So let’s recap. Last week, I posited something that I feel is pretty straightforward: We’re hitting a point where clearly we can no longer rely on past jobs as a particularly strong guidepost for future jobs in Final Fantasy XIV. Not in the sense that we’re going to stop getting new jobs (that seems highly unlikely) but in the sense that I do not feel confident in looking back at prior jobs and saying, “Ah, yes, the hint suggests our next job will be Geomancer.” This doesn’t mean it’s best to not bother making guesses any longer, and indeed, I think there are a number of things we can look toward as potential guides moving forward.
Last week, I talked about magical arts that the game could explore. This week? We’re covering melee weapons. Unfortunately, in some ways this covers a whole lot less ground, since there’s not as much to talk about in some senses and our first new job reveal has made it very clear that the designers are willing to just make up new weapons if they want. In other ways, it’s more fun, since human beings have a trulystaggering number of ways to hurt one another within arm’s reach. So let’s talk about it.
Whips
No, I am not saying that a future job will use a car as a melee weapon. Although now that I write that, itwould be cool… but no, no, stay focused. I’m talking about whips. We all talk about whips because whips are dope, but there is actually a decent history of whips as a weapon in the series as a whole, and the fun thing is that they’re also usually used in weird ways.
Let’s be real, some weapons presuppose a job. If you’re going to have a katana, you’re going to have Samurai in the game. But whips tend to be associated with more unique individual characters. Sometimes casters, frequently hybrid casters, often characters who have a mishmash of different abilities and are clearly meant as a repository for a whole bunch of series stuff in one person because it wouldn’t fit together otherwise. I mentioned whips a few times discussing Beastmaster as they would have made sense for the job, but there are also plenty of other conceptual jobs where they’d also work fine.
What’s the downside? Well, as cool as whips are, they’re a bit of a bastard to animate. And as mentioned, there isn’t really one solid set of concepts that fits around them, so whatever it was would be more or less original. Still cool, though.
Hammers
Now, I’ve speculated on hammers more than a few times, and it’d be fair to point out that at this point Warrior has a few hammers. I definitely think that the odds of a very heavily mace-focused job have gone down. But the fact is that it’s still out there, and we’ve even got a couple of NPCs using a hammer as a weapon. To be blunt, there’s room for this.
Pun entirely intended.
What precise role these weapons would serve is up for debate, of course; you could pair maces with tanks (and indeed, Nero takes up a similar role) but you could also make the argument to have them as a DPS. (Surely it hasn’t slipped anyone’s notice that DPS jobs tend to be more fast and agile with their weaponry, yes?) The major downside is simply what I already noted. Both Dark Knight and Warrior already have the “slow, weighty weapon” category rather well filled, and it’d thus be harder to find a new way to make this feel unique regardless of its role… and when dealing with a big, heavy mace, you expect slow, weighty weapons as a matter of course.
Poles
It’s kind of funny, at least to me, that this series has multiple different weapons that are all broadly categorized as “a stick.” We’ve got staves, and we have rods, so what’s the difference with poles? The answer is clear to anyone who has playedFinal Fantasy XII orFinal Fantasy Tactics, and that’s that we talking not about wizardly objects but about twirling poles that are used to poke, smack, trip, and generally pummel things into submission. These are your classic thwackin’ stick.
Poles aren’t exactly common through the series, and usually they don’t show up in favor of mage staves. In fact, one of their most prominent appearancesis within the aforementionedFFT, where a big part of their strength lay in the fact that they are magically balanced and thussurprisingly capable melee weapons within the hands of mages. But that’s part of the fun. They can work in a remarkable number of contexts and can work well as a weapon for a martial arts job without using knuckles or for something else more lightly armored.
Of course, the flip side is that we’re talking about a franchise where two things are true. First, there are not actually a lot of different martial artists who don’t fit under the “punch stuff” header, and second, if the game were going to give us a mage that could mix it up in melee, we’d be right to say, “Isn’t that Red Mage?” And yes. It is Red Mage. So, again, this would be a bit of a “starting from scratch” for the character concept. Not that there aren’t potential jobs that could fit here anyway, but let’s move on.
Swords
“Wait a second. We have swords. We haveso many kinds of sword!” And yes, we do, please sit down for a second. I am not saying that a new job will be released that is just Paladin Againadin with another sword. I’m saying that there are a lot of types of sword, as evidenced by the fact that we currently havemany jobs using swords already, and the addition of skyltborg should make it clear that you can just call a new kind of shield whatever you want.
Now, the obvious reason to add a new kind of sword would be to add a job that traditionally uses a sword as a weapon. And to be clear, there are a couple of those; Mystic Knight/Rune Fencer/etc. is an obvious candidate (and vaguely hinted at with the Corvosi swordmaster in the variant dungeon). But I include this here partly as a bit of a joke so that both of these columns have four entries and partly because there are a lot of sword-adjacent weapons that could wind up called in. Serah Farron got a transforming sword-bow because the developers wanted her to have a special weapon, and I’m not going to suggest we’ll get that as a whole thing; I’m suggesting that having a new kind of sword variant is a long tradition in this series, so we should never discount the possibility of Yet Another Sword.
I mean, heck, by that token,Endwalker and presumablyEvercold will be theonly expansions that add a new job without some kind of sword variant. Yes, gunblades count here.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I have four more melee weapons to go over like I mentioned, so let’s continue along this particular garden path.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizingFinal Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
