How to Do a Final Fantasy VI Remake

 I'm roughly halfway through (I think) Final Fantasy VI, currently (unchanged since my last post) cleaning up various things before I go to the Floating Continent and... well, see the game change significantly for the back half. (Spoilers for a 30-year old game?)

I do think I need to temper some of my reactions to the game given that this is the first one really filtered by nostalgia, but I also know that the general consensus surrounding VI at least in the U.S. is that it's the best (even if VII is also deeply beloved). And folks at Square Enix have talked about how they dream of making a similar from-the-ground-up remake of VI the way that they've done with VII.

The biggest challenge, they say, though, is the cast. After games like IV where Cecil is very clearly the main character, and V where the cast does share the spotlight fairly well, but there's only five total party members (and only four at any given time,) VI's guiding philosophy was that all the characters were the main character. Granted, I might give privileged positions to Terra, Locke, Celes, and maybe Edgar and Sabin, but the goal was to ensure that everyone had something of an arc.

Now, I know that the second half of the game is where a lot of these personal stories get resolved, so I'm still in a bit of a set-up phase, but I am getting a sense of the game's overall shape.

Speaking with my best friend, whose favorite video game of all time is VI (though he's never beaten it! He's working his way through V's Pixel Remaster for now - we've been doing this in parallel) he suggested that if we had an expanded remake like VII has gotten, he would put the end of the first game at the big battle at the Narshe mines.

This does feel like a natural spot - while the game starts in Narshe, you have the separate legs of the journey trying to get Narshe to join the Returners, Locke meeting Celes in an occupied South Figaro, and Sabin coming to understand the depths of Kefka's depravity before he, Shadow, and Cyan take their trip aboard the Phantom Train, and then later meet Gau on the Veldt.

The funny thing, though, is that as a place to cut, you actually wind up ending the game before the mechanic of Magicite even enters the picture. That could actually be great - you could basically not have to worry about it when designing the first game, and instead focusing in on the characters' individual powers.

I'd guess, then, that the second game (assuming this would be a trilogy like VII) would likely begin with the search for Terra, eventually getting your first Magicite in Zozo, Celes' starring turn in the opera, and then the trip to the Magitek facility in Vector, the opening to the world of the Espers, meeting Strago and Relm, and finally the Floating Continent. That might be a lot, but it's actually kind of similar to VII's remakes where you cover a lot more ground in the second game.

It's actually sort of funny to me that VI is generally agreed to sit alongside VII as the best of Final Fantasy's entries (I've heard a lot of people putting the MMO Final Fantasy XIV alongside them, but I can only really do one MMO and also I think it's PC only and not on Macs anyway) but unlike VII, which has had tons of prequel games and a sequel movie, as far as I know they've never returned to the world of FFVI, other than various remasters of the original game.

I've been a massive fan of VII's Remake trilogy so far, and frankly wish that future Final Fantasy games would use its combat system much as many of the pre-X games more or less re-used IV's Active Time Battle system. Seeing the world of VI fleshed out and detailed as the VII remakes have done with that game, and seeing those characters rendered in modern, realistic graphics with more space for performances and voice-acting... really it would be freaking awesome.

Given that this is the last of the Pixel Remasters, I'm trying to stop and smell the roses as best I can. I feel like I'm clearing a massive backlog of classic games while also walking through a kind of museum of game design.

On the Cusp of a World of Ruin

 I think I'm about halfway through Final Fantasy VI, which would suggest the game is actually shorter than V. Given the degree of familiarity I had with earlier parts of the game, I believe in my original attempt at this about 18 years ago, I got stuck at the boss of the Magitek Research Facility, which is funny because this time around it posed essentially zero challenge.

Indeed, one of the slight disappointments here is that some of the most iconic fights have been over too fast. My fight with the Ghost Train ended in only about two rounds (I did manage to get a Meteor Strike, which is what the Pixel Remaster calls Suplex, I assume as a more faithful translation of its Japanese name, off on the train, fulfilling the meme) and similarly my second bout (of which I'm now through three) with Ultros at the opera house was tragically short, I think this one only going three rounds.

