Decided to go with the following:

Van- Bushi/Knight

Balthier- Shikari/Foebreaker

Fran- Archer/Red Battlemage

Penelo- Monk/Black mage

This leaves Ashe and Basch.

Ended up giving Basch Uhlan only to find out that it's a class best paired with Archer. Are there any significant downsides to having him go Uhlan/Archer with Fran already being Archer/Red mage? Also any advice for what to do with Ashe? I'm probably putting too much thought into all of this but I'm seriously considering restarting to get things right.

Read this thread just after I finished Raithwall's tomb. Man my jobs are wayyy out there in comparison. Oh well, should be interesting at least!

Also, 16 year old me really liked the game when it came out but I honestly did not expect to be having so much fun with it. I'm very happy I bought this. Penelo is still annoying but not as much as I made her out to be in my head.

Hopefully I'm still as infatuated with it at the end of the game.

Since we're using this thread to post party combos, I bought the guidebook (love having those treasure maps), and this is what they recommend:

I went with it because I mistakenly thought the boards overlaid and that there was this whole geometry optimization issue to consider. In reality it's two separate boards, and the detached tiles can really only be connected with Espers, so it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.

@dleo: No real downsides to doubling up on archer. Just bear in mind that characters of the same class share the same board. So if Basch unlocks a quickening on that board it won't be available to Fran anymore. Make sure you split the espers and quickening between them in an effective way.

You need a white mage still, so Ashe is going to have to be it. Good news is her magic stat is great, so she fits any mage role well. You can either pair her White Mage with Time Mage or Machinist based on what you have. Both are fairly weak individual classes compared to the other classes in the game, so it's not so bad losing one in your overall party. What you choose will depend on what you want. Machinist will make your white mage a stronger combatant and time mage will make it the most effective support combo.

Machinists guns don't scale on stats which sucks for Ashe because she has nice stats, but since white mage doesn't get battle lore it actually works out to make up for the white mages weak combat presence. Machinist White Mage combo also allows for the character to wear dark robes that boost dark damaged by 50% and rock a dark gun for very heavy hits that never miss. However, since it's a white mage it's important to keep in mind they won't be shooting that often anyway.

Time Mage is just a good supporting role with access to a variety of spells other characters don't have. Slapping this on a character who is already spending 90% of their time in q support role works out well. And they can still use crossbows, so they give white mage a decent option between spells.

Honestly if I were you I'd do Uhlan/Time Mage and WhiteMage/Machinist. Don't bother pairing Uhlan with Archer if you're already using archer. RedMage Archer is a stronger combo, so most people I've seen aren't running their archer on Uhlan unless they're doing Blackmage/Redmage anyway. If you want to double up on archer, I'd do WhiteMage/TimeMage on Ashe and Uhlan/Archer on Basch.

Interesting how the main topic of discussion for this game has been the class system and how to best optimize it, when the 4x speed option renders it completely moot. It doesn't matter what setup you have -- you will inevitably end up overleveled and will Half-Minute Hero anything that crosses your path.

I don't think the original game was ever balanced for you to clear out every single map because of the absurd amount of time that'd take, but in Zodiac Age, it's a requirement as you'll miss out on tons of techs and spells otherwise.

It's pretty amusing going into a new boss at 4x speed and having to figure out why it's not dying. The last boss I fought absorbed all elements, so I had to unequip my elemental weapons before it died 3 secs later. During the entire fight it was impossible for me to die. Sure, there's always a slight chance a single status effect will screw up everything, but if you make sure to spread Stop, Disable, and Confuse immunities among your characters, the chances of that happening are practically zero.

It's especially satisfying once you have your Gambits set up in such a way you can actually have a character sitting at <10% HP using Souleater, while equipped with the Bubble Belt for double HP, and using Balance to inflict >9000 damage. Not to mention I constantly have Reflectga up as my healer has an Opal Ring and can penetrate Reflect, while Balance and Black Magic can still be reflected off the party onto the enemy. That's potentially 40k damage with Balance when you have a guest in your party.

Seriously, I don't think any other RPG has ever made me feel this powerful before. Good stuff.

But for what it's worth, here's my setup:

Fran
Uhlan/Time Mage

Ashe
Bushi/Black Mage

Penelo (wish I'd picked Balthier, but oh well)
Monk/Red Mage

Basically, I picked the weapons/melee classes I liked the most, and added magic to them. I thought the White Mage would be overkill as a Monk/Red Mage already gets access to nearly all White Magic, while also having access Black, Time, and high-level Arcane Magic.

Honestly, you really can't go wrong as long as you have a good healer in your party, but if you just have Foe 100% HP > Steal set up, you'll be swimming in cash and will have 99x of every single restorative/remedy anyway. Even if you played the game with 3 Shikari and no subclasses, you'd be just fine.

Enjoyed reading your builds. After unlocking the second License Board and thinking hard on it, here's my final team. I even named my builds: Spoiler blocks only for Esper unlocks and one weapon name.

While I took note of the suitability of stats and job-pairing versatility, I stuck strongly to thematic ties in characterisation. While I tried to use as many Jobs as possible, I wanted to make both Basch and Ashe knights so I dropped Machinist to compensate; I don't particularly enjoy guns in this game and it doesn't seem particularly interesting or useful - outside of the Esper-unlock for high-tier Time Magick.

I spent way too long deciding on the job pairings, but I actually found it to be pretty fun trying to find a way to use all the jobs and also make good pairings. I ended up going the route of making each character more versatile rather than specialized.