Magikarp Power / Final Fantasy

• Final Fantasy has two examples:
  • The Monk/Master is not that good at first, with only access to insanely weak knuckles/nunchaku and cloth for equipment. But his attack and defense go up so fast with levels that you can drop the armor and weapons early on. By mid-game, he dodges more than the Ninja and outdamages everyone else to the point of one-shotting the final boss. Plus, you don't need any equipment for him to be good.
  • In the earlier versions, the Thief starts out as by far the worst of the Light Warriors, with terrible starting stats, his only worthwhile stat being Luck (the stat which is supposed to determine likelihood of running away from battle ^note in short, the calculations for running use incorrect (and inconsistent) variables, which can greatly affect the odds of running successfully; however, the Thief still has enough luck to run with some reliability and has little other value). He has surprisingly good Strength growth, but with bad weapons and armor, he's still going to get outdamaged by the Red Mage. Then he gets upgraded into a Ninja, and suddenly, his equip range skyrockets to be on par with the Knight, with better Evasion on top of that, and he becomes able to use low-level Black Magic, including FAST to make himself even stronger. He even gets the third-strongest sword in the game to himself. In later remakes it's downplayed, with the Thief having slightly lower stats than a Warrior and the Ninja being a few shades of Glass Cannon more than the Knight.
• Gordon in Final Fantasy II joins with the worst HP of any Guest-Star Party Member, easily starting off as The Load compared to your party members at that point. But he starts with 22 in all of his stats and Level 2 in all weapon skills, which lets him take any role you wish and catch up on HP/MP quickly.
• In the Famicom version of Final Fantasy III, you start with the Onion Knight job; in the DS version, it's unlocked after a simple sidequest ^note that is itself unlocked through Socialization Bonus, but let's not pick nits. It's just about useless compared to all other classes, with pathetic stats; the DS version is able to equip everything in the game, but that's not helpful when your stats are that bad. Except, its stats skyrocket after Level 90, and it's the only class allowed to use the Onion equipment set.
• Final Fantasy IV:
  • Played with when Cecil becomes a Paladin about a third of the way through the game; his level is reset to 1, along with all of his stats except for his HP. This means that all his physical attacks are essentially useless until you get him leveled up again, which fortunately isn't too tricky given that the enemies you face at this point in the game will award decent EXP, but it leaves you battling said enemies with a trio of Squishy Wizards.
  • The resident Quirky Bard Edward from Final Fantasy IV gets outright explosive stat growth past level 70, unlike every other character's stat growth which becomes random and can even go down on a level-up. Get some better equipment for Edward and he becomes the fastest character in the game; level him to around 90-99 and almost all of his stats max out.
    • In the Game Boy Advance port, the harp you can find in the Cave of Trials deals extra damage against dragons — which the final dungeon happens to be full of. And the harp in that port's post-game dungeon has a damage boost against every enemy type. His only drawback is auto-hiding in critical health, which spoils your healing rhythm, but prevents a Total Party Kill.
    • He's at it again in The After Years — in his tale, he's mainly useful because the rest of his party and the enemies are really low-leveled. Unless you take your sweet time grinding him, he'll start the endgame a good 10-20 levels below everyone else, and even if he's on par, he'll likely still have weak attack power and low HP. If you stick with him into the final dungeon, he becomes faster than enemies can handle and gets a harp with bonus damage against every enemy type. By now you'll likely have enough cash to buy a ton of X-Potions to buff his Salve, his Bardsong allows for free buffs and debuffs, and his Escape move lets him avoid any attack.
• Final Fantasy V:
  • The game's Freelancer and Mime classes are rather unimpressive on their own, but 'absorb' a mastered class's passive abilities and stat boosts, with the result that by the endgame, they're easily the best classes, since you can have a character with the highest boosts in every stat, using any equipment, and any combination of active abilities you want.
  • The Blue Mage was first introduced in this game. At first it comes with nothing learned and the only abilities you learn from it just involve being able to cast Blue Magic with other classes, learn Blue Magic with other classes and some middling scan abilities. Even the first handful or two of Blue Magic is meh at best and relies going out of your way to find specific monsters. But if you take the time to learn all the available spells that can be learned? The job can easily devastate enemies like they were nothing with its level-based spells and at the same time be one of the best healers/support characters, better even than White Mages, the typical healer job.
