Level Irregularities in FFIV
So I really don't know what the hell is wrong with the people who designed Final Fantasy IV. They really need to learn how to fucking balance a party. Here's the situation in the game. I start off with two people at level 10. I immediately lose one of them, and gain another one at level 1, who always dies in one fucking hit. Ten minutes later I get another person at level 20, who leaves after one dungeon and is replaced by a guy at level 6. I then get another person at level 13, and a dungeon later another person at level 20. Four hours into the game, I finally feel like I have a fucking party that isn't going to die at any minute. Unfortunately, I immediately lose everyone except the protagonist (who is about level 20 at this point), gain two people who at level 10, then my protagonist reverts back to level 1. Who the fuck decided this was a good idea? I can't describe to you how crazy the range of levels are. You can tell they really planned this because six hours into the game, you're still fighting monsters from the first dungeon in order to compensate that half of your party is still in the single digits. Why don't you just give me characters at a reasonable level? Why give me a character who starts at level 1 when everyone else is at 10? I shouldn't have to be forced to grind for half an hour just to strengthen that character enough that she doesn't die after being hit once. That's fucking ridiculous. The game shouldn't be hard because half my party is under-leveled when they're introduced.
Then there's this one character named Tellah, who is fucking atrocious. When you first get him, he's amazing since he has all these cool spells and the only other mage in your party is this little girl who can't do shit. You quickly find out he's shit though. Why? Because no matter how much you level him up, his MP never exceeds 90. This is because the spell Meteor is part of the plot in this game and it costs 99MP, so the developers didn't want Tellah casting it before he's supposed to. The problem is the only spells which do actual damage are at least 15MP. That means he can only do six hits before he's useless for the rest of the dungeon. That is really fucking retarded. You know what you should've done? Made Meteor 999MP and then have Tellah's MP something reasonable that I can work with. When my level 18 Paladin has significantly more MP than my level 23 mage, there is something fucking wrong with this situation. Even better, some of Tellah's stats go down as he levels up. That is just great. Fucking wonderful.