I'm now in a clean-up phase, exploring on the Blackjack to try to get everything I can out of the World of Balance. But the floating continent is now floating, and that means that we're near VI's big midpoint shift. I only hope that the World of Ruin is as substantial.

To be sure, I imagine I'm getting through this content quickly in part because I'm so familiar with it.

Another goal of my check-in with the midpoint of the game is to let some of the lower-level characters catch up. Poor Gau is still in the teens, while folks like Terra and Strago are 25. Speaking of Strago, I'm also trying to amass things like his Blue Magic (I've only learned a single spell he doesn't start with, and it's... Self-Destruct) and Gau's Rages (of which I have many, but I guess there are some really powerful ones to pick up). I also picked up Mog, and got him a bunch of environment-based dances.

Well, I guess if it's over too quickly there is a port of VII you can get on a PS5...

Final Fantasy VI: Espers, Operas, and Another Leap Forward for the Series

 So, while I had never played very far into it, Final Fantasy VI was the first game in the series I was really aware of (though the dark-clad knight in some cardboard cutout that I recall vaguely from early childhood might have been Cecil from IV, then known as II) and so I'm a little biased toward it as "the" classic Final Fantasy game.

But, to be fair, by reputation and by what I'm now experiencing playing the game, it is earning that.

I've now worked out a deal with future party-member Setzer to use his airship to travel to the southern continent and confront the Empire and rescue some Espers from a Magitek factory.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Square seemed to pull out all the stops when conceptualizing VI. I should note that, graphically, the Pixel Remaster has made some changes and embellishments on what released for the SNES (and I'll talk about the Opera in a moment) but in terms of art direction, there are some huge departures from the previous games. Yes, there have always been elements in these games of high technology, most notably the sci-fi environments encountered in IV. But while there are still some castles to be found in VI, they have ventilations shafts in their towers.

Zozo, in particular, feels hugely different.

At one point in the game - after a lengthy journey where the characters get split up (one branch of which includes the segment on the Phantom Train) and then reunite for one of the game's "multiple parties" segments (which, as a WoW player, I think of as "raids") a few characters need to go looking for Terra, and this takes you to the wealthy town of Jidoor, which has a classic medieval Final Fantasy town vibe, but where the lower class citizens were all banished, and were forced to go create a new town up in the mountains called Zozo. And it is there that we discover Terra was last seen.

Zozo, unlike any other town I've seen in an earlier Final Fantasy game, feels modern (well, modern for the mid-90s). While, being a video game settlement, it's tiny, the town has the vibe of a dense urban slum, with tightly-packed apartment buildings. Zozo doesn't really function as a town the way that most towns in these games do, as you'll be attacked anywhere in there and the "stores" don't actually have anyone who will sell you anything.

The dense town of urban decay - which literally has bodies lying out on the street - has a vibe that I think was popular in my childhood, an era when the cyberpunk genre was really big (a genre that, all apologies to modern cyberpunk authors, I think is almost redundant given how we're already in a society dominated by the internet where megacorporations dictate how we live). It's honestly something that I think as a kid I would have found kind of off-putting and depressing, but thirty years later kind of hits a note of nostalgia. Zozo is scuzzy to the extreme.

But it's also here that one of VI's major progression systems is introduced. Terra is being tended by Ramuh, one of the Espers that, being basically human in form, can pass as human and live in secret. Ramuh escaped from one of the empire's Magitek laboratories, and is hoping to enlist the Returners in liberating his fellows. Ramuh's three companions, Siren, Cait Sith, and Kirin, didn't make it, but transformed into Magicite upon their deaths. Ramuh allows the same to happen to him, and thus we get our first Magicites.

Each character can have one Magicite equipped at a time, and as you battle things, the Magicite will (permanently) teach you spells - for example, Ramuh gives you, if I recall correctly, Thunder, Thundara, and Poison. Additionally, some Magicite will also affects your stats when you level up - I believe of the first four you get, one has your Stamina go up an extra point with each level, another increases the HP gains you receive by 10%, and another increases your Magic attribute by 1 when you level up. Finally, each of these Espers can be summoned once per battle by the person who has them equipped.

