Jobvolution: Does it exist?

I thought of this tonight. It's probably been done but I don't if it's been done by Final Fantasy. The concept is acquiring job classes automatically rather than through manual switching and rather than being previously determined.

Here's how this works:
Any character destined to be in the protagonist's group are "essentially" blank slates. Purhaps they have a few developmental "points" toward a specific class that suggests they'd be better suited for it but what they become is up to you.
As the leader, you're free to give them any command one would normally find on a ATB menu: Attack, Magic, Steal, Run Away, and even some others that may not exist like Sneak, Barter, Gamble, etc.
The more a character follows these orders, the more points they get toward a skill.
Let's say you want to build a character to a white mage. That character must use healing and other Holy-elemental spells. You can alter a character's class at any time. Even if they have become proficient enough to cast a Revive-All as a White Wizard, you can have them cast black magic until they are proficient enough to use level 3 spells as a Black Wizard. This isn't to say you're creating a Paragon. Bridges only go in one direction so crossing back deducts points from another class. Using magic, whether Holy or not, increases magic points while deducting physical attack points and vice versa. Reaching a balance is the only way to create a Red Mage. Balancing physical attacks and White Magic will create a Paladin. Balancing physical attacks and defensive tactics will create a Sentinel, etc.
Using skills like Steal and Sneak will increase points toward Thief and Ninja classes. Barter goes toward a merchant-style class, etc.

This would be extremely awesome if it could be implemented well enough. I'd love to know if this type of gameplay is available already in a similar or identical fashion. :)

FF2 isn't quite so explicit, but it does have the leveling the skills/stats you use aspect. Though it is possible to power everything up it becomes quite difficult, as leveling stats tends to decrease other opposing stats.

Not that I am sad that it doesn't appear in more places, I absolutely despise character building scenarios like this.

This was XIV's original system, FFII utilizes a system like this and it's been refined over time with some of the SaGa franchise as well.

There's couple annoying problems with this.

First, it eliminates active customization. By the time you've locked in your standard jobs, that's pretty much all you can do. You'd accumulate so many points towards your "standard" job that attempting to respecialize would involve a long annoying grind. This also limits the amount of customization you would be able to perform (or, more accurately, willing to perform) in order to adjust for differing fights. If you want to try out a new strategy, grind the appropriate jobs for half an hour, and hope it's actually a worthwhile strategy, or all that time is wasted.

Second, it really punishes gameplay with how restrictive it is. Let's say you want a Paladin because having a sturdy healer is really good in boss fights. Well, be prepared to cast a completely unnecessary Cure spell every five turns just to make sure you don't lose to many skill points and lose access to the class.


It's an interesting concept, but it doesn't really add anything, and it severely limits how you play, and how much customization choice you have. There's a reason most of the successful systems in the series (including the job system) have been all about you unlocking tools which then remain permanently, constantly increasing your available choices. It works a lot better, and lets you adapt and change your mind a lot easier. Adding a grind (even if only a short grind of 15 battles) where you have to not only enter fights you didn't really want to enter, but also fight them a particular way, every time you want to change classes? I do not think that's a good idea. And it probably would have made me rage-quit Bravely Default, given how often you have to change strategies to deal with well-designed enemy encounters.

There are plenty of ways to worm out of such drawbacks. Note that my original post stated you get points "per action" not "per battle", so one way to avoid the problems you mentioned would be to have the class change occur automatically during battle whenever you've met the conditions.

Each time you use a physical attack, you'll notice it getting stronger until your class finally changes to Warrior, Knight, etc. Each time you use White Magic, you'll notice it getting more potent until your class changes to Paladin then to Sword Saint (assuming you're still using physical attacks), and to White Mage, then White Wizard (if no longer using physical attacks). If, from Fighter-Warrior-Knight, you use Black Magic enough, you'll go from Red Mage to Red Wizard, or to Black Mage and then Black Wizard. On the other hand, spamming attack will eventually promote you to Berserker and put you in berserk state until the battle ends (the next battle would revert you to the class prior to Berserker). As a counterpoint to this, spamming black magic would promote you to a Fury (a magic Berserker inspired by Lulu's Overdrive).

To avoid Job Classes shifting right when you've got them, the point counters will reset upon reaching a class, and a priority system measuring your overall use of skills (percentage rather than grand total) will prevent shifting to a job class you weren't even shooting for. As a helper for those wanting to boost their summon attacks, you can use more affordable black magic and it will also increase the power of your summons for when you're ready to use them. However, using Summons doesn't add points to Black Magic and there is no berserker-style risk to spamming summons.

You always have access to any command and every magic spell as your job class only dictates how potent those abilities are. As you upgrade from Mage to Wizard, your spells will automatically shift to Ra and Ga spells, the MP cost shifting with the change. But your Class change would adjust your MP's percentage not just the maximum so really the only moment a class change would affect your ability to cast is if you were already next to zero.

Balancing points would not only lead to the creation of Red Mages and Paladins but to other job combinations like Samurai Knights, Assassin (Ninja + Ranger), Dragoon (Ninja + Gladiator), etc.

Being able to shift to any class at any time, you can equip any and all items you find, however, Heavy Armor will slow down classes not meant for it and certain weapons will be all but useless unless you're the proper class (i.e. Bows and Arrows, Bells, Books, etc.)

That's all I can think of at the moment.

