Final Fantasy Classic Jobs Part I
Jul. 23rd, 2023 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingIn what was the origin of my whole "Classic Jobs" series of variant playthroughs, in early June of 2017 I started with Final Fantasy for the NES.
Before I even address how this is done, it's probably good to address what it means. Since the early days of fantasy roleplaying, there have been tropes of the traditional, balanced adventuring party. In the oldest versions of Dungeons & Dragons, the only three classes were "Fighting Man", "Magic-User" and "Cleric". In future editions, rogue/thief was added, and then gradually they introduced some of the main classes you see in many more modern roleplaying games, like rangers, monks, paladins, and bards. But the original four, really, were a fighter, a thief, a healer, and an offensive magic user.
The original Final Fantasy very much has its roots in old editions of D&D, and this is something that has been discussed many times on the GameFAQs FF1 NES board. It's clear that FF1's classes are inspired by the 2nd edition of Dungeons & Dragons, with the odd one being the Red Mage who may be somewhat of a stand-in for D&D's Bard. A lot of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns have been based around the idea that the party will have access to a strong combatant, usually on the frontlines (i.e. fighter, or paladin), a skilled person to find less obvious paths (i.e. thief/rogue), a healer (i.e. cleric, white mage) and someone with offensive and utility magic (i.e. magic-user, wizard, black mage). This came to be expected enough of the time and crossed through media enough that TVTropes has a page titled Fighter, Mage, Thief. I guess the cleric didn’t make the cut for the trope, but for some reason that seems more familiar to me personally.
Computer and console RPGs have a tendency to do this, too. Not always, but often. You can spot versions of this in the Might & Magic series, the Ultima series, the Dragon Quest series, various D&D-based games, and somewhat overtly in Final Fantasy IX.
It happens that in the early days of the original Final Fantasy, it was a common recommendation to take a team compromised of a fighter, white mage, black mage, and either a black belt (monk) or thief. Parties like this are great for experiencing the most different aspects of the game although anyone who knows the game in any level of detail would say it's a suboptimal group. Regardless, this party recommendation was stated in Final Fantasy I's original manual as well as the well-known Nintendo Power Final Fantasy Strategy Guide.
As the Final Fantasy series matured and differentiated itself from other roleplaying systems and mythologies, the series very much came to have its own classes. While "fighter" remains a valid class in some games, sometimes its meaning is muddied (as in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance) and sometimes it just doesn't exist (as in Final Fantasy V). In Final Fantasy, the fighter class upgrades to "knight", which has been a lot more consistent. Thus, for best embodying the trope and having the most "classic-styled" party possible through as much of the job-based Final Fantasy as possible, it seemed to me the best fit was Knight, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage. It's possible to play this way naturally in Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy Tactics, and something very close to this is achievable in several other titles.
To back up this decision, I also tried to numerically analyze the series to find the most common jobs in the Final Fantasy series. I assigned games a significance weight, where direct sequels (like Final Fantasy IV: The After Years) were counted for half if they included that job, and where "it seems like this fits the class archetype somewhat but not exactly" also counted for half points. I then totalled these values through all mainline games among Final Fantasy I through XII, plus the three Tactics games. This analysis is discussed in this GameFAQs topic, and the sheet I used is available here.
What's funny about this data-driven approach is that it, uh, didn't back up what I wanted. It suggested that the most common jobs in the Final Fantasy series by my semi-arbitrary metrics were, in order, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, and Ninja. So I said, "Screw science!" and played the way I wanted to.
Now, that brings us to the next thing that isn't gameplay: how can you play Final Fantasy 1 using a party of knight, thief, white mage, and black mage? You can pick "fighter" as a class from the game's outset, but not "knight"; a "knight" is a class-changed "fighter", but if you choose to class change it modifies the entire party. Well, this ended up being serendipitously made possible around the time of this challenge by GameFAQs user essellejaye, who in late May of 2017 posted their updated (but actually built-from-scratch) version of FF Hackster. essellejaye had also created a partial hack intended to enable multiple classes named LevelData4All. Using this, I was able to separate the knight, and go through the entire game using a party of knight, thief, white mage and black mage.
