Boy this will be a long one.
Figthing fire with fire: on making the enemy my weapon
Final Fantasy Tactis has an interesting feature: with the right abilities (Entice with Beast Tongue/Orator, Tame, Reis' Dragon's Charm for dragons) you can persuade an enemy monsters (and humans for that matter, not relevant now) to join your party. You can then deploy those monsters as controllable units, each with their own bespoke abilities. You can even assign the Beastmaster support ability to your human units and place them near to your monster units to unlock each monster's additional ability. This system is actually nice, monsters are admittedly one-note (no abilities to learn, no equipment to use) but you have a nice variety of them; you can use them to supplement your own troops or, as idea for a challenge run, replace your human units with monsters (you need to keep Ramza of course). There's even
a mod based on this idea.
So in Tactics Adavance you'll get a expanded version of this, right? Right? No, of course. Playing Final Fantasy Pokemon on a Nintendo console? What are you,
Dragon Quest?
To be a bit more serious, I totally get why monster taming isn't in FFTA (
barring mods of course): the system already isn't well explained in FFT, and while there's monster variety the limited party slots and the greater versatility of human units makes monster feel subpar, with very few exceptions. Monster taming in the end is more useful for Poaching than for combat.
This is not to say that the idea in itself is bad, and the FFTA devs introduced 3 Jobs that can use monster abilities while retaining the standard characters versatility: the Beastmaster, the Morpher and the Blue Mage.
The Beastmaster I've already talked about as part of the base No Mou Jobs, so I'm going straight to the Morpher.
The Morpher is a No Mou advanced Job that requires only Beastmaster abilities to unlock. It features ok HP, low MP, decent defenses, mediocre offensive stats and actually good Speed (best Speed among No Mou Jobs in fact). Offensive stats matter little though, due to how their abilities work. To make Morphers work you need first to Capture monsters using a Hunter; doing this send the monsters to the Monster Bank and gives you a Soul weapon that teaches the Morpher how to Morph in the corresponding monster's species. There's also some Souls that are acquired through quests, like their ultimate weapon the Rukavi Soul (Rukavi, Lucavi, is this a reference? Maybe...), though those aren't tied to Morph abilities, and some monster species can't be Captured and there's no associated Soul. In addition to Souls Morphers also get clothes, robes and hats as equipment. In addition to their Morph abilities Morphers can also learn the Damge>MP reaction ability.
So, let's say you have your monsters in the Bank, you have your Morph abilities learned, you use a Morph ability; what happens? You've used your action for the turn and the Mopher goes into a weird pose. The next turn the Morpher can use the ability sets of monsters of the species you're Morphing into; when youselect an ability from one of those sets the Morpher's stats are replaced by the corresponding monster's ones for calculations related to the ability used.
Confused? Here's an example to clear it up: you have a Cream, a Jelly and an Ice Flan (all 3 in the Flan species) in your Monster Bank. Your Morpher uses the Flan ability and goes into the pose. He can from now on access to every ability set in the Flan family: in this case Scorch (Cream), Melt (Jelly) and Chill (Ice Flan). If you then use, say, Blizzara from the Chill set the stats used for calculations are the exact same ones of the Ice Flan you have in the Monster Bank; this applies both to offense and defense, if for example your Morpher targets himself, and includes elemental affinities (so you can self-sat Blizzard on your Morpher in this case to heal, since Ice Flans absorb ice). If you didn't have an Ice Flan in the Monster Bank, but only a Cream and a Jelly, you would have access to only Melt and Scorch.
If needed the Morpher can un-Morph for free, if for example you need to use something from the secondary Job or you want to switch what you're Morphed into; you'll need to burn an action to Morph as usual if that's the case.
