I really don't understand the use of the word "Warrior" in this world

So doing the Warrior job story, we learn that Warriors, the job, originated from a tribe of Roegaedan who specialized specifically in the use of greataxes and harnessed the power of their "inner beast", and called themselves Warriors.

So Warrior in this setting is a person who wields an axe and uses their anger as fuel for their attacks. Specifically this is what constitutes a "Warrior" in Eorzea. Except......that's not true. Warrior is used in the literal dictionary definition by many characters to refer to combatants. Because that's what a real-world warrior is. Lets look at the dictionary definition:

"Warrior: (especially in former times) a brave or experienced soldier or fighter.
"the warrior heroes of ancient Greece""

Warrior, the term, is used in what is obviously the proper meaning of the word colloquially throughout this game. And, of course, our characters are called Warriors of light.

So we have the actual dictionary definition of what a warrior is (what anyone would assume one means when they say "warrior")......and we have a unique class of people who specifically wield axes and use their anger in battle....who call themselves "Warriors". So we have ordinary warriors.....and then we have warriors (the job). So a Warrior player is Warrior Warrior of Light. It's kinda silly.

Now I understand every game has to have a warrior class. But in most games, warriors are just people who can wield a wide variety of weapons and just don't have any special powers, just basically some dude who picked up a sword or whatever. But in this game, Warriors, the class, are their own unique class, who wield a specific weapon and nothing else. Like a Red Mage, or a Monk, or an Astrologian. It makes sense with these classes because they're literally a class with their own unique field of training. Warriors are just supposed to be ordinary dudes who picked up any weapon and go to battle. They're the "vanilla" class of any game, they're not really a class.

It's just ......wierd to me that Warrior in this setting is both the literal definition of the word warrior and also a unique class with it's own unique powers. Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way though.

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It's like the Bard situation, where there is the minstrel type who are travelling musicians earning coin by singing in taverns and the like... and the actual Discipline of War (Job class) that are Archers who started singing songs in battle to inspire their comrades - two seperate concepts which also are similar.

The confusion with the WAR Job and the Warrior of Light term goes back to the original FFI where the concepts first originated, (FFXIV owes a lot to the original FF game), and the two ideas from then on became reoccurring elements throughout the FF series, WAR as a reoccurring Job, usually a physical damage dealer that specializes in most weapon types but tended to favour axes or swords, and the Warriors of Light which was usually the term given to the player characters in the earlier FF games (the term kind of dropped out of favour by FFVI, only to be 'rediscovered' later on when Square started rereleasing touched up versions of the early FF games on modern consoles), and it's use here in FFXIV is part of Yoshi's desire to have FFXIV honour and reference the FF series in general.

Interestingly there was little confusion in the original NES version of FFI between these terms as they were translated slightly differently - the WAR Job was actually known as Fighter in the original NES FFI, and the 'Warriors of Light' were written actually as the 'Light Warriors', so the confusion is more a modern thing, ironically.

Yeah, they probably should've named the Warrior job after the classic job they're actually patterned on, Berserker. But perhaps they didn't because that would've been confusing to the people who started using the job and saw it has... like, buttons, and interactivity. Traditionally, not a Berserker quality.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

It's like the Bard situation, where there is the minstrel type who are travelling musicians earning coin by singing in taverns and the like... and the actual Discipline of War (Job class) that are Archers who started singing songs in battle to inspire their comrades - two seperate concepts which also are similar.

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I really don't understand why they didn't just make Archer transition to Ranger and instead made them become Bards. Though, could this be like the Paladin class fantasy problem (They're just Gladiators with holy-themed abilities) where it's simply an issue of Japan not having or understand the concept of a Bard because it's a western thing like Paladin? By that I mean they fundamentally did not understand what constitutes a "Bard" and thought making a bowman who also plays music made sense. Sad that thanks to the way jobs are designed we'll never get a proper bowman class because we can't have two classes who use the same weapon.

Unless they go the route of Arcanist and have Archer branch into Ranger as an alternative and still use the same weapon/animations.

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Originally Posted by YukikoKurosawa

I really don't understand why they didn't just make Archer transition to Ranger and instead made them become Bards.

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Why would Ranger be any better? The archetypal fantasy-Ranger is Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He never uses a bow.

Think of Warrior of Light as a title.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

Why would Ranger be any better? The archetypal fantasy-Ranger is Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He never uses a bow.

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But this is a Final Fantasy, and Final Fantasy rangers typically use bows.



Doubling jobs on another class, though, please no. If anything they need to separate SCH From ACN already.

I suspect that Archer didn't become Ranger or Hunter for the same reason that we got Machinist instead of Musketeer: it's hard to make a whole moveset on this game's scale out of 'Good At Shooting'. Only so many ways to spin that over thirty-plus abilities before it gets stale, so you have to find a clever extra angle both to give new mechanics and to add variety to story and flavor. So, Archer becomes Bard to get both songs and musical-aesthetic animations, and the gunner gets a bunch of extra gadgets.

Also because when they were introducing jobs they wanted to include a 'support DPS' option for variety's sake, and all the other classes had pretty clearly not-that evolutions, so... well, let's graft bard songs onto Archer, why not?

It's just one of those things. Like many games have an Assassin class. But an assassin is also simply a murderer. But both meanings of the word exist at the same time.

A scholar is a student. But a Scholar is a shiled healer who uses fairy and a long lost art.

A monk is a religious figure who practices a certain lifestyle. But a Monk is a fighter from a precise Ala Mighan order.

There's countless example if we did in it, I'm sure.