Which class fantasies of base classes do you like/miss?

[Cleretic]

Paladin is a huge miss. FFXIV's Paladin is like a wandering ronin who help people in need instead of a holy warrior who get power from a divine source.

Okay, explaining XIV Paladin as a 'Paladin class fantasy' is a goddamn TRIP, because it has a rich history, that just isn't the one we grew up with.

Something we actually have to remember is 'Paladin as holy religious knight' is actually an invention of D&D Second Edition. Before then, including in earlier D&D editions, Paladin was more associated with stuff like the knights of Charlemagne; more chivalrous and pious. There was religion involved in it, and their abilities had that 'holy' flavoring to it, but only as a small part of a greater code of honor, as an assumption that a noble knight would by nature be religious. D&D moved away from that and into a pure religion thing probably because a lot of that code of chivalry was honestly just really annoying restrictions on exactly one person at the table, and paring that back to just a religion of the player's choosing kept the notion of a knight with a code while giving a lot more freedom. (2e Paladin still had some of that, like paladins having to constantly give tithes to local churches, but most of it was gone.)

But, remember that JRPGs as a whole grew out of people playing those earlier editions of D&D primarily as dungeon-crawlers; Japan didn't get 2e, so they didn't get the memo about things like 'we've now decided paladins are just religious knights'. As a result, Japanese approaches to that sort of fantasy borrow from only those earlier versions of D&D, and in this case, that manifests in Final Fantasy's paladins just not being religious. Consider Cecil from IV; not an ounce of religion in his character, he's just got a busload of duty and conviction. Given that, you can look at the base conceptualization of FFXIV Paladin and see that it actually is a solid adaptation of irreligious paladins; they're a 'For Queen Sultana and Country' royal knight, with that whole original story being tied up in tradition, honor and duty in the face of a world that wants to stamp that out.

...And then the HW Paladin story arc still ruins that, because that story is terrible no matter which direction you're coming at it from.