Duke Revier's Grand Game Emporium

  (Image of the demonic cardinal inflicting a death clock on everyone under his fixed AI in the PSP version) So I mentioned that I'd be playing the PSP port. Well, I ended up doing it alongside my current playthrough of the PS1 original. It's a pretty good experience, it's the base game but with some decent quality of life features, a brand new translation, some minor visual upgrades, animated and voiced cutscenes and of course, brand new content. What's immediately noticeable is how the AI is much more aggressive, being willing to hurt its own allies as long as it can do significant damage or kill an enemy or two. The new translation is enjoyable, and has some pretty good lines sprinkled throughout. I was dreading that it would be exceptionally stilted, having had poor experiences with the similar looking translation for Tactics Ogre's PSP remake, but thankfully that isn't the case, aside from a few lines that try too hard to be Shakespearean. ​ The three main ...

  Revier, the protagonist, had finally unlocked Chakra, which meant he was free to sample other jobs! Yay! Doing so however revealed a rather silly trait of the class system - many of the class unlocks made no damn sense! To demonstrate, here's what the paths for all the classes so far looked like. Squire →Knight→Monk→Geomancer (!) Squire→Archer→Thief→Lancer (??) Chemist→White Mage→Oracle (???) Chemist→Black Mage→Time Mage (?!?!) Yeah, uhhh...I can't make head or tail out of those progression paths at all! It seems like they tried to mesh the class system of Final Fantasy 5 with the linear class progression of Tactics Ogre, except Tactics Ogre had linear progression because the later classes were meant to be upgrades  (or, at the very least, considerable sidegrades)! That aside, I considered making Revier a lancer, but with no spears available, there wasn't much point to it. Instead, he'd just go back to donning a knight's garb, with Chakra keeping him topped off an...