A question about Spells.

[ChiyoMaomaki]

I used to think that Fire I,II and III were Fire, Fira and Firaga respectively.
But I remember a couple bosses USING "Aga" spells, in fact I vaguely remember something using "Blizzaga IV" in a fate from awhile go.

So are we just like barely using magic since we can only use I, II and III?

Is there chart I can get a look at for power levels of spells?

[MilesSaintboroguh]

It's different kinds of magic to differentiate between the player's magic and the enemy's magic. We have I, II, and III and many enemy casters follow the same rule. Amon in the Sycrus Tower has Blizzaga Forte, Thundaga Forte, and Firaga Forte. Why Forte on each spell I will never now. I don't remember a fate with an enemy casting Blizzaga IV unless you mean the Final Fantasy IX crossover event where you fight Shantotto's puppet that used crazy spell names. We have a Blizzard IV for Black mages as well as Fire IV, so we are getting up there in power. Cure IV also exists, but only a boss uses it and the Great Gubal Library (Hard) has in game lore that acknowledges that Cure IV exists, which may be a spell White Mages will get in 4.0.

[Jonnycbad]

Enemy version of player spells also look different. Sophia's Thunder II and Aero II look differen't from BLM/WHM's versions, and Ozma's Holy looks different from WHM's, and Ascian Prime's Shadow Flare is different from ACN's.

[DarthVella]

Amon in the Sycrus Tower has Blizzaga Forte, Thundaga Forte, and Firaga Forte. Why Forte on each spell I will never now.

Amon's "Forte" suffix would be because he's a performer - forte meaning, among other things, a particularly loud section in a musical piece.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

No we're not.

Go read the book in Great Gubal Hard mode. It mentions how Cure spells used to be named like that but then were switched for ease of use

[Eloah]

The Dev team actually touched on this a while back, I can see if I can find the post, but the short of it is that the Spell names were done to not confuse new players to the series. In Japanese the spells follow the normal convention of no suffix, Ra, Sa, Ga, Ja, etc, but because not every spell is the same in that some are AoEs and some Single target, they thought it might get confusing for people not familiar with the series as a whole, which is why they did the I, II, III, IV method. But regardless of which method is used both are meh for the spell hierarchy created in this game.

[Claire_Pendragon]

to be more clear, it wasnt that Ra and Ga were too confusing, it was that the japanese version (and i believe all versions excluding the english version) used these suffixes in other places as well, such as Materia. (There were other items, but i forget what they were)

If anything, the fact Cure3 isnt actually better than cure2, and how Blizzard2 has a completely different function than the other blizzard spells, makes the numbers be more confusing. (They received many complaints about players thinking level 3 spells were better than level 2 spells, and used them incorrectly, as they never bothered to read the tool tip.)

So why does materia having those suffixes, instead of "grade 5" cause issues?
because they were not consistent.
I forget the order (and the other suffix), but ill make the order up, to get the point across.
Cure > Cura > Curaga > Curaja> Curaza
Materia Grade > Gradra > Gradama > Gradaja > Gradaga

The items used different sufixes, AND didnt even go in order, where JA was before GA for example.

So to make it easier to understand, they changed everything to numbers...

Except.. they could have just gave them the same suffix in the propper order, or gave JUST items "Grade Numbers" instead of the suffix if they really felt a need to clarify.

In the end, it was rather silly on both sides parts on how they handled it.

[Desudro]

In FFXI the suffix was used to tell you what the spell did as a class of spell.

No suffix: single target (either you or someone else)
-ra: self-target AoE
-ga: AoE on another target
-ja: AoE on another target that applied an elemental debuff according to the element of the spell. (The exception to this may have been the Curaja added later on...I'd have to ask my wife)

Each spell in each class was then numbered I, II, III, etc. for more potent versions of that spell.