Current Events > Final Fantasy IV is a bit of an odd one character-wise, isn't it?

(+) Yeah! (+)

1. You play as the same characters for the vast majority of the game, with possible slight variation with guests or characters stepping away for a bit. (1, 2, 3, 5, 15)
2. You play as an amount of characters larger than your party can handle throughout the story, and by and large once they're all established you get the opportunity to switch and shuffle them out to your liking. (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13)

2 shuffles a bunch of characters in and out of your party a lot

Not really odd... FF 4 is pretty much the breakthrough entry of the Final Fantasy series, the first one with relatively complex characters and a sweeping story that keeps you hooked. As with most JRPGs, playing it is like playing a story on rails, and it's only after this game that they finally decided to have more and more heavily story focused games, with 6 beating it out for most party members and then the ps1 titles starting the tradition of companion archetypes

You have your core group of Cecil, Rosa, and Rydia for the bulk of the game. Edge comes in I believe about halfway through.
Its really not that much worse than II.

And perhaps they shouldn't. Perhaps giving the player characters to train and then just removing them from active gameplay forever is a bad thing to do to the player.

In glitchless speedruns

I was thinking about this yesterday and it seems that as far as characters go, FFs fall into two major categories:

1. You play as the same characters for the vast majority of the game, with possible slight variation with guests or characters stepping away for a bit. (1, 2, 3, 5, 15)
2. You play as an amount of characters larger than your party can handle throughout the story, and by and large once they're all established you get the opportunity to switch and shuffle them out to your liking. (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13)
IV is the only one (of the main numbered) where it's a large cast and you don't get the option to shuffle, which makes it interesting how they ended up addressing that in both the Advance (just give you the ability late in the game) and DS versions (Augments kind of serve that purpose a bit).

What are some other RPGs that do what IV did?

tommyleejonesnewspaper.jpg

I thought it was odd that you get to use 5 members in battle instead of the usual 3-4

FF2 did the same thing with its 4th party slot by having the 4th party member change constantly which thanks to the odd leveling system it was really annoying to train someone new

The official 4th main character doesn't join until the final dungeon and both Leila and Ricard are in your party longer than he is

What are some other RPGs that do what IV did?

What's odd to me too is I can't really pinpoint an era it's trying to replicate

It's a culmination of the core concepts and designs of FF1, 2, and 3. FF4 is essentially the definitive classic final fantasy.

FF5 feels like an upgraded 3 and FF6 onward things get progressively weird.

What I mean by era is that you have very traditional medieval kingdoms but also have super futuristic dungeons.

I'm not saying it was aliens.