About Fantasiesta
Fantasiesta (working title) is a video game concept of mine. I've spent some amount of time coneptualizing verious aspects of its design, with a couple of false starts into creating the game in Unity. It is based on the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta, which is a popular challenge run of Final Fantasy V. At some point, I very much would like to create this game. I may, provdied I can ever make anything remotely playable, provide an alpha or beta playtest version of the game and distribute it via this website.
Types of good games
I like 4 categories of good games. ("Good" here doesn't mean I actually like the game myself, but it's hard to ignore the accomplishments of some games even if I don't like them)
- Games that defined a new genre (e.g. Super Mario 64, Dragon Quest, Wolfenstien 3D)
- Games that refined an existing genre (e.g. Super Mario Odyssey, Chrono Trigger, World of Warcraft)
- Games that smushed two or more genres together and made something cool out of the smushing (e.g. Crypt of the Necrodancer, Undertale, Braid, honestly a lot of indie games do this)
- Somebody makes a mod to a game and then somebody goes "oh hey that mod was better than the game it was in, what if we made a whole game about that" (e.g. League of Legends, PUBG, arguably the entire Tower Defense genre if they took inspiration from Warcraft 3)
I'm most interested in that last category.
What is the Four Job Fiesta?
First, a brief history lesson. Final Fantasy as a series is pretty notorious for not being the same game in-between installments. Each of the Finals Fantasy re-imagines the basic mechanics in at least some way. FF5 is from the SNES era of the series, and so shares some similarities with other games of its era (ATB battles, rows in combat, the "steal" command, etc.). The thing that FF5 does differently is that it has a job system. This isn't particularly new. Dragon Quest 3 had jobs way back in 1988, and even Final Fantasy had jobs in 1990's Final Fantasy III. FF5 differs from 3 in a few ways, largely through better technology and polish. Everything that I'm about to describe could be done in FF3, but generally isn't done because FF5 just has better level/job/class/world design.
"Jobs" are pretty synonymous with "classes" in the context of RPGs (also in real life but that's neither here nor there), with what I believe to be the key difference of the expectation of being able to swap a character's job frequently. For example, you might have one character spend a portion of the game as a Thief before changing their job later to Bard. Or Summoner. Or Dancer. There's a ton of options, and (in FF5 at least), you get to maintain some aspects of previous jobs when you swap. For example, you can teach a ninja how to cast magic, so that they can do ninja things and magic things in the same combat. Cool beans. A big part of the game is experimenting with different job combinations. Sometimes you can blend some really nasty combos together. Sometimes a particular job is really good for this particular boss. Sometimes you play berserker and regret it. FF5 has 20 jobs (give or take), so you get a lot of toys to play with.
Too many toys.
The game fixes this problem by slow-rolling new jobs out to you. It's barely 30 minutes into the game when you get your first 6, but you're stuck with those basic jobs for a couple hours before you advance the plot enough to get your next batch. You get all 4-5 sets of jobs (depending on how you count and yes I'm ignoring Mime and the Advance jobs, for those of you who read the textbook before class) at about the 1/3rd mark through the game. That's plenty of time to mess with the cool jobs once you get them all.
This brings us to the Four Job Fiesta. The fiesta is a challenge run (ok technically it's a charity event thing but you can do the challenge any time you want) where you're extremely limited on which jobs you can use and when. With the vanilla ruleset, you get exactly one job from each batch (or crystal, which is the plot mechanism for distributing jobs). You must have at least one member of your party with that job for the rest of the game, and no job can be used that wasn't given to you.
So, for example, you could get to the first crystal and recieve the job "Knight." Great, now your whole party is knights. You get great gear so your offenses and defensives are good, but you have virtually nothing to deal with magic. Play through the game for a bit, and get to the next crystal. Your next job is Summoner. Cool, now at least one person must be a knight and at least one must be a summoner. Do you go 2-2? Do you go 3 summoners with just a token knight? That's up to you! But now you need to go get summoner equipment and go find the summons so you can actually use the job, and so on. By the time you enter World 2 (it's a whole plot thing), you'll have 4 jobs and everyone in your party will have a different job. It's up to you now to figure out how to beat the game with the jobs you got. Maybe you were lucky, maybe you weren't. That's the challenge.
It's an interesting challenge for a lot of reasons. You might get a job you've never seen before, and have to learn its mechanics. Summoner has to kill a bunch of optional bosses in order to learn its powerful spells. Bard has to do side quests to learn songs. Beastmaster has to figure out what nearby enemies have good !Catch abilities. Some jobs are simple, but none are boring. More interesting still is when you get particular job combos that you haven't seen before. Remember the "teach your ninja how to cast spells" example I gave earlier? That turns out to be a really good idea, since the magic scrolls that ninjas can !Throw scale based off of your magic stat, which ninjas have pretty low by default. Give them some magic skill and suddenly they're throwing around electric death for cheap!
Most interestingly, the fiesta actually makes a good entry-point to FF5, despite being a challenge run! There are a variety of reasons for this, but it largely boils down to "20 jobs causes a lot of decision paralysis, 4 does not".
Questions to answer:
- What would be different about Fantasiesta as opposed to the Fiesta?