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I normally wouldn't care about defend either, but in this case it would give the mage something to do that isn't potentially detrimental. A system that makes it so that everything a character can do will harm him or the party is a stupid system, personal tastes aside.
When I played through I made two of the party members into magic users, so for each battle there was not one but two characters for which I always had to choose between wasting mp and lowering my magic power. twice the stupidity.
Yeah I hate the NES FF1 and FF2 battle systems. It takes like 10 minutes to finish a battle that would take like a minute or so to finish. Because almost every hit is ineffective or a miss. Those games would be SO much better if the battles weren't like that. Glad they changed the battles in 4 and later. Never played 3 so don't know about that.
The Ineffective feature is only a matter of strategy, though. I once played a game of FFI WSC with the Auto-Aim disabled (i.e. Ineffective enabled), and I didn't find that game any harder than a game of FFI WSC with the Auto-Aim enabled. However, I also think it's annoying when your mages need to do something stupid and near-useless or something that will weaken their magic when you're going through dungeons. Every version of FFII, except for DoS, was pretty much discouraging the use of mages.
I only use physical attacks in those 2 games, never magic.
I virtually stoped losing any stats about half way through the game.
it reminds me of hamlet, which is.... kinda good...
Yeah, I've never lost stats in DoS. I reccomend that version, it's the one I played. And believe me, you don't want a version that discourages magic. Wait til you get to deist cavern. The hill gigases still make me shudder.