Wrost RPG Class Ever!

I remember playing Final Fantasy 5 and having a pretty good time building my dream party. That game gave you a lot of room and a lot of options. Your characters are four blank slates that can be customized to fill any role. There were numerous classes with a wide variety of skills, strengths and weaknesses. The concept got much better in Final Fantasy Tactics. The only problem was just how much busywork was involved. I was probably 10 hours into the game when it threw one of the cheapest RPG tricks at me: A mandatory boss with only one strategy!

Bullshit!I'mnotpreparedforthat!NowIhavetogogrindABPforanhour!Fuckme!

The game forced me to use the one job I chose to neglect: The Sorcerer class. This class is creative but entirely useless so they force you to use it this once and only once! It's a combination Knight and Black Mage class. It can't use magic and it can't wear heavy armor. What it does is it fortifies it's equipped weapon with black magic spells such as Fire, Fire 2, Fire 3, Poison, etc. which changes the effect of your normal attack.

Pretty neat, but that means you don't actually do anything for a whole round. The enemies stick around longer and you take more damage. That's the cost of this class's strength. The idea is you'll always be able to exploit an enemy's weakness for a lot less MP than a Black Mage. It's not worthwhile for random encounters, just bosses. Why? Because if you're going to roll up a fighter, you are much better off using the Bare Hands ability you easily learn from the Monk class until you collect the legendary weapons. You can clear just about any typical fight in 1 round, maybe 2, making MagicSword the slower, weaker strategy.

But it is a very interesting idea. I like it. If only they designed the game to better suit it. You'll notice in some FF games, the characters have built in classes and can't be customized, like 4,6, and 9. There was never a sorcerer class in any of those games and it's not an iconic class of FF. Some improvement I would suggest is an  the ability to cast spells on your sword at the start of battle before actually taking a turn, like having initiative. Or, what if an alternate to casting spells on your sword for a long duration, you could just make one-time attacks with a spell in place. How about support abilities to make spell casting quicker or the ability to cast a spell without using a turn? An alternate could be doing a normal attack, then the spell is casted? How about an advanced ability to stack spells on your sword? How come the Sorcerer can't use black magic conventionally anyway?

How about designing a game around the class? Nah, whatever. I haven't played any more FF games after 10, but it's worth noting that the Sorcerer class didn't make it into another FF game.