  • The Red Mage class, normally a Jack-of-all-trades class that's good in the beginning, gradually loses use as you go through the game. However, if you persist with the class, long after one would have abandoned it (its final skill level taking 999 points), you'll gain access to the absurdly powerful Dualcast ability, letting you cast magic twice per turn. The funny thing is that once you do this you'll never use the actual class again, as it has poor stats and forces you to waste one action slot for red magic spells.
  • The Chicken Knife starts off extremely weak, but becomes stronger with every battle you flee from with no limit on its growth (compare the other choice, the Brave Blade, which caps off high and gets weaker) potentially making it a weapon that can deal 9999 on every attack. The downside is that using it has a chance to make you run away from battles you actually want to fight, but there's several workarounds for that.
  • The Dancer class doesn't have much to write home about - except for its special equipment, like the Rainbow Dress and Lamia Tiara. Then it's much more likely to land Sword Dance attacks that deal x4 damage.
• Final Fantasy VI:
  • Gau is seen as a Magikarp by most fans, simply because it takes forever to learn all his rages. (He's quite effective with just three, but which ones you get are up to the Random Number God and it can take quite a bit of grinding to get the ones you want.) With enough rages, he can absorb all eight elements, hit with any element half the time and a simple physical the rest of the time, or even use the rare Charm status on enemies. If that's not enough, he's one of two characters to use the Snow Muffler, the single best equipment in the game.
  • Strago is a Blue Mage, meaning he has to see the enemies' abilities to learn them. Unfortunately, he's a Blue Mage that you get late in the game, after you're well past the point where you'd normally run into the monsters using the blue magic he can learn. This means he's not a "set him aside, and he'll be good later" type, and more of a "If you want him to be useful, you have to go well out of your way and backtrack to get his abilities."
  • Relm starts with no spells, weak physical attack power, an odd assortment of equipment, and the Sketch command which is useless at best and prone to crash the game at worst (though the latter is mostly worked out in re-releases). Her endgame equipment, on the other hand, is among the best, and her Magic stat is the highest in the game so once you teach her some spells she will quickly surpass your other mages. As for Sketch, it remains useless in most circumstances, but if you don't mind some Loop Hole Abuse, it's the key to an easily exploitable bug in the original SNES version of the game. It's not until fairly late in the game that you get to the point where it's exploitable rather than game-crashing, but once you find the right enemy group you can reliably fill your inventory with vast numbers of the most powerful equipment in the game.
  • The Cursed Shield hits you with every status effect in the game, including Doom (which can't be blocked by a Ribbon, unlike the other status effects) - but take it into 256 battles without dying, and it becomes the best shield in the game, the Paladin Shield, negating or absorbing all elements of magic and avoiding most physical attacks, as well as teaching you the best spell in the game, Ultima (the only way other than the Ragnarok esper, which, incidentally, requires skipping the Infinity -1 Sword, and by extension the ability to bet it at the Colisseum for an even better sword, unless you're playing the GBA/mobile version).
• Final Fantasy VII:
  • The Ultima, Shield and Full Cure materia. All do the same thing when initially equipped. Almost nothing, except muck around with your stats. Get them to their second level, though, and they give you a very powerful attack, a powerful defensive spell and the ability to heal a character and remove all status ailments from them. Nothing to sneeze at.
  • Enemy Skill starts out with no effects whatsoever, and can't even be leveled up. If you know what enemies have what skills and how to copy them onto the Materia, it can provide access to most of the game's best spells two discs before those spells will even become available. Even once you get those spells, the Enemy Skill techniques are usually stronger, more convenient, or both. Some of the skills are permanently missable if you're not careful, but even without those skills Enemy Skill is the best Materia in the game in terms of raw versatility. Not bad for a yellow rock that doesn't do anything when you get it.
  • Tifa's initial Limit Break is barely stronger than her regular attack, but unlike every other character, she can use every one of her Limit Breaks at once and get guaranteed critical hits from all of them. While it takes practice to master the timing of her roulette wheels, doing so makes her one of the better physical attacks in the game.
