Character Comparisons

[Tycho]

There are too many factors to write a comprehensibe guide about that, I mean a real guide, not opinions stated as facts, if Tycho gets in here, he'll make our brains explode.

;p
Eh, I think this one isn't all that subjective. The animation thing is based on speed (there might be errors), and most of it is from Kefka's research.
Still, I don't really believe ST tried to balance the game. By looking at the games, it seems like their way of developing would be something like this;

"Hmm, Hunters rocked too much in DC because they could use awesome RA weapons. Let's make all of them suck as compared to Rangers now, by making all good guns RA-exclusive, and by giving some of the best HU weapons in the game usable by Rangers as well. Hey, how about we give all Rangers a decently good ATP at L200 as well? Wouldn't it rock if a RAcast with Daylight Scar could (max ATP, 100% to the applicable attribute, L30 S/D) could do 92% of the damage HUcast could do that way, while still being able to use kick-ass guns?"
"YEAH! Great idea! That'd effectively make three of the Hunters vastly inferior to Rangers! We could laugh at everyone that's still going to use a Hunter like on DC, gahaha."
"Indeed. Now how shall we balance the genders?"
"Well. We cannot make them equal, that'd be boring."
"I guess... then shall we try to balance them well?"
"No way dude, we're Sonic Team. We fail at making games, everyone knows that."
"That's a good point. Well then, what gender shall we make better?"
"Hmm. I like girls better. ._."
"I suppose that settles it, I'm not going to work overtime to argue about stupid game mechanics noone cares about."
"Then, in what way shall we make female characters better?"
"Dude, how about we just make some great female-exclusive items, give female characters better animations for Katana, Knuckles, Claws, Musashi, Slicers, Handguns, Rifles, Launchers, Shots, Rods and Cards, and give the male characters Resta abilities that practically require them to touch their team mates?"
"Okay, that'd probably work. I didn't like how FOnewm could attain a huge Resta range on DC, he's so ugly."
"Yeah, I agree... Same for HUmar and RAmar. I think we should make them suck, it would ruin the visual appeal of the game if a lot of people online used these classes."
"Like the graphics are that much better than they were on DC. But I already got HUmar and RAmar down, by not giving them both S/D and J/Z. I think RAmarl looks cute; so despite her being neither human nor Force I gave her L20 techniques, instead of the L15 ones she's supposed to have."
"Jeez, you make all the classes you personally like too good, L20 Resta/S/D/J/Z + best HU weapons and best RA weapons + good class for Berserk/Demon's' just doesn't sound right. But can't we penalize FOnewm for being ugly or something? I really hate that class."
"Uhuh, me too.. I'll make sure he's vastly inferior to FOnewearl by giving her an MST such that she can still do an equal amount of damage using Gi- and Ra- techniques."
"Gaha, solid plan. But... Shouldn't we give FOnewearl some disadvantages as well? I mean, she really does own too much already."
"Ehh, do I really have to? Aw, I use one myself, I wouldn't like for her to get weaker."
"Meh, it shouldn't be too obvious. How do you play your FO?"
"I support full-time, duh. I implented this 'damage cancel' algorithm to make sure that nuking absolutely really sucks, and Forces aren't supposed to be able to melee."
"I'll give her 'disadvantages' like low ATP then, that OK with you?"
"That's brilliant. Let's make the chara select screen say that meleeing is better for newbie players though, so my FOnl can still be better than a lot of other players."
"That's a good idea. You should only play in the Japanese servers though, because gaijin suck; and so you can pretend you don't see their AR/CE problems. It's easier to drink coffee than to fix problems!"
"Yeah yeah. I pwned them already, by giving the translators instructions to badly translate or typo ギルタブリル, オモチャオ, ニヨイボウ, 蒼黒のニョイボウ, テルジス, チェーンソード, ブルーマージ, サンテミリオン, シャンベルタン, and some more I forgot about."
"So then at least they have good translations for most of the items."
"It's incrediby hard to badly translate katakana names. We still managed to give them short badly translated descriptions for all items though."
"That's mean, you already made sure Europe did not get PSO+, or any download quests or game-save cards in episode III."
