Part 86: Addendum: Party Construction in Final Fantasy III DS

Addendum: Party Construction in Final Fantasy III DS

Since I named the section "addenda" and I like these little infoblurbs in LPs, I've decided to go through my ideas on party construction with y'all. Strap in.

Two classes strike me as absolutely indispensable to the party: White Mage and White Mage Plus One. In this game, most important fights will come down to a damage race, and healing helps keep you in that longer. Other classes can heal, like the Red Mage, or the Bard, or a Scholar with a lot of Potions, but none of them do it as well as the White Mage and upgrade, and the White Mage can even use staves for offence (or Aero, in a pinch), so in a normal run, the White Mage is a definite must-have.

The other three slots, though, are a little less definite when it comes to roles. I like to have a physical attacker (Warrior, Dragoon, Dark Knight, Monk, &c.) and a magical attacker (Geomancer or Red Mage, generally) to actually do the damage racing. These two don't do anything but go full tilt on enemies. For the physical attacker, I prefer the speedier classes to something like Knights or Vikings, because the extra hits will eventually make up for reduced Strength. Whatever you like, though, you need damage. These guys are as important as the healer, even though there's no clear winner. The physical damage is the more ambiguous category, though, since Attack (as a command) is standard across all classes. Magic is a pretty wide category, and I like things that have a lot of MP (Evoker's big brother), don't use MP (Geomancer), and have powerful spells (both of those, and also Black Mage, I guess) - unfortunately, those categories take a bit of time to fill; nothing from the Wind Crystal is good for it.

The fourth slot is the wildcard. You can go for another straight attacker (Monk and Warrior are good for this, and Thief eventually comes into it pretty well) or another caster (Red Mage or Evoker++ are the hot items for that role) or even a support-only class (Bard is what I have in mind here, but Scholar is also a class in this game). This character is wide open, and that's nice. I like a Thief here because it's well-equipped through the whole game and it'll eventually mature into a solid attacker.

What you don't want, though, is a party that rotates classes, and that might seem counter-intuitive, given the job system. I know the thread's gone over this a lot, but the combination of job levels and adjustment phase really guts the thing and makes it more rigid than a game like Final Fantasy V. Look at how I did it up top - the healer changes classes once, the physical character changes jobs three times, tops (but one is also an option - you can go from Warrior to Dragoon and take that to the endgame, if you want), the caster should only change maybe twice (only once if you're happy with Geomancer), and that last guy is a Thief forever in my general set-up (a late-game change is also an option). That's eleven jobs in the whole game, twelve if you count Freelancer. There are 23 options.

Half of the jobs in the game should probably never see use.

Now, you might want to mess around a bit, and that's completely fine, I understand it, but if that's how you're playing this, this section probably isn't for you anyway. You won't get job levels out of it unless you grind, though, which means you'll always be at a disadvantage to a more fixed party. Sometimes you can enter a situation and just be completely fucked if you don't have the right job. I remember seeing an ad for this game back in 2006, talking about how you could have 279,841 different party combinations. 270 of them are going to serve you particularly well.

1 in 1,000.

I think that the implementation of the job system in this game is a major problem, and that's why. The way the game is made just isn't as flexible as it should be.

That's what I think, anyway.