(An aside: If you're curious about essellejaye's ongoing work on FF Hackster, the more up-to-date version named FFHacksterEx can be found at https://ffhacksterex.digitaldreamers.org and here on GitHub. The author of the original FF Hackster, Disch, passed away in 2020.)
Thus, this playthrough was done on a hack! But it was a minor hack. If you know this game, you probably understand how weird this scenario is. You're saying, "So FreshFeeling is going to play through Final Fantasy, with a completely normal party, except with no class change, except for the fighter, who is always class changed?". Well, yes.
We've answered "what" and "how" so I guess we need to address "why" here. Really, we're doing this because I was interested to see how far we could take the concept of using a strict party of knight, thief, white mage, and black mage in as many games as we could, whether the games were built for it or not. I knew I was going to do it during the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta, and I knew it could be done in Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy Tactics, so I thought I'd just... extend that. Was I expecting this to be super novel or interesting on the original Final Fantasy? No, not really at all. But I got to try out essellejaye's work and there's something to be said for that, I think.
As I said, play began in early June of 2017.
At the start of the game, this change is pretty meaningless. In fact, the only thing that significantly differentiates a fighter from a knight prior to the point where you would generally change classes regardless is the knight's access to some minor white magic, but that isn't usable until at least level 15 and I intended to skip that regardless. The process of initial equipment and whatnot shook out normally.
Perhaps I should mention that I do strongly dislike using thief in Final Fantasy 1, so at least there's that working against me. Though the thief has been rebalanced substantially in every version of the original Final Fantasy released since 2004, in the original version they are very suboptimal until mid-game and borderline non-viable in late-game. The thief's best weapon through almost the whole game is worse than one the knight can buy in the third town.
There was a bit to show off in this first short session. At about the 6-minute mark I showed off the revised version of my PartyInfo Lua script that upgrades the GUI to show more stats in combat. I had last shown this toward the end of my VYUOKITE Avengers playthrough, but I fixed it up a bit since then.
I also made a sidebar to use on Twitch:
I went to the Temple of Fiends at level 2 and raided the chests that I could get, collecting the Cap, but I got hit pretty badly by some Creeps and decided to go back to town to heal up instead of immediately challenging Garland. We did that and bought some spells, and still returned to battle Garland at level 2. That battle went juuuust fine.
Shortly after leaving Coneria, we ran into two Ogres who killed Bartz. We managed to run away and then encountered four MadPonys! There were some close calls. We healed up after that and earned level 3 from a MadPony very shortly after.
In Pravoka, we bought some minor armor upgrades, healed up again, and went to fight Bikke's Pirates. On the first action of the battle, Lenna cast SLEP and it affected 8 of the 9 Pirates! Even though that spell is bugged to only work for a single turn, when it hits that many targets it feels pretty worthwhile. On the second turn, with 8 Pirates remaining, Lenna used SLEP again and it worked on 7 of them. Amazing luck! That battle was a cinch.
I did want a bit of money for spells and such in Elfland, so I showed off the trick to guarantee encounters with Kyzokus that you can use immediately after getting the ship. I used that for a bit to afford level 3 spells and other upgrades without it taking forever. First, I grabbed Bartz a Short Sword and Faris a Scimtar. Fighting large group of Kyzokus is still pretty risky at level 3 though. We got level 4 before returning to Elfland, where our next big upgrade was armor:
Now we're ready to take on two Ogres if needed! And it was. Very shortly after this we fought two Ogres with no real issue.
We did the Kyzoku manipulation grind for a bit and returned to Elfland with level 5 characters and enough money to buy FIR2 and LIT2 for Lenna. Bartz at level 5 is capable of two hits with a Short Sword, so it we actually crawled up the power curve pretty nicely here.