This whole deal allows Morphers to have a great variety of abilities at their diposal, but comes with 3 downsides: you burn a turn for Morphing, you need to Capture monsters (so you also need a Hunter, and Capture tops at 24% accuracy; good luck with that) and the stats of the monster you've captured are the ones you use; this means that a low-level monster will lead to less effective Morphers. To counteract this issue you can raise the stats of monsters in your Bank, potentially to the cap, and in doing this the Morpher can be the potentially best Job in the game. It's a whole process though. Morphers let you "play" as monsters with the ability to switch up during combat and can have both great versatility and potential, but require a lot of work to make them functional even at a base level (nevermind high level of play).
And then Tactics A2 came around and deleted the Job. Yeah, the Morpher is the only Job that doesn't return in A2. Between the low popularity and the amount of work required (not just the Job, you would also need to port the entire Monster Bank system) I can get why the Morpher got dropped. Do we get a replacement? Not really...
Now, before talking about the Job everyone is waiting for, I want to quickly take a look at the new monster-related Job in A2: the Chocobo Knight.
The Chocobo Knight is a Moogle-exclusive Job that specializes in capturing and rinding Chocobos in battle. They feature low stats all around except for Speed, where they outdo every other Job in the game. Despite being knights they can only equip light armor and hats, and can't use shields. Chocobo Knights can however equip every single melee weapon in the game, opening up a lot of possible combinations. The Chocobo Knight Job has no abilities to learn, relying instead on the secondary Job when unmounted and the mounted Chocobo abilities when mounted to work.
Capturing (mounting) Chocobos, the main use of the Job, isn't very difficult: the Chocobo has to be in Critical status (<25% HP) and without debuffs (buffs are ok), then you just need to move the Chocobo Knight near the Chocobo and use the Mount command that appears. You can dismount Chocobos at any point in combat, or if you're KOd or Petrified; you also dismount if the Chocobo Knight changes Jobs. Once dismounted the Chocobo is lost and you need to do this all over again.
There's 6 Chocobo varieties in Tactics A2: Yellow (normal), Red, Black, Green, Brown and White. Every Chocobo has 3 common abilities: Choco Beak (a melee attack, a bit stronger than the normal one), Choco Cure (heals self and adjacent units) and Choco Barrier (casts Protect and Self to self and adjacent units). The difference in Chocobos comes from the extra ability they have and the Move stat. There's also minute differences in attack power and Resilience, but those are minor. More relevant is the shared weakness of all Chocobos to Lightning, Water and Holy, that can fortunately be overwritten by the Chocobo Knight's equipment.
In more detail:
- Yellow Chocobo: baseline Chocobo, they only have the 3 shared ability and no particular movement feature. Also the first Chocobos you see and the most abundant, so at the start quite useful.
- Black Chocobo: they can use Choco Flame, that deals fire damage at a single target, ignoring Resistance. 18 MP per cast though. Choco Flame's power is based both on Magic and on the equipped weapon's attack power. These Chocobos also can fly like in FFT. Offensive choice #1.
- Red Chocobo: good old terror bird, they can use Choco Meteor for area damage. This one also costs 18MP and the power is based on the Magic stat, so equip accordingly. Offensive choice #2.
- Green Chocobo: a new variety, Greens can use Choco Esuna to remove status from themselves and adjacent units. It's the same as the White Mage, with range limitations. A decent support choice, they also have the highest Move of all Chocobos at 6.
- Brown Chocobo: another new variety, these can use Choco Guard to cast Regen on and increase both Defense and Resistance of the surrounding units. It's ok for support.
- White Chocobo: last Chocobo and new variety as well, they can use Choco Recharge to recover 34 MP to a nearby target. They also have Move 5. Probably the best support choice, recovering MP is big in this game.
Chocobo Knights are a gimmick Job, though they can work in some roles. Main use is support, good Speed and movement help a lot and their abilities are cheap. Offensively they don't have much, and being limited to only the Chocobo abilities while mounted is very limiting. You want at least one chocobo Knight, there's a quest chain when you have to capture Chocobos and bring them to a ranch, but outside of that their use is quetionable.
