Final Fantasy Adventure: Leveling System

When I think of the action-adventure genre I tend to think of the Zelda series of games. You wander around with a variety of weapons beating up a variety of monsters and solving some puzzles. Maybe you can get better by getting better gear or some extra health but that's about it. So I was a little surprised when, after killing a bunch of monsters, I leveled up.

I did some reading (on Wikipedia, mind) and it claims there's a different genre entirely called action-RPG. Which is basically the same thing as action-adventure with a leveling system. I guess in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised at all. What is Dead Rising, after all? Or Devil May Cry, which I even mentioned a couple days ago!

At any rate when I leveled up in Final Fantasy Adventure I had a choice to make when I leveled up. There are apparently four stats in the game (stamina, power, wisdom, and will) and you get to choose a focus stat each time you level up. You gain 4 stats each level - always a fixed 2-1-1-0 split with the 2 and 0 determined by the stat you choose.

Stamina - 2 stamina, 1 power, 1 will, 0 wisdom
Power - 2 power, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 wisdom
Wisdom - 2 wisdom, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 power
Will - 2 will, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 power

So you're guaranteed to gain stamina and will every level. You can only get one of power or wisdom each level. I found all this out with some trial and error in game, but the question then was what do these stats actually do? There didn't seem to be anything in game that would tell me, but I did my first 14 levels without looking things up. My best guesses for what the stats do:

Stamina - increases maximum health. I knew this for sure since my max health got bigger when I took a stamina level.
Power - increases physical damage done. I knew this was pretty likely since I could start killing mobs in 1 hit instead of 2 after leveling up. That could have been a function of just level but it seems more likely to be based on power.
Wisdom - I never took a level in wisdom and my maximum mana never went up. I'd guess the two are linked.
Will - I have no idea here. My guess would be it makes your spells more powerful.

I also definitely took less damage as I leveled up so some stat likely impacts damage taken. Which one? Stamina seems likely but I could see will doing it too. And maybe even power!

At any rate, after 10 power levels and 4 stamina levels I decided to turn to the internet and find out what the stats do. Power does exactly what I thought it did. Stamina too, except it also impacts damage taken. Wisdom increases maximum mana and the potency of spells. Will impacts how fast that silly little bar on the bottom of the screen fills up.

What does that bar do? I didn't really know before looking that up either. From Secret of Mana I remembered that you could charge up a weapon to do a special attack with it. This bar fills constantly and is depleted when you hit the attack button so it seemed likely to be powering up my attacks. Once I even threw my axe across the screen which came as a bit of a shock. (And meant I couldn't attack until it fell off the edge of the screen which sucked!) It turns out that's precisely what the bar does. Attacking with a weapon is different based on weapon type and how much charge you have. None of the abilities seemed terribly interesting and the axe one actually seemed detrimental! The sword one looked like it could have uses if only because the default sword attack is so abysmally bad. Part of me wants to experiment with the sword attacks but I actually vendored my starting sword already. (I hope this game isn't like the Manders RPG!)

At any rate, now that I know what the stats do, I'm quite happy with my stat up choices. Will seems like it actively hurts the way I play so I don't want to pick it. Picking wisdom means I don't get power (and vice versa) so it feels like I should focus on one or the other but not both. I haven't seen a reason to cast a spell that wasn't cure and even then I'm selling off consumable healing items so I don't need more mana to cast more heals. So I mostly just want stamina to survive more and power to beat down harder!