Unless you’re a player like me who really likes to go through RPGs with as little reliance on magic as possible, then you probably play your own Final Fantasy games with a good enjoyment of spell-casting. Preferably, I like to fight; give me a cast of four Black Belts and after one turn, I will have hit the ogres about 72 times for close to a billion HP damage, terminated.
But today, I’m going to talk about the class that I don’t really use – the Mages, and then make a brilliant analogy about how it relates to my career and I.
The Black Mage is likely the most popular of mages, likely thanks to some stupid webcomic that injected a little bit of personality into the weakest, most pathetic fighting class in the history of video games, or the simple fact that the player just simply likes the idea of using magical spells to obliterate the opposition. I admit, as much gratification I get by watching my army of Black Belts swing their fists twice each, for it to somehow register with 66 hits 778 dmg terminated, there’s something to be said about how the Black Mage shoots fire from his palms once, and in single-file line, nine imps disintegrate, one by one.
The White Mage is an oft-understood class. Most tend to assume whitey is the lame one, who also seems to be pretty androgynous, or plain straight up female, but I have to guess that it’s just a typical effeminate, Yoshitaka Amano-inspired male character. Compared to the Black Mage, the White Mage can actually wield a hammer or Masamune and not be a total dunce. Most most importantly, the White Mage’s ability to use support spells to heal the party, revive fallen members, and remove negative status ailments makes them an essential cog to really have a chance to survive.
The Red Mage is an intriguing one. The best way to simply describe Red is with a simple characteristic – “Jack of all trades, master of none.” The Red Mage can fight fairly adequately with swords, adequately capable of wearing mid-range armor, but most importantly, adequately capable of casting white and black magic. Red will never have the opportunity to utilize anything high-level in either class, but combined with their fighting ability, and the likely growth of his teammates, it’s a pretty moot point.
So here’s the analogy:
White Mages are Print Designers.
Black Mages are Web Designers.
Red Mages are what are popularly seen as “hybrid designers.”
So okay, sure, I’m a White Mage. The least popular of the mage classes. Whatever, that’s fine by me, because popularity has never been something that I have actively sought out.
The way society is now, with the massive strides the internet has taken these days, the demand for Black Mages has exponentially increased. Advertising on the internet, e-commerce, and all other modern web jargon is the “new hotness” these days, with numerous companies looking to hop aboard and ride the magic carpets of popular trends.
However, lately there has been a disturbing trend that companies all across Atlanta, and I’m led to believe across the rest of the country are following, which is the fervent pursuit of Red Mages. Often called “hybrid designers,” companies across America are salivating at the thought of designers that can fill two voids with one roster spot. Designers that can build, pre-flight, and press-check collateral materials in the morning, and then come home and blow their evenings updating websites that utilize Cold Fusion, ASP, and PHP respectively.
And here’s where I come to my unabashed conclusion, based more on frustration than logic:
There is no such thing as a “master” Red Mage/Hybrid Designer.
Just as the Red Mage cannot use NUKE and LIF2, there aren’t designers who are masters with InDesign as they are masters with PHP. And if there are those who do exist, I have yet to meet a single one, and I like to think that I know a pretty good deal of graphic designers in my own little world.
I have applied with several, and been turned down by every company that has been looking for a hybrid designer, because I am clearly not good enough for their standards. I am not going to dilute myself – I know that I am a White Mage. If it can be printed, I can create it. I can bring the fallen back to life, but I will not be able to make icicles fall onto my adversaries. I can BS well enough on the web-side of the working world to get my foot in the door with certain companies, but certainly not enough to apparently claim a full-time working position any time soon. Like today, I finagled my way through several XML scripted pages, and figured out some fixes to some client demands. But would I want to do it for a living? Fuck no.
The pursuit of the world’s greatest Red Mages is Corporate America’s way of being greedy. They don’t want to pay a White Mage and a Black Mage to do their bidding for them when they can seek out the employment of a Red Mage for less. The roster spot saved by employing mediocrity is obviously saved for Thief classes. Or maybe the Thief is the one in charge all along? Either way, by putting dollar signs and the typical rhetoric bullshit thinking of saving money ahead of production and output, a company is made weaker.
Hybrid designers don’t really exist. At least not to the level that hiring companies are seeking.
And for the record, I’m quite happy being a White Mage. The world existed and ran pretty smoothly for quite a few decades without the internet, and I’m pretty sure it could do it again, when the world inevitably loses its own head and the internet maybe dies. Unless you’re a huge dork like me, you probably needed a White Mage to make it through Final Fantasy – the ability to use cure magic and the EXIT spell are so convenient throughout gameplay, but nowhere is it truly necessary to have to be able to use black magic, when Black Belts can beat the ever-living tar out of any bad guy in the game.
