Magic in FF5

[rubah]

I was driving to school yesterday and for some reason, while shivering and waiting for my car to warm up, I started thinking about the magic system in ff5.

I would say that there's a lot of backstory you could fill in about such a simple system.

The basics are that you buy the spell [books?] at the magic shops, right?

Of course, any one could buy these, since you don't have to be in that class to purchase the magic.

So my thinking would be that, since no one else can have a job class, because it took the crystals to give that power to our party!friends, anyone else who buys a spell would be under a one-time-use only thing.

Of course Bartz, Reina, Faris, and Galuf are too smart to do that, once they have their magic jobclasses, so it's understood that they wouldnt' do something so stupid as wasting a spell forever.

But imagine if you were an NPC. Perhaps if you went into the woods to chop lumber, you would take a cure along, just incase you accidentally chopped off your arm.

If a monster showed up in town, and there were no light warriors to kill it, you could use that Flare your family had been saving up for generations to destroy it.

If you were an NPC in ff5, what spells would use keep a stock of, for everyday life?

[eestlinc]

why would you only be able to use it once? would the book burn up? what if you can't even use it at all?

I always wondered how shops in ff games stayed in business. Are there a bunch of NPCs runnign around buying chain whips and bucklers?

[rubah]

if you could use them over and over, what would hte point of a job class be?

[eestlinc]

to be able to use them at all, maybe?

[Mirage]

I think most people would be able to learn magic by studying and becoming magicians. The crystals just makes it much easier for our heroes to master them.
The other soldiers in the world don't need the crystals powers to become good with various weapons, and I'm pretty sure there are other magicians in the world besides our 5 heroes.

[rubah]

Why would they sell magic if no one else in the world could use it? it's not like they know the light warriors are coming:O

And I remember my reasoning behind the one-use idea. In ff2j (which admitedly isn't ff5) you can either give a person magic to use or equip them with it as an item, which will cast it at like level8 once.

Plus it sounds sorta realistic, when you see all those google ads of people buying a spell over the intarwebz xD

[Light Mage]

The people in FFV were classless, they crystals gave them the skills and abilities of warriors who *had* specific classes.

Perhaps "normal" NPC type people had to train into a specific Job, like learning a skill or a trade, as they didn't have the luxury of a crystal to give them instant mastery, or indeed to be able to pump them full of multi-class levels, etc.

An NPC would decide what he wanted to do with their life, and train into that Job for the rest of their life, as their career.

The Warriors who's souls were in the crystals were simply REALLY good (masters) at the jobs they did, and had heroic destinies or some such - therefore their souls were suitable for that perpose of being stored within the crystal.

Our heroes of FFV didn't learn a Job when growing up, yet the crystals gave them all the expertise of the Warriors who did - naturally even the heroes themselves had to train to use their new Job knowledge efficiently - which is why they had to gain AP and level their Jobs up, to the maximum potential as demonstrated in the original Warrior who's soul was now in the Crystal shards.