TL;DR - FFIII to FFV is like Street Fighter to Street Fighter 2.
FFV is my favorite video game and I love job systems in general so I went into this game expecting to love it. I didn't.
Where to start? Enough has been said about the brutal difficulty curve and how ridiculously unforgiving the final sequence of dungeons are - I broke my no savestate rule for that shit - but I think my problem with this game goes deeper than that: it simply isn't a good job-system game at all.
Firstly, there are so many jobs but only a handful of them are of any consequence. So many jobs you unlock later in the game are simply strictly-better versions of older jobs which means even though you have more than 20 jobs available, by the endgame you have reason to use maybe 4-5.
More damningly, the game utterly misses the point of a job system (flexibility, customizability, creativity) by railroading you into extremely specific jobs for specific dungeons/bosses. One simple example: there's a cave where all enemies respond to physical attacks by duplicating themselves and then swarm you to death. An NPC tells you that if you attack them as a dark knight they don't split. So you use dark knights like the game tells you like a good boy and you're fine.
What if you decide to try to be creative? You could try using magic against the enemies...but the cave is one of the longest dungeons in the game and you won't have enough spell charges to get through (ethers aren't a thing here). You could try using the Master's buildup ability to oneshot them before they duplicate... but using that ability reduces his defence to zero and he will get oneshot. You could use geomancers who can cast spells for free... except the geomancer's ability in that cave is absolutely terrible and has a very high backfire rate. It's as if the developers went out of their way to make sure you wouldn't find any other way around playing the game exactly as they want you to.
And the thing is, if the game actually approached it like a puzzle - leaving you to try to figure out which of the many jobs you have would be the correct solution to a dungeon/boss, then it would be somewhat satisfying. But it's not; it's just an NPC telling you straight up to "use dark knights!" or "use dragoons!" and woe betide you if you try to do anything differently.
Now that I think about it, you can ignore the TL;DR above. If FFV is Street Fighter 2, FFIII is Shaq Fu.
FFV is my favorite video game and I love job systems in general so I went into this game expecting to love it. I didn't.
Where to start? Enough has been said about the brutal difficulty curve and how ridiculously unforgiving the final sequence of dungeons are - I broke my no savestate rule for that shit - but I think my problem with this game goes deeper than that: it simply isn't a good job-system game at all.
Firstly, there are so many jobs but only a handful of them are of any consequence. So many jobs you unlock later in the game are simply strictly-better versions of older jobs which means even though you have more than 20 jobs available, by the endgame you have reason to use maybe 4-5.
More damningly, the game utterly misses the point of a job system (flexibility, customizability, creativity) by railroading you into extremely specific jobs for specific dungeons/bosses. One simple example: there's a cave where all enemies respond to physical attacks by duplicating themselves and then swarm you to death. An NPC tells you that if you attack them as a dark knight they don't split. So you use dark knights like the game tells you like a good boy and you're fine.
What if you decide to try to be creative? You could try using magic against the enemies...but the cave is one of the longest dungeons in the game and you won't have enough spell charges to get through (ethers aren't a thing here). You could try using the Master's buildup ability to oneshot them before they duplicate... but using that ability reduces his defence to zero and he will get oneshot. You could use geomancers who can cast spells for free... except the geomancer's ability in that cave is absolutely terrible and has a very high backfire rate. It's as if the developers went out of their way to make sure you wouldn't find any other way around playing the game exactly as they want you to.
And the thing is, if the game actually approached it like a puzzle - leaving you to try to figure out which of the many jobs you have would be the correct solution to a dungeon/boss, then it would be somewhat satisfying. But it's not; it's just an NPC telling you straight up to "use dark knights!" or "use dragoons!" and woe betide you if you try to do anything differently.
Now that I think about it, you can ignore the TL;DR above. If FFV is Street Fighter 2, FFIII is Shaq Fu.
firelance32
7 months ago