• Speaking of Tifa, in Final Fantasy VII Remake this describes her pretty well. At first her lack of range, low damage output and health can make her the biggest liability on the team. Figure out her unique mechanics and she will do damage that no one can compare to while being nigh untouchable.
• The Toy Gun from Dirge of Cerberus is pathetic at first, but can be leveled up into the ultimate weapon.
• Final Fantasy VIII:
  • The Diablos Guardian Force reduces opponents' hit points by a percentage equal to Diablos' level. At its starting level 9, this is starkly unimpressive compared to other summons and spells; grind it to level 100, and it's instant death for anything with less than 9999 hitpoints.
  • The Cactuar Guardian Force. Its damage is calculated by the number of tens in its current level x 1000 (e.g. at level 43 it does 4000, at level 68 it does 6000). At level 100, it will do 10,000 damage to all enemies making it the second most powerful GF in the game. Unlike Diablos, bosses and other enemies immune to gravity damage are susceptible to this attack.
• Final Fantasy IX:
  • Zidane's ultimate ability gets more powerful the more you steal from enemies; steal enough times and it does 9999 damage.
  • Similarly, Freya's Dragon Crest is useless at first, but powers up by killing dragons, eventually being able to do 9999 damage.
  • Quina, the blue mage of the party, starts with no spells and a weapon that has random chances to deal piddling amounts of damage. However, putting time and effort into learning Quina's Blue Magic will help them become the most diverse and powerful spellcaster in the game. This requires going through the "capturing frogs" minigame, among other things.
• Final Fantasy X:
  • Some Celestial Weapons are harder to get than others, but all require you to go out of your way to complete a sidequest near the end of the game. All of them start out with an auto-ability that prevents the holder from gaining experience; you need to find two items to fully power them, at which point they triple the rate at which the wielder's Overdrive meter increases, increase the damage cap to 99,999, and allow physical attacks to pierce enemy Defense, in addition to 2 other things that vary between weapons.
    • Tidus's Caladbolg comes with Evade & Counter and Magic Counter (in short, he will evade most physical attacks and counterattack everything thrown at him). It is also a strong contender for the hardest one to get; to fully power it, you must get a negative time in the Calm Lands chocobo race.
    • Lulu's Onion Knight gives her Magic Booster and One MP Cost (the short version is that all of her spells hit 50% harder and only cost 2 MP). This lets her spam powerful spells with little worry of running out of MP (considering that almost nothing in the game has a Mana Burn effect). However, powering it up infamously requires that you dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row; this requires a lot of patience and focus and decent reflexes.
  • In Blitzball, the Kilika Beasts starts out as the worst team, but two-thirds of the team end up being among the best players at their positions, and they can all learn every technique.
    • Larbeight ends up with a 96 in Shooting and an 87 in Endurance, making him unquestionably the best overall forward. He has a 50 in Attack to boot, the highest of any forward, so he's a moderate asset on defense.
    • Isken's a very good forward, finishing with a perfect 99 in Endurance, letting him break through a lot of defenders, and an 81 in Shooting, the fifth-highest out of anyone.
    • Vuroja ends up the best all-around midfielder with a 99 in Passing, a 75 in Endurance, a 54 in Attack, and a 65 in Block. This makes him a fantastic setup guy on offense since he can break through a couple defenders and pass over the rest of them, and he's a pretty good defender who isn't easily gotten through or around.
    • Kulukan finishes as one of the best defenders with very high Block and Attack stats, each at 64, and a near-perfect 96 in Passing. She'd make a great midfielder if her Endurance weren't mediocre.
    • The other defender, Diem, is merely a top 10 player, and their goalie, Nizarut, finishes with the third-highest Catch.
  • Weirdly, Keepa, the rather terrible starting goalie on your team, has his Shooting stat skyrocket in later levels, finishing with a perfect 99. All of his other stats are still terrible, though, so to use his godly shooting you basically have to get him wide open, which isn't always easy to do.