At the moment my strategy has been to try to swap them out so that everyone learns as many spells as possible - especially Cure (taught by Kirin). But I think in the long run it'll also be important to have Espers equipped that will give certain character the attributes they most need. Celes and Terra, as the two native spellcasters, will probably be characters I focus a lot of Magic stats on.

Right now the Figaro brothers are profoundly powerful with their unique abilities. I got the Chainsaw on Edgar (which I must confess I got some online help with) and between that and Sabin's Meteor Strike (which in the SNES version was just called Suplex) I can dish out a ton of damage in single-target scenarios. And in fact, both have powerful AoEs as well. I wonder if these will remain as powerful moving forward.

Indeed, very few characters, it seems, have much reason to just use the standard "attack" command. Celes does when she's not casting spells (I haven't encountered a ton of spellcasting enemies, so her Runic command doesn't get a lot of use). Locke was doing this until I got a relic that changed his "Steal" to "Mug," and while given that he wasn't putting out much damage compared to the Figaros anyway, having him focus on combat larceny has been a pretty standard practice.

Following Zozo, and needing an airship to get to Vector, the imperial capital, another of VI's iconic sequences (and there do seem to be a lot of those) takes place - in which Celes takes the place of an opera singer whom she looks like as bait for a scoundrel gambler who happens to have an airship and intends to kidnap the singer.

Now, the fact that this kidnapper is a future party member is... a bit intriguing, as he's a full-on villain here.

But this opera sequence is where I think the Pixel Remaster went really hard. I do have vague memories of this in its original SNES form, and while it was a real spectacle, in the Pixel Remaster they do a couple things I genuinely didn't expect.

The first is that they play with camera angles. All of these games have had the top-down (or slightly-tilted top-down, maybe more tilted in VI) perspective, but we get shots of the stage from various angles, with the sprites redesigned to show off... well, angles that we don't usually see them from. It's not constant, but it's a sort of shocking vision as we're reminded that, oh yes, we're actually in 2024 right now (at least as I'm writing this) and video games have definitely figured out how to show off a 3D environment.

The other is that the singing in the opera has full voice acting. As in, it's really sung, with, like, lyrics being sung by voice actors in English.

Now, the SNES did have very occasional voice acting - think about the opening of Super Metroid "The Last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace." But that was seriously exceptional, and I don't think it was really until the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation that voice acting in video games became the rule rather than the exception. So yeah, this really knocked my socks off.

Playing through all these iconic moments, though - Suplexing the ghost train, having the second Ultros fight on the opera stage - the one thing is a little surprising is how easy things have been. Both of those fights only lasted like two or three rounds, and while with Ultros I probably did do a little grinding (trying to learn various spells and such) with the Phantom Train I really didn't at all (ok, I spent long enough in the Veldt to have Gau do his thing one time, but that hardly seems excessive).

Not all the fights have been easy - I took on the second bout with Kefka (which comes after defending Banon from several waves of imperial soldiers - though there's a recovery bucket you can return to between fights) with Locke, Gau, and Edgar, I believe, and well after I'd set Gau to one of his Rages, Locke and Edgar were both knocked out by a single attack, meaning I had to just sit there and cheer Gau on to finish the fight (he did prevail, but with a fairly small number of hit points left) but I wonder overall how much of a challenge the game will wind up being. My general rule (and this is probably the subject for a whole post) is that I like a game that is difficult enough to get me to engage in its game systems - you don't want something where you can just hit the basic attack over and over and succeed - but not so difficult that it feels impossible (yes, I know that I play FromSoft games, and for some reason they feel like an exception to that second rule, probably because of some sort of "tough but fair" philosophy).

Anyway, I'm still playing through stuff that feels relatively familiar to me. But I'm running out of big moments that I already know pretty well.

Final Fantasy VI Kicks Off With Unprecedented Creativity

 It's a small detail, but Final Fantasy VI might be the first in the series in which the first or second monster I fight is not a goblin.

From the beginning, the Final Fantasy games always flirted with some divergences from the medieval fantasy genre. Fantasy, of course, does not need to adhere to the historical limitations on technology (and in fact, there are often some "rules" to medieval fantasy that aren't actually historical, like I think guns pre-dated full plate armor in our reality). We had the sort of technological city in the sky in the first game, and certainly by IV we had what were clearly high-tech elements, such as the futuristic Tower of Babel and Lunar Whale.

