Mages, wizards, sages, whats the difference

[Hinj]

Hopefully no won has already thought of this but I just don't get the difference between a Mage, Wizard, Sage? I hope that's not a stupid question.

[nocht]

sages are able to use both and spells that both cant while they can use spells that the other mage cant

[T.G. Oskar]

Hopefully no won has already thought of this but I just don't get the difference between a Mage, Wizard, Sage? I hope that's not a stupid question.

No question is stupid if it leads to knowledge, clarification, or simply put, to anything. Even if the premise may sound as such.

But, let's get to business. If you were to consider it in real life, the term "mage" and "wizard" both refer to a (hypothetical) user of magic, while a "sage" is merely an expert source of knowledge of any kind, such that it should be considered the foremost authority in the matter. A sage, though, currently stands for philosophical kinds of knowledge, as an expert source of knowledge in scientific matters would be known simply as an "expert in X", or even "the authority in X". I say this because it reflects a bit on Final Fantasy.

You'd need to see the concept of a Mage, a Wizard, and a Sage through the lens of the entire Final Fantasy series. If you go from the first games, the "Mage" is a user of a particular kind of magic: for example, a White Mage is a user of White Magic, a Black Mage is a user of Black Magic, a Red Mage uses both White and Black Magic but at a limited scale, and later on more mages appear. Likely, a Wizard would be the advanced version of that Mage, which can use stronger magic than the original Mage; a White Wizard would be capable of using the 8th level spells that a mere Mage cannot, while the Red Wizard would be capable of using the full range of spells as a White Mage and a Black Mage. A Sage in those games doesn't exist (the Red Wizard is pretty much the Sage), and it's mostly relegated as an NPC.

As the game progresses, the distinctions begin to waver. The Wizard's original intention drops, and it goes a bit into obscurity while the Sage emerges as a real class. All Mages slowly acquire the ability (depending on the game) to learn the highest level of spells of their own kind. Final Fantasy III properly introduces the Sage, which is capable of using all kinds of magic (White, Black, and even the newly introduced Summon magic); the NES version made it the most powerful mage (dwarving even the Devout, the Magus and the Evoker in their respective strengths), but in the DS version it only merely made it the user of all magic, while making the former three the best users of their respective magics.

In FFIV, which is the current theme here, the term "Wizard" has already faded into obscurity, and the two mages which do exist (the White Mage and the Black Mage) are capable of learning the strongest spells in their list (Rosa can learn Arise and Holy, Rydia can learn Meteo), while Tellah as a Sage can learn both kinds of White and Black Magic and can even cast a random spell of the list, but has a supremely low amount of MP (enough to be unable to cast Meteo by himself, and certainly enough to be unable to use spells consecutively)

So, in a nutshell: a mage can cast a spell of a single "school" (except for Red Mages which draw from two), a wizard is a stronger kind of mage of the same "school", and a sage can cast from all "schools" but usually tends to falter in the amount of spells it can cast from each.