Well, I still have a bit of an SNES FF itch, so time to fire up FF5.
FF5 - My dark secret: I never beat this game. Never even got past World 2 because I kept getting distracted by grinding and bad gaming habits I had as a teenager. So, in the interest of actually completing this run for once, I will be doing no grinding (for job skills/levels. I'll probably do some minimal grinding for Blue Magic I want. To that end, I'm also looking up what Blue Magic is available in each dungeon, to minimize overlevelling/skilling). Additionally, since I haven't actually explored what all the classes have to offer, I won't be doing a Fiesta challenge, BUT in the interests of keeping characters completely unique, I'm setting the restriction that once a character uses a class, ONLY that character can use that class for the rest of the game.
Damn why do the GBA versions insist on using Amano art character portraits. So ugly. Galuf looks blazed out of his mind.
The game also wastes your time with waiting for sprite animations to a much higher degree than 6 did. Thank god for frameskip.
So about 40 minutes and two autobattle dungeons in (in game timer; more like 15 real time) and I finally have jobs. Uh, OK game. Lock the part that makes you interesting behind 40 minutes of gameplay cool. I decide that my first round of jobs will be Blue Mage (Bartz), Monk (Lena), WM (Galuf), and Knight (Faris). Once I get Learning I throw Bartz in Thief for a bit until I get Find Passages because god that's a tedious gimmick the early FF games had way too much of and I don't want to deal with it. Once I get Find Passages I switch back and probably won't deal with Thief again.
The game really is tedious for the first hour or so, especially plot wise. Galuf being ridiculous aside it's all forced drama about characters we don't yet have a reason to give a shit about. There's a lot of bad here that I could spend basically all my time complaining about but after a certain point I just stopped caring and deleted it all. Suffice it to say, nothing special is going on here and I probably won't have anything to say unless it's egregiously bad because I just can't care.
Up through Walse Tower, Monk is pretty clear MVP thanks to innate barehanded/Counter, with WM being a very clear second. Blue Mage will pick up later but I'm pretty sure I'm done with Knight.
For now, switching Galuf to BM but will probably switch him to Summoner once I get better summons, and then swap back and forth between WM and Summoner as I get access to spells. Maybe switch him to RM for a while to get Dualcast later? I switch Faris to Mystic Knight with Two-Handed, and Bartz to Time Mage since he has Learning and my Blue skillset is really pathetic right now, and switch back to BluM once he gets a few levels in TM and a better set of Blue skills. Lenna will be taking a brief dip into Berserker but I'll ultimately be switching her back once I get the Berserk skill.
One thing I find interesting so far is that this game gives you an "airship" really early, but in spite of that your exploration options still end up being fairly linear. It's one of the more well done thing about this game, and frankly most of the early FFs in general. Almost immediately you have unimpeded access to all of the towns you've visited previously while still not having complete access to the whole world, which is very necessary since shops don't necessarily all carry the same things. I think this is why games like Suikoden 3 drove me up the wall--like in this game, shops carry different things so you have to go back and forth a lot, but S3 has you trudging back and forth between uninteresting, tedious dungeons that take a good chunk of time to get through, but in these early FF games once you've made it somewhere once all the backtracking can be done in a very brief time. Some strikingly good design decisions on that front, really.
Get up through Karnak Castle. Beastmaster with Barehanded is really, really good through this section, and 2handed makes the basic attack of Mystic/Knight pretty good. The fire boss is easily rekt by Blizzara and Blizzara Sword, each breaking 4 digits roughly 4 hours into the game. Yay.
The timed section gives me a reset because I tried to get everything but ended up running in circles a couple times. This ends up being a blessing, because on my second try I learn Aera, which I missed the first time. I missed Death Claw from the Iron Claw, but not a huge deal. Bartz can finally be useful...ish.
Quitting here, but a few more comments. While the game makes the oh-so-stupid decision to withhold jobs from you for a good hour or so, once that flood gate opens you're goddamn swimmin' in options. 3 hours 30 minutes game time (Probably 2 hours real time? yay frameskip. You the real MVP) and I have almost all of the jobs and the game's really opened up.
Thinking about what jobs to take, I'll probably stick with my current party for now, with the exception of switching Lenna off Berserker for Beast Master, so I can beef up my Blue Mage more easily. Once I get that, I'll switch between Monk with !Control secondary and Berserker with Bare-Handed secondary as appropriate, then once I get the Berserk secondary settle back into Monk for the long haul (IIRC the Earth Crystal jobs don't open up for a while). Once I get Shiva and Ifrit I'll switch off BM into Summoner with White secondary, then go into WM as new skills unlock, and probably abandon BM for good. Once I get enough levels into Mystic Knight to keep casting -ara blades, I'll probably transition into Ninja because that seems obvious.
Yeaaaaaah this is scratching my wholly-unnecessary-planning itch way better than FF6 did.
Is Geomancer even worth using in this game? They're really a crapshoot between the different FFs. FF3o's sucks, but FF3DS's is awesome, Mog's dances suck, FFT's is good, etc. etc.
Anyway done for the night. The game is like the polar opposite of FF6 so far. Everywhere FF6 shines FF5 is just awful, but the parts where FF6 fell apart FF5 shows a lot of promise in.