But VI feels like the first game that truly sets aside the D&D inspirations of the series and sets out to do its own thing. Yes, there is still a big castle you go to early in the game, but it's actually a big mechanical fortress that can bury itself in the desert.

I haven't gotten my hands on any Magicite yet, so at this stage in the game the characters are limited to what they inherently can do, but what that is is pretty fun. Terra is the only spellcaster at this point, but Edgar has an array of tools that are quite effective in combat (though I'm given to understand he'll need upgrades over time). I think in my previous runs at this game, I didn't appreciate the Noiseblaster and Bio Blaster, defaulting to his Auto-Crossbow, which does the most direct damage. I'm not sure if it's ever ideal to just take the "Attack" action on him - perhaps if he gets a weapon that's better than any of his tools - but I'm fine with that.

My most recent addition to the crew (I'm a little over an hour into the game) is Sabin, Edgar's martial artist brother, and boy has the Pixel Remaster made him easier to play - his unique ability is Blitz, which gives him various attacks that seem inspired by fighting games. Using them requires you to input a specific button combination, and you'd have to memorize them after reading the combinations in the pause menu. Now, in the Pixel Remaster, you select the Blitz you want and then get a prompt in-combat that tells you which buttons to hit, which I am extremely grateful for.

Anyway, I also find it interesting how Kefka is introduced - he's a lieutenant of the evil Emperor Gestahl, and going by the tropes of this sort of game, you'd really expect him to be some tough but ultimately subordinate boss, like the Turks in VII, or I guess the elemental lords in IV.

Another note is how the town of Narshe, which is where the game starts, really feels like it has a more distinct personality than a lot of the towns in previous games - you really get a sense of the extremes of temperature, between the snowy cold outside and the heat of all the steam-powered machinery.

Also, the way the world map works is different - the angle is sort of tilted and the camera is much more zoomed in. This does make it feel a little more like you're exploring a big world, but it will take some getting used to (and especially the change to a "behind the character" rotating camera angle when using a Chocobo, and I assume later the airships, which actually reminds me of Secret of Mana when you get Flammie the Dragon to ride on - a game where I think you only ever see the overworld when flying above it, outside of non-controlled transport like the big cannons).

Environments in this also feel like they're a little more three-dimensional - a departure in the art design that shows an evolution toward the modern 3D environments we're now used to.

V Down, I to Go

 Well, that's the penultimate entry in my Pixel Remaster run of the early Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy V is a great game - I honestly don't know where I'd rank it compared to IV, which I consider good praise. Mechanically, the game is certainly more complex than IV, but the Jobs system in V takes the ideas introduced in III and really makes them work a lot better - though that is not to say that there isn't room for improvement.

Ultimately, when I got to the final dungeon (which, at least in its first half, is actually a really cool trip, taking you through what at least was the 16-bit equivalent of a surreal journey through locations both familiar and semi-familiar) I had most of my characters going as "Freelancers," gaining all the passive benefits of their various classes. This wasn't quite as crucial on Bartz and Lenna, whom I had using, respectively, Black and Time Magic and White and Blue Magic (as cool as Dualcast was, I really couldn't go in without someone that could cast Curaga, Arise, and Esuna). Faris and Krile had mastered several classes (I did actually get the latter's Mystic Knight mastered in the final dungeon) and so Faris was my biggest damage-dealer, using Spellblade and Rapid Fire while dual-wielding I think the Brave Blade and either Excalibur or Ragnarok. Krile I had Spellblade on but rather than having her Rapid Fire she took care of Summoning magic - and honestly, Golem's Earthen Wall and Odin's Zantetsuken both played important roles in the final fight.

Exdeath as a villain is actually a kind of cool inverse of your typical Final Fantasy bad guy. In a lot of cases, you have some ambitious and arrogant human (or human-adjacent fantasy person) who has been transformed into a hideous abomination through some magical corrupt. Exdeath, though he appears through most of the game as an armor-clad knight (not unlike Golbez in IV, whom we discover near the end isn't really the bad guy), turns out to be not even remotely human, and is instead a great tree that was used as a kind of dumping ground for evil magic and essences, which then amalgamated as this singular entity.

