Gau 'sucks' in 1994 when you are 10 years old and doing a blind playthrough of Final Fantasy VI.
But it's 2023, and we have 30 years of experience playing around with Rages; we have YouTube and Giant Bomb and Discord and GameFAQs. We can look into Final Fantasy VI like an extradimensional being and dissect it down to the assembly code. We can use Gau, now. We have the technology.
Gau is good. Gau is great! Gau is OP. Sure, he has 253 rages, but you only need, like, five of them. Gau can cast Meteor, Holy, Shock, Firaga/Blizzaga/Thundaga for free. And if spells are too fancy for you, he can hit like a truck.
Gau cannot fail, Gau can only be failed. All hail Gau.
monks in everquest, especially short player species, is a longstanding tradition. Bipedal rat drop kicking a dragon and having it fall over? A classic.
Monks in JRPGs can fight even when disarmed1,2, meaning when you're inevitably captured, you have someone who can just punch out the guards.
but mostly, well.
Sabin suplexed a train and I was hooked.
Footnotes:
- if you are disarmed by losing arms, that's different
- in D&D 3.5 there is a sentence that says at level 10, your fists count, *for all intents and purposes as magical weapons. Our DM took this very literally, I rolled a 1 once, and had to take a standard action to pick my hands up off the floor and re-equip them.
