Geomancer: Under-rated. Subtle, yet valuable. Explained well above.
Monk: Very well rounded, surprisingly so in fact. A fully-trained Monk has good commands for attacking, assisting, healing, and even reviving (*if* your fallen ally is on the same exact hieght as your Monk).
Samurai: Another great well-rounded class. With the right stat-boosting equipment, a Samurai's "Draw Out" skills can instantly take out a whole group of enemies without harming allies a bit... like a Summoner, but faster and cost-free (unless you break a sword, which is fairly uncommon). Unfortunately, they are slow as heck and don't move very far, either. Samurais have better abilities than the job itself is, so they'd be better off switching to something else once they learn them all and using the Samurai abilities as a secondary skill set.
Ninja: The perfect assassin. They are rather vulnerable beacuse of low HP, but as long as they can stay alive, they are *dangerous*. They are great for assassination missions where you have to defeat only a certain individual to win, even more so with expanded movement or height-ignoring movement abilities. Probably my favorite overall class.
Calculator: A fully trained calculator (note: takes a long while to train) with all possible magic learned (takes a really long while), then reassigned to Wizard or Summoner (for the better Magic Attack stat) or Priest job (for the extra Speed) is THE most powerful single character in the game. In fact, they pretty much break the game. There's not much challenge left when you can take out (or severely damage) every single enemy on the screen with a Holy spell while your allies get healed... in a single turn. So... I often put my Calculator to more... devious... use... Oracle-type "Ying-Yang" magic and Time Magic. Using them as a support character rather than full-out attacker gives your other characters a chance to PRETEND to be valuable to the team.
Other special combos and jobs:
Mustadio: Chemist/Engineer. Stop enemies from attacking and/or moving, heal allies. Nice support combo. T.G. Cid/Orlandu: Holy Swordsman/anything. He's tough. Really tough. At high levels, he could probably take on a field full of enemies on his own with no allies. Olan: The coolest character than doesn't stay with your team. "Galaxy Stop" is the single coolest ability in the game.
If I had to choose, I'd probably have a team full of Ninjas. Or maybe Monks (like that one battle). But the best job class is... having a team with a good mix of all of them (a cop out, yeah). And then play through again to use all the classes you didn't use the first time. :-)
Like a few others here, I'd recommend IX first, because it's a nice summation of "classic FF", has some cool old-school elements with flashier graphics that might not put him off as much if he's not into old-school looks. It's a nice, neat definition of the series as a whole. But my first was actually VII, so that would be my second choice.
Really, all are good games and are worth playing, but it really depends on where he's coming from. If he likes old-school graphics, then old school is cool. If he like realistic human graphics, maybe X would be better. If he likes cyberpunk style, then maybe VII is best. If he likes strategy games, give him FFT.
But IX would be my first recommendation for a new player without knowing him, and VII my second.
No, I haven't yet, and I probably never will. First, I don't know Japanese, except for a few words. And so much of FF games are tied to reading text and getting a lot of the story and battle system through it. I don't think I'd enjoy it half as much if I couldn't read and know what I was doing and what was going on.
Plus, sometimes the American version is a little better than the original release. Sometimes the development team has had some time to fix a few bug, or in the case of some games (like FFVII), extra features are added (like the extra weapons).
So, despite having to wait longer, I feel it's generally worth it.
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