Final Fantasy
Job Select - This is like your traditional D&D like selection. Create your party from 4 blank slate characters from Fighter, Thief, Monk (Or Black Belt), Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage. Stuff like this has been around in tabletop games and other video games inspired by them. 2/10
Job Upgrade - Hell yeah, dude. Get yourself a powerboost by completing a quest to change to a stronger class: Warrior, Ninja, Master, Black Wizard, White Wizard, Red Wizard respectively. But they're still just the same classes. 3/10
Final Fantasy II
Level Stats by Using - This one is weird. It makes sense, I guess, but it also makes the game kinda finicky, in my experience. To get stronger with physical attacks, hit things with physical attacks. To get faster, evade, to get stronger with spells, use the spell over and over. While it's a neat idea in theory, I don't care for the execution. 3/10
Final Fantasy III
Job system - This is the first crack at a more fully fleshed out job system, where you can level up and change jobs and such. I did not play the original, so I can't say much about it, but in the remake, changing jobs had a penalty. For a number of fights after the change, you were weakened, so you did less damage, took more damage, etc. This felt weirdly punishing to people who wanted to experiment, but I guess 10 fights isn't all that bad? Though, being weakened in this state was no fun. 5/10
Final Fantasy IV
Unique Character Abilities - Yeah, it's a thing. Thee's a class change part way through, but for the most part, each party member has their strengths and weaknesses. They step away from the generic heroes in this one. 4/10
Final Fantasy V
Job System - Heeeeere we go. This may be the best implimentation of the job system. As you level up, you earn AP, which you use to unlock abilities for your currently equipped job. You can switch jobs with no penalties. Typically, each job will have their own core ability (for example, Black Magic, for Black mages), and then a blank spot, for you to take an ability from another class. This can be the other class' active commands, like say, the Bushido abilities from Samurai, or it can be a passive that you've unlocked from another class, like "Equip Sword", which would let you use swords on your current class, even if they normally couldn't. It's a fun system with a fair amount of flexibility. 10/10
Final Fantasy VI
Esper Equip - Each character can equip one item called Magicite. These items are used to both summon creatures, learn abilities, and affect your stat growth. For example, the Ifrit Magicite lets you summon Ifrit in battle for a big fire based attack, but also you can learn Fire, Fira, and Drain from him, and you receive a +1 bonus to Strength every time you level up with him equipped. So not only is switching magicite important for learning new spells, it also helps you round out your attributes. 7/10
Final Fantasy VII
Materia - The Materia system is an evolution of the Esper/Magicite system from Final Fantasy VI. There are Magic, Summon, Support, Command, and Independent. Materia starts at level 1 and levels up as you have it equipped. As material levels up, it gets stronger by enhancing its capabilities. For example, a level 1, a Fire materia will just cast Fire 1. As it levels up, you'll learn to cast Fire 2 and Fire 3, more powerful fire spells. And when it becomes Mastered, at level 4, you'll get a brand new level 1 Fire Materia, sprouted off of it. This really gets interesting with the Support Materia, and your equipment slots. Each character equips a weapon and a defensive item. These items can have materia slots. Some slots are unliked, and look like O O O on the Materia menu, but some slots are linked, like this: O O=O. When a lot is linked, it means that you can try to use a Support Materia to modify it. A popular combination is the Magic "Cure" with the 'All" support Materia, which gives you the option to cast a spell on all allies, or all enemies, once per "All" level. I enjoy messing with Materia very much and it felt like a fun way to integrate weapons and your other abilities. You may choose to use a slightly weaker weapon because it lets you link your magic better. 9/10
Final Fantasy VIII
Draw - Instead of knowing spells innately, you get your spells from enemies, by drawing from them in battle, or you only to cast them back on them or save them for later. You can also learn spells by drawing from Draw Points on the world map, or by desynthesizing items using your summons' abilities. Drawing is definitely the worst way to get magic. Desynth for your spells. 2/10
Junction System - LET'S BREAK SOME SHIT! Holy god this is the best shit ever. The junction system lets you junction your strawn or distilled magic into your stats. In this game it is almost NEVER a good idea to cast a spell, in my experience. If you junction say, Curaga to your HP stat, to raise your max HP, then you start casting those Curaga, your max HP will drop, since they pull from the same pool. This system allows you to junction various magics to your Strength, Defense, Magic attack and defense, accuracy, speed, HP, your elemental resistances, your status immunities, your elemental Attack stat and your status attack stat, as long as your equipped summons have the corresponding junction skill known. Some magic is better at boosting HP, so your Cure spells will give you more health, but less attack than your Fire spell in that those same slots. You can break this game very early in disk 1. You can get Sleep spell early in the game from within your starting area. Stock 100 of those and put them on Squall. Get Siren a bit into the game and learn HP Junction, and Life Magic Refine. This will let you turn items into healing magic. When you get to Timber, but 10 tents. Refine each Tent into 10 Curaga, and slap the 100 Curaga on your HP. You now have over 4000 HP as a low level character, while enemies are doing like, 80 damage. Let your HP sit around 400, where you'll be safe, and you can start triggering your powerful Limit Breaks. Learn Status Attack Junction, slap 100 sleeps on it on Squall, with his perfect innate accuracy, and you can start putting enemies to sleep with basic attacks. It's dumb and glorious and great. 10/10
Final Fantasy IX