Before I even address how this is done, it's probably good to address what it means. Since the early days of fantasy roleplaying, there have been tropes of the traditional, balanced adventuring party. In the oldest versions of Dungeons & Dragons, the only three classes were "Fighting Man", "Magic-User" and "Cleric". In future editions, rogue/thief was added, and then gradually they introduced some of the main classes you see in many more modern roleplaying games, like rangers, monks, paladins, and bards. But the original four, really, were a fighter, a thief, a healer, and an offensive magic user.
The original Final Fantasy very much has its roots in old editions of D&D, and this is something that has been discussed many times on the GameFAQs FF1 NES board. It's clear that FF1's classes are inspired by the 2nd edition of Dungeons & Dragons, with the odd one being the Red Mage who may be somewhat of a stand-in for D&D's Bard. A lot of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns have been based around the idea that the party will have access to a strong combatant, usually on the frontlines (i.e. fighter, or paladin), a skilled person to find less obvious paths (i.e. thief/rogue), a healer (i.e. cleric, white mage) and someone with offensive and utility magic (i.e. magic-user, wizard, black mage). This came to be expected enough of the time and crossed through media enough that TVTropes has a page titled Fighter, Mage, Thief. I guess the cleric didn’t make the cut for the trope, but for some reason that seems more familiar to me personally.
Computer and console RPGs have a tendency to do this, too. Not always, but often. You can spot versions of this in the Might & Magic series, the Ultima series, the Dragon Quest series, various D&D-based games, and somewhat overtly in Final Fantasy IX.
It happens that in the early days of the original Final Fantasy, it was a common recommendation to take a team compromised of a fighter, white mage, black mage, and either a black belt (monk) or thief. Parties like this are great for experiencing the most different aspects of the game although anyone who knows the game in any level of detail would say it's a suboptimal group. Regardless, this party recommendation was stated in Final Fantasy I's original manual as well as the well-known Nintendo Power Final Fantasy Strategy Guide.
As the Final Fantasy series matured and differentiated itself from other roleplaying systems and mythologies, the series very much came to have its own classes. While "fighter" remains a valid class in some games, sometimes its meaning is muddied (as in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance) and sometimes it just doesn't exist (as in Final Fantasy V). In Final Fantasy, the fighter class upgrades to "knight", which has been a lot more consistent. Thus, for best embodying the trope and having the most "classic-styled" party possible through as much of the job-based Final Fantasy as possible, it seemed to me the best fit was Knight, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage. It's possible to play this way naturally in Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy Tactics, and something very close to this is achievable in several other titles.
To back up this decision, I also tried to numerically analyze the series to find the most common jobs in the Final Fantasy series. I assigned games a significance weight, where direct sequels (like Final Fantasy IV: The After Years) were counted for half if they included that job, and where "it seems like this fits the class archetype somewhat but not exactly" also counted for half points. I then totalled these values through all mainline games among Final Fantasy I through XII, plus the three Tactics games. This analysis is discussed in this GameFAQs topic, and the sheet I used is available here.
What's funny about this data-driven approach is that it, uh, didn't back up what I wanted. It suggested that the most common jobs in the Final Fantasy series by my semi-arbitrary metrics were, in order, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, and Ninja. So I said, "Screw science!" and played the way I wanted to.
Now, that brings us to the next thing that isn't gameplay: how can you play Final Fantasy 1 using a party of knight, thief, white mage, and black mage? You can pick "fighter" as a class from the game's outset, but not "knight"; a "knight" is a class-changed "fighter", but if you choose to class change it modifies the entire party. Well, this ended up being serendipitously made possible around the time of this challenge by GameFAQs user essellejaye, who in late May of 2017 posted their updated (but actually built-from-scratch) version of FF Hackster. essellejaye had also created a partial hack intended to enable multiple classes named LevelData4All. Using this, I was able to separate the knight, and go through the entire game using a party of knight, thief, white mage and black mage.