  • Yuna does start with the ability to summon incredibly powerful creatures. However, she herself is extremely fragile at the start, and unlike other characters, she initially can't kill certain enemy types in one hit. If you want to let her get a share of AP (requires her to have done something in battle), you'll probably be swapping her in just to defend or heal (since summoning in a fight with low-level enemies wastes time and complicates getting XP for everyone else). What she does have is access to nearly double the Magic stat increases compared to Lulu, the game's default black mage. That still wouldn't be a huge deal if you could only teach Yuna black magic after completing her standard leveling path. But around the game's halfway point, you can find several items that allow you to turn Yuna into a black mage. If you have actually been leveling Lulu enough to unlock the third tier of black magic and then teach it to Yuna, even if you haven't been using her much, Yuna immediately puts Lulu's magic damage to shame.
• Final Fantasy X-2:
  • The blitzball minigame, Yuyui, recruited at Scout Level Max, starts off with 1 IN ALL HER IMPORTANT STATS. Not only that, she's very painful to train because her biorhythms NEVER go above 1, so you'll be eating up LOTS of Command Points just to let her rest. However, her max stats are all 99 (255 for those that go above 100), making her a total Game Breaker, given the opportunity to learn special skills like Corkscrews and Volleys.
  • Some of the Garment Grids allow you to use certain powerful spells - like Holy, Ultima etc - if you spherechange through certain paths during battle. Even if the dressphere the character is using isn't a Black Mage, White Mage etc.
• Final Fantasy XI has several versions:
  • Blue Mages start out as a somewhat underpowered Magic Knight... until level 40, when they can create their own skillchains every two minutes. At level 30 (but not really useful until 44), a blue mage can set her support job to Thief and make use of Sneak Attack with a spell like Cannonball to ensure the spell lands with 100% accuracy and for massive damage. Which kind of makes them a Fighter, Mage, Thief at this point.
  • Scholars start out as a wimpy, sub-par spellcaster that has low skill in all forms of magic, and unlike the magically similar Red Mages, Scholars have no real way of taking a beating or giving one. This begins to change at level 10, when the job has the ability to optimize either White or Black magic, raising the low D skills to a much more impressive B+ skill. It only goes up from there, as by the time Scholar reaches level 75, the job becomes a borderline Game-Breaker with the sheer variety of magic it can use and the myriad ways it can be used. While many of the jobs feature in this trope, Scholars are the best example of it.
  • The Summoner, ironically enough for the series. First, you need to beat up at least half a dozen prospective summons to begin with in order to have enough spells. Then, most early Blood Pacts are cost-ineffective or even practically useless, and avatar melee is even worse; some players have even threatened Summoners with being kicked out of the party if they don't basically act like half-powered White Mages with big MP pools! The only thing a Summoner is wanted for is boss fights, where their 11th-Hour Superpower comes in handy... until, that is, they hit level 70, when suddenly they get most of the good damaging pacts (most of the rest being gained at 65). It's even stated by the developers that Astral Flow is meant to be used against a lot of enemies at once, which is really obvious when the 70 Blood Pacts deal damage that's comparable to it.
  • Red Mages are generally lack-luster White Mages until level 41 when they gain the spell Refresh that replenishes Magic Points when suddenly they become the pretty pretty princesses (Or to some others who play Red Mage, Buff/Cure whores) of Vana'diel. Their two-hour ability Chain Spell is almost completely useless until around level 40 when they gain more MP, a slightly better set of spells, and the ability to swap their current HP with their current MP.
  • The Puppetmaster. Known to most of the playerbase as simply "lolPUP", with standard gear it is a weak DD, can summon a healing puppet with bad AI, although it can deal good damage against weak targets; when endgame gear is applied to it, it becomes a powerhouse. A Mythic Weapon Puppetmaster with the Usukane armor set, and the right attachments (which will run you a small fortune), can have nearly the damage output of a Monk and Black Mage combined. It must be emphasized that there are probably only 2 or 3 players in the entire game that have the gear necessary to pull this off.
• Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings rewards clearing a certain Bonus Dungeon with the Anastasia, a sword that has rather subpar stats compared to what Vaan can craft by then. Thing is, every subsequent time said dungeon is cleared, all of Anastasia's stats rise by 10, including Speed, which determines how fast a character attacks. Which means that after clearing it enough times, Vaan basically becomes a living blender capable of soloing most, if not all, of the game's levels.
• Final Fantasy XIII:
  • Hope. For a portion of the game, he has low hitpoints and attack power, though he pulls some weight when hitting elemental weaknesses. Turns out, once you get him leveled high enough, he has the highest magic power of the entire party, and quickly outclasses Vanille as your best Medic once he learns Curasa and Curaja.
