{"id":260,"date":"2007-11-26T11:22:29","date_gmt":"2007-11-26T16:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/260"},"modified":"2016-07-13T11:55:29","modified_gmt":"2016-07-13T18:55:29","slug":"final-fantasy-v-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/260","title":{"rendered":"Final Fantasy V: Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Although I&#8217;ve been trying to play the <em>Final Fantasy<\/em> series in order, I skipped <em>FF3<\/em>.  It&#8217;s never been released on any platform I own &#8212; heck, until recently, it hadn&#8217;t even been released in English.  <span class=\"footnote_referrer\"><a role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToReference_260_1('footnote_plugin_reference_260_1_1');\" onkeypress=\"footnote_moveToReference_260_1('footnote_plugin_reference_260_1_1');\" ><sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_260_1_1\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\">1<\/sup><\/a><span id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_260_1_1\" class=\"footnote_tooltip\">There was an American release of a game called <em>Final Fantasy III<\/em>, but it was actually what we today call <em>Final Fantasy VI<\/em>.  Some of the games were originally released only in Japan, but after <em>FF7<\/em> they decided to sync up the numbers and do official English-language remakes of the skipped episodes.<\/span><\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_260_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_260_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top right', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });<\/script>  I tried playing a fan-made translation of <em>FF3<\/em> on a NES emulator years ago, but found it unwieldy and confusing, and gave it up, hoping that the future would bring a better way to play it.  In particular, it had this &#8220;Job&#8221; concept that was inadequately explained.  Perhaps it was covered better in the docs, which I didn&#8217;t have.<\/p>\n<p><em>FF4<\/em> didn&#8217;t have anything like the Job system &#8212; instead, it accomplished the same purpose, providing variability in gameplay, by swapping different player characters in and out a lot.  But <em>FF5<\/em> brought Jobs back.<\/p>\n<p>This time I have documentation and an in-game tutorial to help me, but it was still confusing at first, because the whole idea is so contrary to both RPG convention and common sense.  In essense: you can change a character&#8217;s class at any time (except during combat).  I&#8217;m not talking about D&#038;D-style multiclassing, I mean you can just turn your level 10 Thief into a level 10 White Mage, cast healing spells on your party, then turn him back to a Thief.  It&#8217;s a little misleading to even talk about a &#8220;level 10 Thief&#8221; at all: it&#8217;s just a level 10 character who&#8217;s currently doing the Thief job.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Surely there must be some kind of penalty for switching jobs willy-nilly!&#8221; one cries.  No, there is not.  Why should there be?  Does D&#038;D reward spellcasters for memorizing the same set of spells every day, or fighters for remaining loyal to a single suit of armor?  Jobs in this game are like garments that you slip on to suit your current activities.  Indeed, each job comes with its own outfit &#8212; or rather, four outfits, one for each player character.  They get sillier as the game goes on.  One job involves dressing up in an animal costume with big ears.<\/p>\n<p>Each character also gets to use one feature they&#8217;ve earned from a different job.  This is where it gets complicated.  See, there are two parallel kinds of XP.  You&#8217;ve got your conventional experience level system, which governs the character&#8217;s base stats (which are modified by the current job), and you&#8217;ve also got &#8220;ability points&#8221;, which are job-specific.  Suppose, for example, you want a character who can both use a sword and cast healing spells.  One way to go about this is to give someone the job of White Mage and go kill stuff for a while.  A White Mage with enough Ability Points gets the privilege of keeping the ability to cast first-level White spells when switched to a different job.  Get some more Ability Points and you can keep the ability to cast second-level White spells, and so on.  Likewise, you can do it the other way around: if you gain enough Ability Points as a Knight, you can switch to White Mage and keep the ability to use a sword.  (There are other jobs that use swords, but only the Knight lets you keep it.) Each playable character can only have one skill of this sort active at a time, but like the jobs themselves, you can switch the active skill at will.<\/p>\n<p>The whole scheme seems tailor-made for people who like experimenting with different character classes.  There are only four playable characters, but there are 22 jobs, including exotic things like Geomancer and Chemist.  Naturally I want to try them all.  