(An aside: If you're curious about essellejaye's ongoing work on FF Hackster, the more up-to-date version named FFHacksterEx can be found at https://ffhacksterex.digitaldreamers.org and here on GitHub. The author of the original FF Hackster, Disch, passed away in 2020.)
Thus, this playthrough was done on a hack! But it was a minor hack. If you know this game, you probably understand how weird this scenario is. You're saying, "So FreshFeeling is going to play through Final Fantasy, with a completely normal party, except with no class change, except for the fighter, who is always class changed?". Well, yes.
We've answered "what" and "how" so I guess we need to address "why" here. Really, we're doing this because I was interested to see how far we could take the concept of using a strict party of knight, thief, white mage, and black mage in as many games as we could, whether the games were built for it or not. I knew I was going to do it during the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta, and I knew it could be done in Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy Tactics, so I thought I'd just... extend that. Was I expecting this to be super novel or interesting on the original Final Fantasy? No, not really at all. But I got to try out essellejaye's work and there's something to be said for that, I think.
As I said, play began in early June of 2017.
At the start of the game, this change is pretty meaningless. In fact, the only thing that significantly differentiates a fighter from a knight prior to the point where you would generally change classes regardless is the knight's access to some minor white magic, but that isn't usable until at least level 15 and I intended to skip that regardless. The process of initial equipment and whatnot shook out normally.
Perhaps I should mention that I do strongly dislike using thief in Final Fantasy 1, so at least there's that working against me. Though the thief has been rebalanced substantially in every version of the original Final Fantasy released since 2004, in the original version they are very suboptimal until mid-game and borderline non-viable in late-game. The thief's best weapon through almost the whole game is worse than one the knight can buy in the third town.
There was a bit to show off in this first short session. At about the 6-minute mark I showed off the revised version of my PartyInfo Lua script that upgrades the GUI to show more stats in combat. I had last shown this toward the end of my VYUOKITE Avengers playthrough, but I fixed it up a bit since then.
I also made a sidebar to use on Twitch:
I went to the Temple of Fiends at level 2 and raided the chests that I could get, collecting the Cap, but I got hit pretty badly by some Creeps and decided to go back to town to heal up instead of immediately challenging Garland. We did that and bought some spells, and still returned to battle Garland at level 2. That battle went juuuust fine.
Shortly after leaving Coneria, we ran into two Ogres who killed Bartz. We managed to run away and then encountered four MadPonys! There were some close calls. We healed up after that and earned level 3 from a MadPony very shortly after.
In Pravoka, we bought some minor armor upgrades, healed up again, and went to fight Bikke's Pirates. On the first action of the battle, Lenna cast SLEP and it affected 8 of the 9 Pirates! Even though that spell is bugged to only work for a single turn, when it hits that many targets it feels pretty worthwhile. On the second turn, with 8 Pirates remaining, Lenna used SLEP again and it worked on 7 of them. Amazing luck! That battle was a cinch.
I did want a bit of money for spells and such in Elfland, so I showed off the trick to guarantee encounters with Kyzokus that you can use immediately after getting the ship. I used that for a bit to afford level 3 spells and other upgrades without it taking forever. First, I grabbed Bartz a Short Sword and Faris a Scimtar. Fighting large group of Kyzokus is still pretty risky at level 3 though. We got level 4 before returning to Elfland, where our next big upgrade was armor:
Now we're ready to take on two Ogres if needed! And it was. Very shortly after this we fought two Ogres with no real issue.
We did the Kyzoku manipulation grind for a bit and returned to Elfland with level 5 characters and enough money to buy FIR2 and LIT2 for Lenna. Bartz at level 5 is capable of two hits with a Short Sword, so it we actually crawled up the power curve pretty nicely here.