  • An entire role, the Saboteurs, suffer from this, as they start out slow and their debuffs aren't really game-changers. Once you get to Gran Pulse however, the game becomes more difficult and suddenly Deshell, Deprotect and especially Poison make things so much easier. Then Vanille (likely your main Sab) learns Death which, unlike in previous FF games, actually works on things now and deals good damage even if it doesn't, especially if switched to a three-Com paradigm during the casting animation.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2: Just about any monster ally with the "Late Bloomer" trait is a case of this, but none more so than Twilight Odin. Starts out weak, at Level 1, and doesn't really get any significant stat gains until Level 80. Once he gets there though, his stats skyrocket, especially Strength, which tends to go from the low 400s to nearly 1000 in the space of only 10 levels. He's also one of the few non-DLC monsters that can have the full 6 ATB segments. Granted, it costs roughly 260 Crystals to get him there, so many consider him Awesome, but Impractical, especially since his attack speed is much slower than most other high-end monsters (particularly with magic).
  • Cactuarama, a well-hidden Medic, starts out horrendously underwhelming, with low Magic and HP and the inability to learn any advanced Cure spells naturally. However, its Feral Link, Uplift, not only restores HP to everyone, but is also the only way to bestow the Reraise buff. Good infusions and the right materials will make Cactuarama a force to be reckoned with.
• Final Fantasy XIV
  • Most of the jobs start out fairly weak, but special mention goes to this game's version of Blue Mage. Starting out Blue Mages will only have a single very weak spell, and per most incarnations must get others by killing enemies and mimicking their spells. By the time they're level capped and have a completed spellbook, a Level 80 (Blue Mages are held back by 10 levels of current content for a reason) Blue Mage can out-damage a fully geared level 90 DPS, take a beating better than a tank, and heal themselves to full for a pittance of mana, while having a massive list of spells for buffing, debuffing, and even instantly killing entire groups of same-level enemies. A Blue Mage that knows what they're doing can solo at-level dungeons meant for 4 players and have an easier time of doing such than they should.
  • Conjurer/White Mage slips into this around level 30 when other healing jobs come into play, as the pure healing they put out is less important than the shielding provided by a Scholar, or the buff cards provided by an Astrologian. Around level 60 however when the White Mage gets more tools, their pure healing becomes so strong you can overlook their lack of utility. And by level 74 when the White Mage has had their offensive spells upgraded and unlocked Afflatus Misery, they bring an entirely different kind of utility; raw damage output that puts the other two healers to shame, all while making sure their party can stay alive with the massive numbers and ease of use on their healing spells while Scholar and Astrologian often have to sacrifice their damage dealing to make sure the party is alive and shielded/card buffed.
• Final Fantasy Tactics:
  • The Calculator is the slowest class in the game, and thus the slowest to develop its skills. Once the class is mastered (and all Calculatable spells learned), the skills learned from the class make it the best secondary class in the game, to the point where one well-rounded Math Skill user virtually guarantee victory against absolutely anything the game can throw at you, and the rest of the team may as well stand around using Accumulate.
  • Closely related, the Bard and Dancer classes were extremely weak. But their abilities happen so frequently (sometimes two or three times per command action), and they get experience each time their abilities activate, meaning they both have a habit of power-levelling. Combining these Skills with a Calculator results in game-crushing power in a very small number of fights.
  • A bonus character you can recruit is Cloud Strife from FFVII, who starts off way back at level 1, even though you're relatively far into the game when he can be recruited. Even after being leveled up, he probably doesn't seem like anything special; he's a good physical fighter, but you've got better ones, especially since his special attacks require him to use the fairly weak Materia Blade. And many of his special attacks, including almost all the powerful ones, are too slow to be really useful. But not all of them; Finishing Touch is fairly quick, and it's a real Game-Breaker: it has 100% accuracy, and inflicts a random selection of Stop, Petrify, or Instant Death. Even the least desirable outcome, Stop, puts an enemy out of action long enough for another character to take them out.