The game doesn&#8217;t make all of the jobs available at the beginning, but releases them in batches after certain major plot events, with the more experimental ones appearing later.<\/p>\n<p>Later installments in the series kept the idea of on-the-fly character customization, but the two that I&#8217;ve played used different mechanisms for it.  In <em>FF7<\/em>, it was part of the Materia system, which broke things down into more elementary units &#8212; instead of a Thief job with such features as enhanced speed and the ability to steal, &#8220;Speed Plus&#8221; and &#8220;Steal&#8221; are separate materia that can be used together or independently.  In <em>FF8<\/em>, there&#8217;s a system of &#8220;Guardian Forces&#8221; that enhance their bearers in various ways, including providing the ability to enhance certain stats by attaching spells to them.  The <em>FF7<\/em> system is a lot simpler than the Job system, the <em>FF8<\/em> system a lot more complicated.  But all three of them have one thing in common: &#8220;action points&#8221;, the parallel XP.  When I played <em>FF7<\/em>, it seemed odd that materia &#8212; magic stones slotted into weapons or armor &#8212; gained experience levels along with their users.  But now I see where that comes from.<\/p>\n<div class=\"speaker-mute footnotes_reference_container\"> <div class=\"footnote_container_prepare\"><p><span role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"footnote_reference_container_label pointer\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_260_1();\">&#x202F;<\/span><span role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button\" style=\"display: none;\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_260_1();\">[<a id=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_260_1\">+<\/a>]<\/span><\/p><\/div> <div id=\"footnote_references_container_260_1\" style=\"\"><table class=\"footnotes_table footnote-reference-container\"><caption class=\"accessibility\">References<\/caption> <tbody> \r\n\r\n<tr class=\"footnotes_plugin_reference_row\"> <th scope=\"row\" class=\"footnote_plugin_index_combi pointer\"  onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor_260_1('footnote_plugin_tooltip_260_1_1');\"><a id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_260_1_1\" class=\"footnote_backlink\"><span class=\"footnote_index_arrow\">&#8593;<\/span>1<\/a><\/th> <td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">There was an American release of a game called <em>Final Fantasy III<\/em>, but it was actually what we today call <em>Final Fantasy VI<\/em>.  Some of the games were originally released only in Japan, but after <em>FF7<\/em> they decided to sync up the numbers and do official English-language remakes of the skipped episodes.<\/td><\/tr>\r\n\r\n <\/tbody> <\/table> <\/div><\/div><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> function footnote_expand_reference_container_260_1() { jQuery('#footnote_references_container_260_1').show(); jQuery('#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_260_1').text('\u2212'); } function footnote_collapse_reference_container_260_1() { jQuery('#footnote_references_container_260_1').hide(); jQuery('#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_260_1').text('+'); } function footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_260_1() { if (jQuery('#footnote_references_container_260_1').is(':hidden')) { footnote_expand_reference_container_260_1(); } else { footnote_collapse_reference_container_260_1(); } } function footnote_moveToReference_260_1(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container_260_1(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery('#' + p_str_TargetID); if (l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery( 'html, body' ).delay( 0 ); jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight * 0.2 }, 380); } } function footnote_moveToAnchor_260_1(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container_260_1(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery('#' + p_str_TargetID); if (l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery( 'html, body' ).delay( 0 ); jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight * 0.2 }, 380); } }<\/script>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although I&#8217;ve been trying to play the Final Fantasy series in order, I skipped FF3. It&#8217;s never been released on any platform I own &#8212; heck, until recently, it hadn&#8217;t even been released in English. 1There was an American release of a game called Final Fantasy III, but it was actually what we today call [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[144,191,189,145,190],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rpg","tag-final-fantasy","tag-final-fantasy-iii","tag-final-fantasy-v","tag-final-fantasy-vii","tag-final-fantasy-viii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3672,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions\/3672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}