I don't think that solves the problems at all. The main thing is that I don't want to have to think about how what moves I am using in battle relate back to a higher meta-game of how they affect my overall characters development.

Honestly all that it seems to add is a bigger RP connection between the actions a player takes and their job class in battle, which is fine if that is what you like. But I am not fond of RP style character development, and it is not a hallmark of the FF series either. Rather than re-inventing FF style mechanics it seems better to just look into another type of game that has similar ideas already.

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Originally Posted by VeloZer0

I don't think that solves the problems at all. The main thing is that I don't want to have to think about how what moves I am using in battle relate back to a higher meta-game of how they affect my overall characters development.

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Exactly this.

Your suggestion of making it "per action" does nothing to address the amount of grinding, or the restrictions on how battles are fought.

In order to change classes, you still need to fight a lot in a particular way. Whether it's "per action" or "per battle" honestly won't matter. Heck, you won't even be able to take the Final Fantasy Tactics route of optimizing battles to grind Job Points, because if you're playing as any class that attacks, you'll need to kill things when you take your actions anyway.

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To avoid Job Classes shifting right when you've got them, the point counters will reset upon reaching a class, and a priority system measuring your overall use of skills (percentage rather than grand total) will prevent shifting to a job class you weren't even shooting for. As a helper for those wanting to boost their summon attacks, you can use more affordable black magic and it will also increase the power of your summons for when you're ready to use them. However, using Summons doesn't add points to Black Magic and there is no berserker-style risk to spamming summons.

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Again, this doesn't really help. You're fighting through a dungeon. Halfway through the dungeon, you get a class that you want for the boss. Point totals now reset, so you're safe with that for a time. But long enough to last the rest of the dungeon?

Or, let's take it further. You have the class you want, and you beat the boss. Yay. Now you want to change to a different class. Only you've built up a ton of points with those actions, and it's going to be an annoying grind, again with restrictions on the playstyle, before you can swap back.

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You always have access to any command and every magic spell as your job class only dictates how potent those abilities are. As you upgrade from Mage to Wizard, your spells will automatically shift to Ra and Ga spells, the MP cost shifting with the change. But your Class change would adjust your MP's percentage not just the maximum so really the only moment a class change would affect your ability to cast is if you were already next to zero.

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If you have an ability, but it is useless, you might as well not even have it. Heck, this is going to make switching from Magic users to Physical attack users even more annoying, since you'll be spamming 1 damage hits until you change.

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Balancing points would not only lead to the creation of Red Mages and Paladins but to other job combinations like Samurai Knights, Assassin (Ninja + Ranger), Dragoon (Ninja + Gladiator), etc.

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The more variety of jobs you have, the more likely that an errant actions spent is going to change someone to a job they don't want, or the longer it is going to take to switch jobs in general.

For example, we have two jobs: Fighter and White Mage. Using White Magic while you're a Fighter builds JP towards the White Mage job. After you gain 10 JP, you switch. Woohoo.

Now we have three jobs: Fighter, Paladin, and White Mage. Using White Magic as a Fighter builds JP towards Paladin and White Mage. Either you switch to Paladin after 10 JP, as before (which means you'd need 20 to reach White Mage), or you switch to Paladin at 5 JP (so you reach White Mage at 10 still), which means that you are more likely to reach the Paladin class accidentally.

And this still doesn't address the issue that's running through my head the entire time, which is "why am I having to spend these 5/10 turns just to switch jobs?"

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Being able to shift to any class at any time, you can equip any and all items you find, however, Heavy Armor will slow down classes not meant for it and certain weapons will be all but useless unless you're the proper class (i.e. Bows and Arrows, Bells, Books, etc.)

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How can you shift at any time? Using even an action point system, it will take a bare minimum of three turns to shift from one job to another, and that's assuming that the jobs are actually linked (such as from going from White Mage to a White Mage hybrid class, like Paladin). Switching clear across the board to an unrelated class will probably take even longer. This, again, cuts into customization and experimentation.



What benefit does this give the player over the standard job system? The ability to change jobs mid-fight? I'll just point you to Final Fantasy X-2.

Hmm... admittedly, there was a part of me that figured more classes would just make this more complicated and I'm not sure why I ignored it.

Regarding what you said about White Magic leading to both Paladin and White Mage, I did mention that to reach Paladin, you would have to intersperse physical attacks rather than spamming white magic. I know that doesn't really help my cause but at least using White Magic wouldn't automatically lead in to becoming a Paladin in and of itself.

Maybe some classes should just be removed. You have access to all commands anyway and since Paladins and White Mages (or Red Mages and Black Mages) have access to basically the same spells, a more logical upgrade would be to the Wizard class. Rather than choosing between upgrading between a Red Wizard and Black Wizard, the Red Mage could be removed entirely to be replaced by Red Wizard, so then using Black Magic would upgrade you to a Black Wizard.

You're right the dresspheres were a much more convenient form of job change in the history of FF. But I can't fight this obsession with consecutive turns increasing the power of skills used in succession. Maybe the system should be similar, allowing you actively choose your class but then requiring you to take a few turns to re-strengthen that job.

You also mentioned having an ability but it being useless. Why assume this would have to be the case? Really, the way I view it, there's more a danger of this system quickly becoming game-breaking as your characters could early on gain access to abilities that in classic progression would have been inaccessible until much later in the game including summons.