to stop him - only for the girl to summon Titan and seemingly kill Kain and leave Cecil and the unconscious girl trapped on the other side of a rock slide.

Cecil takes the girl to a desert town to let her recuperate, but a group of soldiers from Baron come to take her, and Cecil fights them off. The girl, whose name is Rydia, joins the party as a Summoner - having access to summon spells (just one for now) and some Black and White magic. While Cecil begins at level 10 or so, Rydia is just a kid, so in the early parts of traveling with her, it very much is a knight protecting a vulnerable girl, but as she levels up, she starts to be a real asset.

Cecil discovers that his friend and likely romantic interest (if only he weren't barred from such things as a Dark Knight!) Rosa is in the desert town and sick with some poison that needs a rare antidote. Traveling with Rydia, they encounter an old man from the town, Sage Tellah, who is trying to retrieve his daughter after a bard seduced her and whisked her away. Tellah is more powerful than either of them, clearly very experienced, with a lot of magic an a "Recall" ability that seems to cast a random spell (with a chance to fail.) I think this doesn't consume MP, which is good.

Anyway, the group goes to Damcyan, where Tellah's daughter went with the bard, only for the city to be bombarded by Baron's Red Wings before they get there. Tellah's daughter is mortally wounded, and the bard turns out to be Damcyan's prince, Edward. Edward is consumed with grief, especially for his responsibility in getting Anne killed, while Tellah storms off to take vengeance on Golbez, the new commander of the Red Wings (whom Cecil has never heard of). Edward joins the party, and provides a hovercraft (because sure) to let you enter the Antlion Cave where the antidote for Rosa can be found. Edward's mechanics reinforce the idea that he's not a fighter - he can Sing, which creates various status effects on foes, Heal, which is a nice MP-free group heal (if a little weak) or Hide, where he just briefly goes off screen for safety until he can return on the next turn.

When you bring the antidote back to Rosa, she recovers and joins as a White Mage, but there's also a scene that night where Edward leaves the inn to play music and process his grief, only to be attacked by a Sahagin, and where Anna's spirit encourages him to fight.

I mean - look, we're grading on a curve here, but holy crap is this more characterization than I've gotten at all in the series so far (not counting later games I've played, obviously).

I wonder if, on a technical level, the capacity just for more data on an SNES cartridge allowed for them to put more writing in the game, or if perhaps the company had actually started hiring people whose task it was to actually write dialogue for the games, or if they just got better at this. But we're talking about a giant leap in terms of storytelling.

The progress system here is also fairly simple - you get XP to level up, and spellcasters automatically learn spells with their levels. So you don't have to worry about finding all the right magic shops to buy the spells you want.

Currently I haven't found any Ether for sale, which makes me think I should probably try to be conservative with spell use - Tents, on the other hand, seem to be easily found, so that might be the new thing to invest in, and that will replenish MP.

On top of that, some dungeons now have save points in them, where you can use Tents as well (something I'm familiar with from Chrono Trigger and from the maybe fifth or quarter of FFVI I've played).

Really, the main thing I now need to worry about is not sitting too long trying to decide what a character should do, thanks to ATB. I think - I think - that the game pauses once you're in, say, the "White Magic" menu, but it's not when you simply have the base options available.

Final Fantasy III Down, III to Go

 Yeah, the numerals are starting to get awkward.

Of the NES-era Final Fantasy games, I think I can safely say that III is my favorite, but it's not without its flaws.

Still, there are big things to recommend it: the Jobs system is, if nothing else, a cool aesthetic transformation. I think the fact that you only have four characters makes it slightly awkward. Furthermore, upon unlocking the Sage and Ninja jobs - the Ninja can equip all weapons and armor and the Sage can use all spells - has the unfortunate effect of basically rendering the rest of the jobs irrelevant in the last stretch of the game.

The other hiccup in the Jobs system is the tediousness of getting up to speed with a new job. Leveling a job requires you to take five total actions (which can include just "Defend") while in that job, but also cap at a single job level per encounter. This means that you might find yourself tempted to spend a long time in some low-level area hitting "defend" for five rounds and then wiping out the monsters, and repeating this ad nauseum.

There's a bit of push-pull I feel on the story. Unlike II, which went somewhat dark with its evil emperor conquering and massacring, this returned to four generic heroes (with the top-position character really being the "player character,") and a pretty standard "chosen one" story involving the restoration of four elemental crystals.

Still, there's definitely more here than in the first game, and some very cool concepts show up: for example, there are two world maps. You spend the first part of the game in a somewhat small world map, but when you reach the edge of it you discover that it's actually a continent floating high above the world. The world opens up a lot more after you leave here and restore the Water Crystal, which raises the sunken continents back to the surface and restores their people.

Also, crazily, you get four airships over the course of the game - the first is in a small valley that serves as the game's "kiddie pool," and you sacrifice that airship very quickly to destroy a boulder blocking the path. Then, you get another ship that is shot down over the city of Saronia (the series' first crack at a big city works by making it effectively four separate villages on the overworld map). You then can't leave the city until you deal with the evil advisor to the king, and in thanks, the crown prince gives you a speedier little ship that eventually gains the ability to convert into a submarine (though there are only a couple locations you need the sub to go to). The final ship is a big air-galleon that is my favorite, because it becomes a little mobile base, letting you resupply and rest anywhere you take it.

The final boss is a bit of a disappointment: the Cloud of Darkness just spams a giant AoE damage ability that more or less tests if your healer can spam Curaja every turn on the party (I miscalculated when I'd have to hit her with an Elixir to replenish her spell slots, which led to a kind of tempo-cycle where I could not revive and keep my top melee guy alive, so ironically I beat the game with everyone but the "face" of the party up).