"Aw, don't be like that. I may be a racist, sexist and a crappy game developer, but don't think that badly of me. But please let's get back on topic."
"You're just trying to change the subject. I won't think that badly of you though, because I heard that for the first time you gave the foreigners an item the Japanese community did not get."
"Oh, that mag? Well, it looks exactly like regular mags, except that it has a giant 'Y!' on it. It's just a mag-ad, for some foreign company. It's even uglier than Tellusis."
"The mag for which you just reused Excalibur's skin? That one was pretty lame, yeah. Didn't the guy that made it make it even better than the SonicTeam mag?"
"WHAT did you say?!"
"Well... he did. Maybe we should make a new item to make up for it."
"I'm not making another weapon, it's too tedious to make visible items. You should make it an armor instead, we can skip out on visuals for those."
"Then what do we call it? 'Sonicteam Armor' or something?"
"Sounds like a perfect name to me. It should be really good as well. Like, 'created for the most dire of circumstances'."
"Gahah, okay. I'll make it later on, when I feel like it. Maybe in a few years, it's not like our promise of 150 new items for EP4 meant the community is getting them in the first five years of the game's release."
"Yes, indeed. It's a pain we still need to release so many new items though... You know I'm blaming it on you for copy-pasting the EP4 drop charts for VH Viridia to all IDs for Very Hard and Ultimate, before making a few slight changes. You could have done better for Normal and Hard as well, then just thinking 'oh, let's make all Rappies drop Rappy stuff, let's make the rare enemies drop Photon Crystals, and let's throw in some crappy weapons and the best partisan in the game for the regular enemy drops to make it look less obvious it's all copy-pasted'."
"Yeah yeah, shut up about that already. It isn't like you tried hard to make complicated patterns for the hit percentage odds, the rare enemy appearance rates, the attribute attachment patterns and the drop-anything rates? You only put some time into the graphics for this new episode, because that's all 99% of the community is going to notice."
"Hey, it's working, isn't it? Besides, where's that coffee girl?"
"She's slacking off, just like certain other people in this company. Weren't you more into wine though? I mean, only a drunkard would name all of the new bosses after wines..."
"Whatever. I think that girl played a FOmarl... Maybe I'll put some time into creating new unique FOmarl animations that suck worse than any other character's animation in the game, for Sabers, Knuckles, Daggers, Swords, Partisans, Handguns, Rifles, Mechguns, Canes, Wands, and Rods. Sure, some might end up just being slower versions of existing animations, but who cares."
"Then what about Katana, Claws, Double Sabers, Musashi, Launchers, Shots and Cards?"
"I never made any good FOmarl-usable Katana or Shots, all Claws and Cards just suck anyway, and she cannot use any Musashi or Launchers at all. About the Double Sabers, the male/HUcaseal animations were better than the female animation anyway. This leaves her with one weapon class; Slicers. Her animation for those is even slightly better than that of the other females (but worse than the males', kekeke), so she can just use Flight Cutter, Diska of Braveman or Rainbow Baton all the time."
"Honestly, you didn't have to do that. About the Slicers I mean; despite the fact they were slow anyway this would mean there is still a way for FOmarl to 'melee'."
"Yes, that's why I'm calling her a melee Force. I mean, with the lowest MST (meaning least nuke damage and weakest Resta) among Forces it's hard to say she's meant to nuke. She can support despite the Resta-problem I guess, but by calling her a melee FO everyone will start using her for something she isn't really good at. At least she didn't get the male Resta range as well."
"Yayz, who cares. HAY LOOK, A SMILING RACAST!"

I couldn't think of a good ending, not expecting anyone to read all of it anyway. I think the androids - fleshies issue is one of the only things Sonic Team balanced well (for Rangers that is). I'm starting to think RAcaseal might not be as good as RAcast, but both RAmarl's techniques (which, again, are nice for Berserk or maybeh Spirit) and Demon's-that-did-not-get-owned and RAcas*'s traps and bonuses to status-ailment/drain specials are pretty nice.
Sorry for the long post, I felt like it.

I think only two people should reply to this: Kefka, and Tycho. And me :D

You seem to be right. :3