Thus, the final boss has two phases - the first one has you face off against Exdeath, no longer bound in armor and appearing as a monstrous, branchless, twisted tree-trunk with a nasty face. Even then, though, you can see that the wood (twisted to have multiple mouths) is just barely covering up the demonic presence inside. When that is beaten (which took me shockingly little time - I might have been a little overleveled, but not by a ton) the wooden facade is stripped away, and we get what I think might be first really true Final Fantasy body-horror amalgamation final boss, where a bunch of demonic entities are kind of melted into one another, trying to pull all reality into the void (a void out of which it is reaching - a cool and scary visual).

In fact, the boss has four targetable points to attack, some of which are weak to certain effects - like one can be Petrified and another can be insta-killed by Odin.

I've noticed that, since my mother died seven years ago, I've been more sensitive than before about any kind of emotional element in pretty much any medium. So even with old 16-bit sprites, I'll confess that Krile mourning her grandfather (and the rest of the party mourning their friend) kind of got to me. Galuf and his Dawn Warrior companions are a kind of cool element in the game - you can imagine some unmade prequel that was the story of their defeating Exdeath the first time. (We don't need that prequel, or... you know, most prequels.)

I think some folks at Squaresoft regretted not releasing this one in America, and I think it probably would have been well-received.

The game is also way longer than previous ones - IV was certainly a step up in narrative, but still a relatively tight story. I put 30 or maybe more hours into V, which feels like a decent time for a modern game (I bet I spent less time in Alan Wake II, at least on my first play through it). Part of that time was definitely grinding (I spent a long time trying to steal Murasame off a Rukh, and there were moments where I turned the Pixel Remaster's ABP boost all the way up and fought enemies to master various Jobs - my rule was that I only used the boost when I was grinding anyway, though I broke that rule with the Magic Pots in the Phoenix Tower) but I also think there's just more content and story to get through. I was intrigued by the game's two worlds - I love that when you arrive in Galuf's world, there are different enemies and the environments all look a little different. I kind of love that feeling of "new world means a whole new set of fantasy elements to discover" and then I was fairly shocked when those two worlds merged into one (I never beat that freaking turtle in the Gil Cave, which vanishes after the worlds merge). Seeing the maps fit together was really cool as well - the notion that this merged world was actually the original one, and that the two other worlds were so similar yet different because they had been separated. It's genuinely a cool fantasy concept. I might have liked a phase of the game where you could travel between the two before they merged, but it's already a long one.

Anyway, with this under my belt, I'm eager to move on to VI, which is my best friend's favorite game of all time and one that I believe goes farther off the beaten path of traditional medieval fantasy. Mechanically, I get the sense that it kind of gives you the solid character-mechanics of IV but with some customizability in the form of Magicite that was maybe a kind of evolution of the Jobs system.

Given that I beat V at around 11:30 tonight (last night?) I decided not to embark on VI until tomrrow.

My Pitch for Running Curse of Strahd

 It's been a while since Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft came out, and given that I am someone who seems to only run long, epic campaigns that take years (we're now 4 years and two months into my Ravnica campaign) I haven't had an opportunity to put the book's setting into practice.

I've actually been thinking about the possibility of, once this campaign is over, or perhaps when the Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign I'm in ends (we're only two sessions in and haven't entered the Feywild yet, so not any time soon) how I might consider trying my hand at actually running a published adventure, and if there's one that has really stuck with me it's got to be Curse of Strahd (the DM for our WbtW campaign has also always wanted to play in that one, so it would feel like a good opportunity).

Still, given that one of my players (my best friend) has read that one already (he ran the one I was playing in a few years ago that got pretty far - we had hit level 8 and were in the Amber Temple) and, well, my own desire to create my own stories, I had some thoughts.

As any reader of this blog can attest, I'm kind of obsessed with Alan Wake and Control. The former, especially with its sequel (while I think I might like Control better, I think Alan Wake II is the best Remedy game I've played, which is admittedly from a sample size of three) being more in the horror genre, feels like a touchstone for me.

