The mage does in fact start with a magic ability, he’s the only character whose base attack consumes energy points (it’s also stronger than a basic sword attack, for instance).
For the cleric I think I will do that, but I will have to carefully rework the game’s difficulty progression (it will take way more than the few hours I took just for that Saturday night). The basic idea for not giving her a heal spell immediately was to make the beginning of the game a little bit harder but make her more useful as the game progresses.
Also she needed a base attack in case anyone wanted to play with 3 clerics. One of the earliest ways to play Final Fantasy 1 in “hard mode” was to pick 4 white mages for your party. That was my reasoning 😁
Thanks a lot for detailing your thoughts, I’ll use this game mostly to improve my new dungeon crawler engine, so your feedback is very valuable!