Is it just me, or is it needlessly difficult? The problem is this:
1. Characters progress according to how they are played. If you fight with swords a lot, you get good with swords. If you get hit a lot, your HP goes up. If you do a lot of magic, your MP goes up.
2. Ordinary monsters are quite easy to kill without magic, saving your MP.
3. HP and physical stats seem to rise more quickly than magic stats, even when you try to use magic to improve it.
4. Many of the bosses and tougher monsters you meet at crucial points have ridiculously high physical defence and must be defeated basically by magic alone.
So here I am, 5 or 6 hours into the game, and despite my best efforts at improving magic power, I still only have around 20-25 MP on each character, which basically means 5 or 6 decent attack spells or cures. The spells themselves are increasing in power – I can expect to hit for 150ish with the attack spells and cure a decent couple of hundred HP.
But contrast this with the fact that with my fighter-types I have around 600 HP and I am dual hitting often for upwards of 150 a pop. Most normal fights are over in a couple of rounds thanks to my mithril swords and axes. Then I meet a boss and find that weapons do 0-2 points of damage a time, so my fighters are relegated to curing and protection spells (I’m training them up as white mages) and my black mage, such as she is (not even any better magic-wise than my white-mage fighters, actually) has to defeat the boss basically single-handed.
This is a positive feedback loop: the more I have to defeat bosses with magic, the more I have to conserve MP while going through the dungeon (ethers are currently pretty darn expensive at this stage). The more I conserve MP, the less chance I get for magical progression. So the magic-only bosses get tougher. And what makes it worse is that there seems to be a cap on the amount of levelling up I can do: while fighting creatures of level N, I can only get up to level N in skills. To get to the level where I could have a reasonable chance against the boss, I need to fight the creatures which are in its dungeon – where I have to conserve MP.
The balance is all wrong. I don’t mind creatures with high defence, but the game is retarding my black mage’s magic progression while requiring it.