I'm also someone who has read a fair amount of Stephen King - a key inspiration for Alan Wake, along with David Lynch (whose work I'm also reasonably familiar with) - and I think there's a point of inspiration here to consider:

Curse of Strahd is likely one of the most-played 5th Edition adventures (that and Lost Mines of Phandelver, I'd guess). I mean, I had read it before I played in it (and did a decent job, I think, of not meta-gaming too much, acting on the knowledge my character had rather than what I had as a player).

While the specific events of Curse of Strahd are, I think, meant to represent a singular period in Barovia, the nature of the Domains of Dread is that Strahd will always return so that he can be eternally tormented, and nothing truly changes.

In other words, it's kind of a loop.

And in that loop, there's some familiarity - people might have played this adventure before, might have a general sense of its shape and its arc.

So (and boy, if you're one of my players and read this blog, stop doing so now) overall, there would be a few things I'd tweak.

For one thing, we'd probably divorce the campaign entirely from anything Forgotten Realms-related. We'd also likely make use of elements of Van Richten's, like allowing Gothic Lineages, possibly Dark Gifts. That's all well and good. We'd of course include all the updates and new character options to come out since Curse of Strahd did way back when it did. And, you know, probably incorporate some of the better cultural sensitivity that came with Revamped.

But that's all window dressing.

I think we would start off small. Maybe we have the players find a Mist Talisman in Barovia or Vallaki that leads to another Domain. Perhaps we'd introduce a new NPC or two who aren't in the book.

Indeed, I think I'd try to get players to come up with more elaborate backstories than what a pre-fab adventure usually calls for, and incorporate hooks and quests that relate to those - the kind of thing that I think a good DM should try to do even when running a published adventure.

And then, when the party finally makes their first visit to Castle Ravenloft...

Blow it the fuck up.

That's right, climbing the perilous path to the great manor overlooking the cursed town of Barovia, the party rounds a bend, and the great castle of Strahd von Zarovich erupts in a massive fireball, stone fragments of its towers and parapets raining down.

What the hell just happened? The characters and the players should both be asking that question.

And from there on, all bets are off - all the assumptions that the players might have had about how things are likely to go in this adventure are called into question. Was Strahd caught in the blast? Is he dead? Can that happen?

And who is this friendly archmage Firan Zal'honen who has invited us to delve deeper into the mystery?

While I tend to write stories with a lot of horror elements, I've always been drawn more to the sense of confusion and disorientation that horror often trades in more than the pit-of-the-stomach dread and visceral disgust at gore and violence. Though I know Stephen King didn't like its departures from the novel's ideas, Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining is my go-to favorite horror film, because of the way that it makes you feel like you're getting details wrong - I think it puts us very effectively in the shoes of Danny Torrance, being a young enough kid that you're not sure if the weirdness around you is actually out of the ordinary or if it's just the way that the world is and you just haven't yet learned about that aspect of it yet.

Alan Wake (both games, but especially the second) very much trade in this idea of a questionable reality, and I think there's a grand potential in the Ravenloft setting if you really hammer home the idea that this is not the prime material plane, where things need to have some underlying logic that adheres to how we generally expect things to work (even if, simply by virtue of existing in the fantasy genre, any D&D game can have elements that break those rules).

Obviously also an element in Alan Wake II, I find the motif of doppelgangers to be a really fascinating potential element in a horror story. Psychological horror and Gothic Horror often find monsters within the main characters' psyche - the threat of a doppelganger carries a lot of potential sources of fear: you could find a double of yourself trying to take over your life and lay claim to the aspects of your identity. You could fear being held responsible for the actions performed by your double. You could fear that what you believe to be you is actually a lie, and that you are the double, who could reconcile the dissonance of your existence by committing a heinous act of murder and stealing their identity. You might fear that a villainous double is no double at all, but another facet of your own personality.

I don't know that this concept would be central to my alternative Curse of Strahd game, but in the distant likelihood that any of my friends find this blog, I'm going to throw this behind a spoiler cut.

A Full Day of FFV

 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.