Final Fantasy III

Final Fantasy III is the final installment of the main series published for the original Famicom. It didn't make it out of Japan in its original form and actually took more than 16 years before it was officially released in English with a DS remake. I played a fan translated version of the original Japanese ROM back in 2003 when I did my first Final Fantasy marathon but I have since acquired the DS version which is what I'll be playing this time around.

Final Fantasy III was the first game to use the job system which has become a sporadic feature in the series. (FFIII, FFV, FFX-2, FFXI, FFXIII, FFXIV, FFTactics, FFTacticsAdvance, FFTacticsA2...) For those who may not know, in a job system each of your characters gets to pick a job and earns both character level experience and job experience towards the chosen job. If you chose white mage then you'll get better at casting healing spells. If you chose fighter you'll get better at doing damage. The difference between a job system and between a game like Final Fantasy I where you got to pick a class at the start of the game is that you can switch jobs at any time in a job system. Chose a bad party at the start of the game? That's ok, you can just switch people around! Run into a dungeon filled with elementals and wish you could cast more damage spells? Switch everyone to a black mage! Find a twinky bow in a treasure chest? Switch someone to a ranger! They tend to keep some of their power from their character level and lose some from their job level but they can quickly build up points in the new job. As the game progresses you unlock new jobs which tend to be more powerful so there's an incentive to swap things up as time goes on both for variety and for power.

Personally I think job systems are awesome. They've evolved into systems that provides a lot of interesting decisions. There are advantages to specializing in one job. There are advantages to branching out into a bunch of different jobs. You can combine features of different jobs together to make a character do what you want. The game can throw fights at you which are particularly suited for one job or another which enables you to use smarts to beat fights instead of just throwing more levels at a problem.

Unfortunately since FFIII was the first to include a job system it isn't quite as awesome as I'd like. They revamped it a little between the original and the DS remake but it still has some flaws. Instead of encouraging you to switch jobs it has a system in place that discourages switching. (All your stats get lowered for a number of fights after making the switch depending on how similar the two jobs were to each other.) There's no way to carry any skills or power over from a previous job so there's no 'build your own class' thing going on. The damage formulae heavily incentivize sticking with one job. It is still a fun system, don't get me wrong, and it had to exist in order for them to iterate on it to get to the even better systems in future games. I'm really looking forward to playing it a bunch. And as an added bonus I can play it on the subway and bus!