  • Ramza's Squire class is also like this, only it gets more advanced depending on how far you are in the game. In chapter one, the only difference between it and the standard Squire is that it can equip robes but not axes and it gets the "Chant"^note which heals HP at the cost of inflicting half the healing on Ramza, while Ramza likely has the HP to take the blow better than whoever is being healed, but it's inferior to almost any other option for healing, but acceptable in a pinch and "Tailwind"^note increase speed by 1, actually somewhat decent abilities. In chapters two and three, Ramza's Squire gains a few new skills, better stats, and the ability to equip heavy armor and shields. By chapter four, however, Ramza's Squire class gains an ability that lets him temporarily boost all of his stats, has some of the best overall stats in the game, can equip Knight Swords (among the strongest weapons in the game), and can learn Ultima, making it one of the best classes in the game.
• Morphers in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance have a gimmick where they can shapeshift into monsters and harness their abilities for themselves, not unlike a Blue Mage. The problem though is that the power of this job corresponds to the power of the monsters you had captured, meaning early game captures become rather useless fairly quickly. However, if one invests huge amounts of time and money into feeding their captured monsters with items, their stats will grow to absurdly high sizes (read: 999) and turn any Morpher into a Master of All.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2: The Sequencer Knightsword and the Peytral Armor can be obtained pretty early in the game, and usually they'll start off fairly weak. However, the sword and armor add a point to their respective attack and defense when an opportunity command is utilized in battle, and they can accumulate up to 99 points to get a total of 131 attack and 127 defense — compare the next best Knightsword and Heavy Armor, at 72 attack and 58 defense, respectively. This crosses over into Game-Breaker in that your characters don't have to equip them to get the points, and it works retroactively, so if you were to work up to 99 opportunity commands from the get-go...
• Dissidia Final Fantasy:
  • Onion Knight works quite similarly to his original Final Fantasy III incarnation. His default attacks are weak and hard to connect with, but as he levels up he gains the ability to chain them into other attacks and becomes highly versatile.
  • Firion. At the start, he has exactly one HP attack (i.e. how you kill things, for those unfamiliar with the battle system): a projectile of medium speed with a charge time. As he levels up though and masters his Bravery attacks he learns the ability to chain them into Double Trouble, and learns the HP attacks Weaponsmaster and Lord of Arms, turning him into a mid-range god.
  • Gabranth. At the start of the match, he's severely underpowered, with a limited moveset and no HP-damaging attacks. However, upon entering EX Mode, he gains an entirely different moveset with multiple high-damage attacks, arguably becoming the game's strongest character second to Chaos. He is also the only character who can charge their own EX gauge at will.
  • In homage to the source game NT turns Bartz into this. Each of his attacks corresponds to a class. At the start of the match they're slower, weaker, and shorter than other attacks similar to them. Once you get enough hits with one they become "mastered" and become stronger than similar attacks, or gain more utility in a few cases. As the match goes a well used Bartz will turn from a usable weakling to a versatile threat.
• Final Fantasy Record Keeper:
  • A good number of equippable abilities start as Awesome, but Impractical due to their low usage count until you start honing them, increasing their number of uses.
  • Tyro is notorious for having an out-and-out bad stat spread and only gains usefulness with Books that give support-based Soul Breaks and support Abilities. However, he's the only character to have access to every single Record Sphere, including all Class Spheres and 6★ Ability Spheres. Pump enough Motes into him, and Tyro's stats jump significantly to put him on par with other characters.
  • As a nod to FFII's weapon skill system, Firion's Burst Soul Break command, Weapon Chain, starts off as one single weak hit, but each use adds one more hit up to a maximum of eight. Reno and Raijin also have such BSB commands; Raijin's in particular is powered up by his other BSB command, starting at 4 hits up to a maximum of 10. Meanwhile, Maria's own BSB command hits more the higher her Magic stat - at max power, she can inflict Super SB-tier damage at every turn.
  • As usual, FFIII's Onion Knight has terrible stat growth, struggling to reach 1000 HP and 50 in all stats when even the weakest mages at his level have about triple that. Level him up to 93, though, and his stats skyrocket, with a growth of 1000 HP and 40 in all other stats until level 99. With his wide range of usable abilities, you can build him into a better Tyro; while he has innate 3* ranking in all usable ability types, he needs to get the unique event-exclusive Onion Motes to unlock their respective Record Spheres and reach 5*.

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