FFXIV: Limited Job and why it doesn't work

[Shougun]

Not really. The initial BLU list in FFV had 30; every other spellcaster job had about 15 to 18 spells.

I did say often (this does not mean always), you could also make an extreme example the other way with the other character variants of blue mage that had like 10 abilities while black magic was like 20. The point being that a book of spells is not strictly blue mage nor is it always blue mage. It's had it sometimes it's not had it sometimes, it's also not always been the only one with a huge list of skills.

Which is to say blue mage does not require a book to be blue mage. Though it certainly could have one. (If the job is limited it makes sense to, but ideally most spells are interesting then, a big book of interesting spells on a limited job would be clearly ideal - obviously if it was 'normal' there would have to be some weird restrictions or just not having that, but it not being a book would be fine because the precedence is clearly there for short lists too "big book" being not a requirement to be blue).

Edit: Just for giggles I checked out many of the representations of the jobs and it's certainly more extreme, but I would still say my exact point stands as I intended it. Blue mage doesn't need a huge list to be blue mage and in games that had big lists blue mage was often not the only one, and gimmicks that blue mage had were also often represented in other jobs (though not as densely as Blue Mage, but like death, or status buff / debuff dumps, etc, existed elsewhere). In some of the games blue magic was one of the shorter magic lists, and others the longest, but in long list games many other jobs also had fairly long lists as well (this doesn't mean it has to be 1:1 length). In the end the length of the list didn't make it blue magic or not, case in point of the many variations of the magic- which means the job doesn't have to have a huge list (though it could). My point never being it can't have a huge list, the point being it doesn't require one and therefore means that isn't a strict bullet point to cross out to make it a real boy. Having a huge list of bad though, imo, is not worth more than a nice list of good skills so even if we do have big lists lets hope for cool and interesting spells over 5 variations of the same potency different colors at tiers 1 2 and 3.

I would not say that WHM had a gimmicky spell list. Cure and Raise reversing to do damage to/instantly kill Undead was an easy method of reducing the spell list by combining the anti-undead Dia line with the Cure spells, both of which were "holy" effects. Reflect was another defensive spell like Protect and Shell. The most gimmicky spell list of the traditional Mages was Time Mage (what with both random damage, fixed percentage damage spells and ATB influencing status effect spells) and even then those spells all followed at Space/Time theme. Blue Mage has always had weird 4th wall breaking spells.

There were loads of gimmick abilities, many of blue mage's skills had comparable variants existing in other jobs like summoner, black mage, or white mage (although the weirdness was usually collected more so in that job than others, a few times you might see Summoner get close though). I always considered reflect massively gimmicky and saving myself in a lot of situations through cheese, although it's not always a white mage spell. I think Vivi did wild stuff with it in FFIX. Not sure how blue mage breaks the 4th wall though.