Gear Abilities - A popular post-battle reward in Final Fantasy games is AP, or Ability Points. These are used to learn your abilities or level up your Materia. In IX, AP earned goes to every piece of equipped gear on each party member and works on unlocking the skills on that piece of Gear. Circlet's for example have the abilities Jelly and Clear Headed. You learn abilities one at a time, and after they are learned, they can be equipped to that character. You have a set number of points to equip abilities, but you can switch these at will between battles. If you're finding you need a specific status resistance for the area you are in, you can take off the "Deal extra damage to Humans" ability and throw on one that resists Poison. It's a neat ability that shows up in the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance games. Sometimes, certain characters can only learn one of the abilities on the piece, so you'll need to bounce it around. I like the system, but it can force you to grind more than you may want. 7/10
Final Fantasy X
Active Time Battle - Normally, in a final fantasy game, you either wait for a gauge to fill before a character can act, and it fills based on your speed (Final Fantasy 6-9 [Nice]), or you enter all the commands at once and then they play out in speed order, causing you to try to predict some enemy moves (Final Fantasy 1-5). Final Fantasy X is a weird one because you can see the turn order on the side. Each action you take has a speed cost associated with it that adjusts your spot in the priority. Someone fast like Titus using an item can get to act again faster than someone slow, like Auron doing the same thing. By letting you see how each action affects the turn order, you can try to minimize damage, take calculated risks, and know when you need to defend. Additionally, in this system, you can swap out party members mid-battle. On any given turn you can pull someone out and replace them with one of your reserves, and they use their speed to drop into the rest of the order, after taking the current turn. This adds a nice strategic level to battles, especially boss battles, where you try to manage the flow of battle in your favor. 8/10
Sphere Grid - As characters level up, you can spend these levels to move along a grid. There are pretty defined areas of the grid where you can see "Oh this is Lulu's area, look at all the Magic Damage and Black Magic spheres", but there are places where you can branch and leave your path to go into someone else's. My go to move is to have Titus finish his path, then jump over to Auron's area for more straight damage, for example. Anyways, you can spend these levels to move 1 space along a path that character hasn't travelled, or you can go back up to 3 spaces. This can be helpful for getting back onto the main path after you did a small detour. There are also blank spaces that you can put special Spheres into that turn into powerful stat boosts. It's mostly a standard level up system, but it's posed in a much more interactive way. 7/10.
Final Fantasy XI
Job Change - It's an MMO and any MMO that lets you change class after starting at no cost is an automatic 10/10
Support Job - This was fun. This let you combine your levelled classes together to make a hybrid kit. A level 15 quest let you unlock the ability to equip any of your other unlocked classes as your Support Job. When a job was your Support Job, you gained the benefits of it up to half your currently equipped job's level. For example, if you had a level 10 Monk and a level 20 Warrior, you would be a Warrior 20/Monk 10, or a Monk 10/Warrior 5. The Support Job doesn't get to use the class specific 2 hour ability, which are some of the strongest abilities of each job, but it would get each active and passive ability it would normally get at the level. Continuing the example, the level 10 Monk as a Support Job would have all of it's level 10 and lower abilities, but could use them at the with the Level 20 Warrior stats. This did lead to some obvious 'best combos', like Ninja/Warrior (when I played, it may have changed), was the primary tanking class, but all in all, it let you do some cool things. 8/10
Final Fantasy XII
Gambit System - Program your allies with a huge string of if/then statements. Rudimentary AI programming in the palm of your hands. I liked this a lot, despite what some people say. It can automate the game some, which for some takes away, but I don't mind messing with it. 7/10
License Board - Buy license to wear hat. Characters can not equip gear unless they have the license for that specific piece of gear. For example, Swords 1 may cover 3 low level swords, but without it, you can use that Bronze Shortsword you found. Its's a progression system. 6/10
Chains - OK, fine, I'm running out of steam here. Kill the same enemy repeatedly to increase the item rewards. Get rarer and rarer items the longer your chain goes. If your chain gets high enough, you'll start recovering HP after each kill. 6/10
Final Fantasy XIII
Crystarium - A lighter version of the Sphere Grid. Each person has a crystal they can advance up for each of their 3 Paradigms/Jobs. Leveling these up is vital for the combat system. 6/10
Paradigm Shift - From the menu, you can define a number of Paradigms, a set of classes for you and your party. During battle, while you only control your lead character, the rest of the party fulfills their roles automatically. When the need arises, you can then shift from one Paradigm set to another, allowing you to change everyone's abilities and capabilities. For example, you may have a set that has a healer, an elemental damage dealer, and a debuffer, to help keep you alive and stall the enemy, and when you find an opening, you can quickly shift into your power attacking formation and start laying on the damage to the enemy. This creates a really fun ebb and flow to the battle, where your pre-fight planning is just as important as your in-battle execution. 8/10
Final Fantasy XIV
Job Change - Like Final Fantasy XI, you can change your class, but now it's even easier. In XI, you would have to go to your Moghouse, these little private quarters that you can access from any major settlement, to change your job. In Final Fantasy XIV, you change jobs by just changing the primary weapon you have equipped. You could, for example, take your Paladin out to a dangerous level, clear some enemies, then equip your pickaxe, and suddenly switch to all of your mining item set and start looking for nodes to mine. It's fast and easy and helps you switch at a moment's notice. I frequently switch what I'm doing, from gathering, to crafting, to leveling my high and low level classes, so it's fun to be able to just switch things around. 9/10
I'm sure I missed some, but I felt that these were the core mechanics I wanted to cover. As we all know, my ratings are perfectly correct and infallible
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