One thing that shocks me is that apparently at no point until X, and then only in X, did the game use a normal freaking turn-based combat system. I through III use this thing where you have to queue up all of your characters' actions ahead of time (which sucks when you want to, say, revive someone and then heal them with a potion or buff them with Protection) whereas IV I believe introduces the "Active Time Battle" system, where you have to get fast at navigating those menus. Having gotten my start with Mario RPG, I'd always assumed that there were some Final Fantasy games that simply told you whose character's turn it was, let you select and action, and then had them immediately take that action. And given that X was my first Final Fantasy game, I assumed that that system was present in the other games (at least before XI's MMO and XII's move to their weird "gambit" system that I detested).

Anyway, I'll be curious to see how the SNES titles look and feel. The Pixel Remasters have, of course, made the old NES ones look like they were on the SNES, so I suspect there will be a less dramatic shift. I might consider going back to work on VII Rebirth's Hard Mode (I've just arrived at Cosmo Canyon in that run).

Hitting the Final Stretch of FFIII

 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).

MCDM's Evolving RPG

 So, I probably should have been a Patreon backer rather than a Backerkit one, given that I am curious about the nuts and bolts of development. As such, I'm only able to glean what changes are happening thanks to the MCDM YouTube page and Matt Colville's Twitter account.

In other words, the stuff I'm receiving here might be a bit off, but I'll try to comment one what I understand to be the latest developments in the game, and this is your invitation to take this big old grain of salt with it.

One of the changes that I'm not sold on is the change to damage ranges.

The RPG (which still lacks even a working name beyond "the MCDM RPG") famously eschews attack rolls. In combat, you simply do an amount of damage based on your rolls, and monsters do so against you. The idea is that you shouldn't hit that feeling of "cool, I just waited ten minutes to get a turn and I accomplished nothing."

This idea in and of itself is one I have largely positive feelings about - I've had those turns where I don't land a hit and it feels crappy (that said, using the Shield spell to give my Eldritch Knight an AC of 27 felt really good - but perhaps not so great for my DM). The only concern I have about that is the way that this creates constant bookkeeping - when an attack misses, it's an opportunity to not have to adjust a creature's HP.

The problem that the folks at MCDM were having, though, was that they had to give everything boats of HP because the damage flow was constant.

The other issue they had was that everyone was doing the same amount of damage - the game is (was) built around a 2d6 roll - the most common dice roll in all of gaming, not just RPGs (well, maybe 1d6 is) - and you'd add a modifier to that to get the damage you dealt. The 2d6 basically acted as the game's d20, but also as its damage rolls, and that led to a difficulty in distinguishing between abilities different classes had and even abilities within a class.

I know that in some earlier iteration of the game at least, you had boons and banes - adding or subtracting d4s to these rolls - and impact dice - adding or subtracting d8s - so you might, for example, have some less powerful ability that only added your Might to the roll but also built up some resource, and then you might spend a couple points of that resource to add an impact die or two, and perhaps add another stat as well. This certainly allowed for some variation, but I can imagine that it starts to get limited when you want new features and abilities to allow your character to hit the cap of level 10.

The new idea they're testing does something pretty significant: your roll no longer determines the damage you deal directly. Instead, each ability has a damage range - on 2d6, you might deal, say, 3 damage on a roll of 2-6, 5 damage on a roll of 7-12, and 7 damage on a roll of 13 or 14.

I see big upsides and big downsides to this solution.

The upside of course is that you can really dial in the power of these abilities. Maybe you want a really reliable if not terribly powerful attack - a "Tactical Strike" for the Tactician. You might make the damage ranges very close to one other - just 4, 5, or 6 damage, so whatever you roll is going to be reasonable but you're probably doing it mainly to gain resources or some other benefit. But then, maybe you have a "Chaos Burst" on your... Elementalist or something, and you could have a really broad range - dealing 5, 10, or 20 damage. You could adjust the ranges as well - maybe there's some ability where you're much more likely to do the middle damage amount but on a very low or very high roll you get these extreme results, or maybe there's an ability where you've got equal chances to deal its various amounts of damage.

The biggest downside, however, that I see is that this is going to crowd the character sheet like crazy. And I think it will require far greater mental investment to understand an ability. A 5E Fireball deals 8d6 damage in a 20-ft sphere. That's straight off the dome for me at this stage. But if I had to remember that it could do 14 damage if you rolls a 4 or lower on 2d6, 28 if you rolls 5-8, and 42 damage if you rolled 9 or higher... that's a lot of mental real estate.

 I suppose the question I have is this: why do we even need to have all of these abilities roll the same dice?

I get that you want to have a common selection of dice for your binary (boolean?) rolls, but if we're tossing out the attack roll, why do we even need to retain something like a d20 roll in combat?

Naturally, the removal of an attack roll in combat also removes the need for multiple attacks (sure, you'd like to have damage spill over if you down a foe, such as if you kill a monster with your first attack and then attack a second one - but that could be a particular attack or class of attacks) so you'll want these die rolls to go up as your character gets more powerful (I also think removing the notion of a generic attack in favor of class-based abilities - somewhat like in World of Warcraft where Paladins have Crusader Strike and Demon Hunters have Demon Bite - both of which are basic filler "this is to generate the resources for more interesting abilities" - gives you more leeway to change what dice you roll) but I don't see why we can't have fun with all the polyhedral dice that people have anyway.

If you want consistent, more predictable damage, you make something where you roll a bunch of d4s or d6s. If you want swingier damage, you use fewer but higher-capped dice. 2d6 has a bit of a bell curve where you're much more likely to roll a 7 whereas on a d12 no result is more likely than another.

Final Fantasy III's Jobs System

 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.