In the first Final Fantasy game, you were able to go ahead and choose four characters for your team. A balanced team usually consisted of a fighter, a black belt, a black mage, or a white mage. This gave you a well rounded team with two melee based bruisers, your magic cannon, and a healer/undead killer. You could also sub out the black belt for a thief and get a character that while not the damage powerhouse, he could crit a lot better than any of the other characters. Then you had the red mage; he's pretty much the jack-of-all-trades but master of none.
It took me a while to finish the game, but once I did, I started thinking about other character combinations. Essentially, I was looking at the long run on these characters since later on in the game, they upgrade to more powerful classes. The fighter becomes the knight and has access to some lower level white magic spells. The thief becomes the ninja and can cast some black magic spells. Black belts become masters and are unarmored and unarmed brick shithouses that will bring down the pain. Red mages become red wizards and gain a few extra spells, but can't cast any of the super powerful ones. White mages become white wizards and get access to extremely powerful healing and holy spells. Black mages become black wizards and cast all sorts of complete and utter pwnage, like the best spell in the entire game: Nuke.
My younger self thought it'd be cool to make an all magic team. Two red mages, a white mage and a black mage. This lasted for a while, but I quickly got bored with it. A number of other character combinations were tried and planned, but they also went to the wayside. At this point, I started to grow weary of Final Fantasy, grew more interested in girls, and let the game collect dust.
A number of years passed, and nostalgia kicked in. One time while I was visiting my parents, I decided to break out the ol' NES. I played around with a few games, but finally settled for an evening of playing Final Fantasy. I was surprised that the game's battery was still good, and it had remembered my last group combination that I'd tried: two black mages and two white mages. They hadn't gotten very far.
It was at this point I started thinking to myself. "Self," I said, "you've obviously got a little something going on here with this current layout."
"Damned straight," I replied. "We've got the healing and the ass-kicking power there, but only later on in the game. Right now, we're too full of suck to get far. I don't think we could even kill Garland!"
"But what if we were to really get somewhere with that similar plan? Have a fighting chance early, then totally kick ass once you mature?"
I gasped at Self's teased idea. It was brilliant, and could work out rather well. Start a new party with two fighters and two black mages. The fighters do the majority of the fighting early on, while the black mages do support and fling spells from behind. There was only one problem, and that was the lack of healing. Potions were fine and all, but buying them along with tents, Phoenix down, and all the weapons, armor and spells meant this was going to be an expensive adventure for the team. Until we got everyone advanced to the adult state, it was going to be a long and painful grind just to get the necessary money. Once it was achieved, it would pay off and do so in a majorly ass-kicking way.
Unfortunately, I didn't have the time or patience to fulfill this plan. I stopped shortly after getting past Astos, mainly because I came close to destroying my controller in fits of rage as I kept dying over and over again.
Much like with Dragon Warrior, the challenge sits in its unfinished state, taunting me every once in a while as I think of it.
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