While watching casual streams of a retro video game, one thing I often do is I inform the player of things that they are supposed to know from having read the instruction manual - which, 9 times out of 10, they don't possess. Video games of the past expected players to do some reading before playing, and some, especially RPGs before thorough tooltips became standard, expected players to refer to provided charts when making shopping decisions.
Recently, I did this while watching someone play Final Fantasy IV, and I noticed something interesting:
The Dark Knight is listed as being able to equip a whole lot of things that he actually can't. Frankly, a lot of it is clearly bogus (Bow and Arrows were listed for the Dark Knight but not the Paladin, for example), but of interest to me is the late game armor. The Dark Knight is listed as being allowed to equip all the non-paladin-specific heavy armors and shields.
The Lunarian Shuffle has a policy of deferring to the original's choices for balance and design whenever it is reasonable to do so. This is why getting the Adamant Armor always involves turning in a Pink Tail from the final dungeon, for example. In this case, it's not clear what that means, though - the game's ROM disagrees with Squaresoft's own claims. So I think I am justified to pick whichever version I feel is best.
I'll go ahead and try out allowing heavy armors to be equipped on Dark Knight Cecil. Perhaps this will make using him occasionally correct, whereas at present he's best as either a Valvalis attacker or a dead body. Hopefully this will make sense to the players.
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