A Stupid Idea

For some reason, one thing I absolutely love to death is JRPG tropes. I’m talking stuff like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, stuff concerning party composition, storyline tropes, and all that jazz.

It’s apparently gone so far that I want to write some MLP JRPG thing. It includes all this party composition, enemy tropes, and stuff like that. This may be because I’m playing through Dragon Quest VI and I honestly love it a lot.

I’m probably going to parody clichés, because, let’s face it, it gets ridiculous sometimes. But still, I have a random itching to write a Mane 6 story that is based on JRPGs, and I’ve gone so far to assign classes to them, because hyperfixation probably.

Twilight Sparkle’s a dead ringer for a mage, perhaps even a sage (though sages usually aren’t available right away). I’m sure she’d have a ton of MP and a vast array of spells (both useless and useful) to choose from. Though obviously, she isn’t the strongest pony, and would likely be a circumstance damage dealer, much like mages are in the first place.

Fluttershy is the priestly type, and it honestly just feels right. She’s super helpful and would surely help her companions out of a vast array of tight spaces. Naturally, she’s the weakest, but she’s always there to help.

Rainbow Dash is the thief, fast, there to cause a bunch of problems, and can really pack a punch if she tried. Unfortunately, brute force is pretty much all she’s got. Thieves are usually there to cause cheap damage on the enemy, and usually have a selection of skills to mess with the enemy a fair bit. However, I feel like that when she outlives her usefulness in a fight, she really outlives it, much like thieves.

Pinkie Pie is pretty much the jester archetype, while not a common JRPG class, it does exist in Dragon Quest VI, and is known as the gadabout. Pinkie Pie is the type of pony to be freakishly good at one or two incredibly wacky things, but not much practical or useful. Sure, she’d be fast, and she’d have a fine selection of spells (most of which involve breaking reality), but the spells we’re talking are not really useful in the long run. In DQVI, the gadabout also has a chance to throw a turn, and I feel like Pinkie would absolutely throw a turn for no good reason. However, Pinkie would have one incredibly random thing that she’d do very well.

Rarity strikes me as a minstrel/jack-of-all-trades character. She’d have a little bit of everything, decent spells, decent attack, decent HP/MP, but nothing incredibly fantastic. In Dragon Quest IX the most jack-of-all-trades character is actually the luminary, and Rarity feels like the one who’d go out of her way to steal the show. Luminaries in DQIX have a wide array of abilities that make the show about them, and I’m sure Rarity would have those too.

Finally, there’s Applejack, who is a no-nonsense tank. She’d be the warrior/paladin type with a lot of abilities that have her taking a metric crapton of damage. She has a ton of strength and defense, though she probably wouldn’t be a slouch on speed, either (though probably still the slowest), which is unusual for the warrior characters. This dangerous trifecta is balanced out by her not being good at literally anything else. She’s there to take a hit and dish it out, and she doesn’t go much beyond that.

---

As you can see, I’ve thought way too much about this and actually want to write an RPG-like story using these classes. The only thing holding me back is that this a video game type, not a story, and that I probably won’t make a dent in it due to my track record of writing long adventure stories (which to say there is none).

I’d have to do something to not make it feel like a video game, but damn if it wouldn’t be cool.

And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie