koima57: Hmmm FF2 was too easy to exploit, hitting your own characters... FF5 jobs were cool to play but i found the story unappealing after the epic fourth with plenty of characters come and go, 3 world maps, dramatic sequences....
Hitting your own characters is not the way to go in FF2; more max HP can actually be detrimental. You might have heard about a powerful weapon (at least on certain high HP enemies) called the Blood Sword. You see, that weapon does more damage (and heals the user more) to enemies with more HP, and this extra damage is not affected by defense.
Now, it turns out that many enemies (including the final boss) have attacks that work the same way. Therefore, as your HP increases, the damage these enemies deal will *also* increase, as will the amount of healing the enemies get. Hence, with more HP, it will be harder to kill these enemies, and it will take more casts of Cure to heal that damage. Then, of course, if you win, characters with low remaining HP will get even more HP, and the cycle continues. That heavy armor you are most likely wearing (because you didn't know better) won't help, and will actually hurt you by penalizing your evasion, preventing you from avoiding these attacks.
Evasion is *very* important. Aside from the situation I just mentioned, evasion affects initiative, ambush chances, and the chance of running away. With low evasion:
* Enemies will routinely ambush you, which can get quite frustrating.
* Even once you get to enter your commands, the enemies will get *another* turn before you *finally* get to act.
* If you try to run, you are not going to succeed.
* Against those enemies, it is quite possible that you will end up with a party wipe before you *get* to act.
With high evasion:
* You will routinely ambush the enemies.
* Furthermore, you will get another round of attacks before the enemies get to act.
* If you try to run, you will succeed on the first attempt (99% chance per character, I believe), unless the battle is a formation that you can't ever run from.
* You can easily win without the enemies getting a chance to act.
In other words, you can break FF2 if you know what you're doing, but the obvious method of hitting yourself to gain HP is not that method.
As for FF4 versus FF5, I should point out that:
* Story, if you are interested in it, is only good the first playthrough. On later playthroughs, the story is no longer that entertaining. On the other hand, FF5's jobs continue to be interesting, as there are insteresting and viable setups that you probably did not use on the first playthrough.
* FF5 also has 3 world maps, or 5 if you count the two underwater maps, so there.
* Problem with characters coming and going is that, at any given point in the game, you are forced to use a specific party setup; FF5 lets you choose your setup, so different playthroughs can be different.
Edit: Why is *this* post, of all posts, "low rated"? What did I do wrong here? (If there's a mistake in this post, please point it out.)