Howdy y'all. Just letting you know that I'm back from the woods and humming and hawing over this still. I have a format I'm pretty happy with now so I hope to have the energy and mental capacity to sit down and start making it playable.
I'm still using almost all of the default VX Ace maps, which is probably a turn-off (especially when I've used a few in event games... repeatedly...). But, hopefully, with all the tileset edits and all the personality I hope to inject into the world, it'll be worth the time saved and still be a fun experience.
I keep going back and marveling at how good my class design is in this. I'm really excited to make some dungeons and monsters that actually put it to the test. A lot of the reformatting I've done is making sure the player gets all the classes in the first half-2/3 (unless you REALLY speed through and purposefully skip stuff) so that I don't need to worry about the player not having options for the lategame. There's some oddities -- you only have one Water class for a very long time, for example -- but I think it'll all work out with how I'm designing the world now.
Also, every town and most dungeon types have all their music sorted. Looking forward to people getting lost in this world ~ I've been playing Octopath 1 and wow, what a disjointed game, but at least the visuals and music make it tolerable. Rough note to end on, so uh... idk praise be to Dagon.