Final Fantasy Levelling Is Stupid

With Final Fantasy 15 sort of round the corner I wanted to take a moment about my frustration with the level systems of basically every Final Fantasy from 10 onwards.

This post was first inspired by a news article that my friend link me a long time ago that I have long since lost, if I find it again I'll update the post.  The post outlined some things about how characters would level up and it compared the system to Dark Souls.  There's nothing inherently wrong with this and it's hard to make judgement without knowing all the other systems that the game will have but it still made me think how dumb levels have gotten in Final Fantasy.

All the way up to Final Fantasy 9 each character was kind of locked into a class.  The exception to this rule was Final Fantasy 3 and 5 which had a job system but if you picked a Fighter you better damn well play that character like a Fighter.  Final Fantasy 7 and 8 had ambiguous classes but it was clear who was better at things like sword fighting and who was better at casting spells.

Then Final Fantasy X came along with what seemed like an interesting level up system.  It introduced the Sphere Grid, a giant collection of circles where each one represented a certain statistical boost or ability.  A lot of people disliked the sphere grid but I thought it was OK.  I still have a lot of questions regarding how it works in the context of the game world but I didn't mind it so much.

My problem with the sphere grid is that the idea of a characters class went completely out of the window in the end game.  Every character could just do everything by the end of the game and you didn't even have to work that hard to get to that point.  You could argue the same thing about Final Fantasy 7 but the work you have to put in to achieve that is STUPID high while in FFX in requires very little effort.

FFX-2 was a bit more job based but jobs could be changed on the fly in combat which kind of ruined the whole point of the job system.  FF12 had that stupid license board bullshit and 13 just knocked the turd right out of the bowl with the fucking Crystarium. 

I'm hoping that the class and level system in FF15 will be back on point.  Where a fighter is a fighter, a mage is a mage and a thief is a thief.  The ability to make your characters more versatile is welcome but don't just abandon their entire role in combat so that everyone can do everything.

What the hell happened to Final Fantasy characters?

I'm starting to think everyone who works in the Square Enix creative departments have massive brain problems....

You'd be forgiven for glancing at the above image and thinking you were looking at a lineup of whatever shitty pop group is popular now in Japan.  Well you'd be very wrong, that is the cast of the upcoming Final Fantasy 15 and just......fuck....what happened to this series?

I want you to think back to Final Fantasy 7, think of the cast in that game and how distinguished they all looked from one another.  You had a dude in purple overalls with a huge sword, a chick with huge tits, a black man with a gun for an arm, a remote control cat robot, a shotgun wielding vampire and others.   Quite a varied group of individuals for that particular adventure.

Now look at the above picture, we have bloke with bad hair x6, Assassins Creed guy, generic old man, chick with straight bangs, 2 more blokes and a blonde girl.  Where the FUCK did all the creativity in the cast go?  I guess it died with the guy who knew how to write halfway decent plot lines.

I remember when Team Fortress 2 came out and I think it was a developer working for Valve that said that you could tell how well a character was designed by how people were able to recognise them by their silhouettes.

I can tell you who all of those characters are just from that above picture, if you did that with FF 15's cast you probably couldn't.  It's the same with FF7, 8, 9, 10, 12 or hell even 13 had better designed characters and that game sucks more than having nails funnelled into your anus.  Final Fantasy 15s cast looks so fucking generic that it just kills any hype that I may have.

Not that I really had any hype, because even though I've heard that it's going to play like Kingdom Hearts that doesn't mean it's going to be saved from the horrible writing that has come with all recent Final Fantasy games.

Unless it's one of the best RPGs ever made, FFXV can suck a dick.  They should just kill this series and make something that won't kill my hype from just the name alone.