And now for the Job everyone was waiting for we have the Blue Mage. A classic Job that's unfortunately absent from FFT (again,
mods come to the rescue), FFTA and A2 reintroduce the Blue Mage as a versatile mage that can learn and use monster abilities and available only to the Hume race.
The Blue Mage has balanced stats, with low-ish HP and MP, ok Attack and Magic, dood Defense and Resistance and middling Speed. They can equip Sabers as weapons and clothing, robes and hats as armor. Blue Mages have access to the Damage>MP Reaction Ability and can learn the Immunity (immunity to Blind, Confuse, Frog, Petrify, Poison, Sleep, and Slow) and Learning Support abilities.
The main feature of the Blue Mage though is Blue Magic. In FFTA/A2 a Blue Mage or any unit with Learning will learn a Blue Magic when they're hit by it and survives or revives due to Reraise (actually important for some Blue Magic). A caveat is that you can't be immune to the Blue Magic if oyu want to leanr it, so unequip any status/element immunity you might have equipped. Your Blue Mages aren't Strago or Quistis, they work more like the Enemy Skill Materia. Also like Enemy Skill every unit learns Blue Magic separately and Blue Mages can't learn from each others (or from Morphers), so keep this in mind. Really, bring a Beastmaster (better, a No Mou with Beastmaster as secondary) along. They're made for supporting Blue Mages, also good luck learning the healing/buffing abilities without one.
So, what you get for all your troubles? One of the most expansive skillsets in the game, that's your reward. Blue Mages have access to 20 abilities that range from healing (White Wind, Angel Whisper) and buffing (Mighty Guard, Dragon Force) to direct damage (Goblin Punch, Blowup, Twister, Poison Claw, Drain Touch, Level ? S-Flare, Magic Hammer for MP damage, kinda Matra Magic), debuffs (Guard-Off, Lv3 Def-Less) and status (Acid, Night, Hastebreak, Bad Breath, Stare, Roulette). A half decent Blue Mage can do more or less everything short of removing status just using Blue Magic, and what it can't do the secondary Job can cover. An insteresting feature is that, with the exception of Blowup, every offensive Blue Magic is based on Attack or does more or less fixed damage (Twister, also kind of Matra Magic). This makes Blue Magic an effective secondary Job even on otherwise physical units; MP can be an issue though, so in practice the combination is used more on Hunters since they get enough MP to make this work (about the same MP as a Blue Mage, in fact). FFTA has an issue where 2 monsters (Goblins and Thunder Drakes) appear only up to a certain point int the game, so if you don't learn their Blue Magic by then you're done; Dragon Force is quite good (buffs both Attack and Magic), so try to get it. BTW this is also an issue for Morphers, so Capture those monsters early.
FFTA2 remixes the Blue Magic list quite a bit. 11 Blue Magics return from FFTA (Magic Hammer, Angel Whisper, White Wind, Night, Matra Magic, Bad Breath, Blowup/Self-Destruct, Roulette, Guard-Off/Expose Weakness, Mighty Guard, Dragon Force) with slight alteration to the MP cost, and we have 9 new entries. There's a buff (War Dance, Attck Up in an area), 2 dispel effects (Eerie Sound Wave is single target, Roar targets everyone), 2 status (Doom inflicts, well, Doom, and Unction deal Oil in an area) and 4 direct damage abilities: Screech deals damage to asingle target and can Confuse, Sandstorm is Earth damage in an area + Blind, Quake is a stronger Earth element AoE and Cornered deals 999 damage as long as the caster has single digit HP (good luck learning and using it). These changes push the Blue Mage in a more Magic-based route and give them a small focus on Earth element attacks; this also helps the integration with other Jobs, like the Seer. The versatility of the Job is still there, but now there's a reason to use the Magic stat.
Wow that was long.
I should be able to end this Job review in 2-3 posts at worst, there's just a few left and it's mainly FFTA2 ones.
