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| What big eyes you have, Mr. Chocobo. |
So, in 1992, a game called Final Fantasy V came out in Japan. It was part of that big old Final Fantasy series and it was very good... but in hindsight, it was a finale for both North America and Japan. For Japan, this was sort of the end of "classic" Final Fantasy, it being the last game that series director Hironobu Sakaguchi actually... directed. Two years after this was Final Fantasy VI, which marked a sudden change in tone and style that would later be reflected and refined in Final Fantasy VII and fucking explode and become Bigger Than Jesus. But that's a story for another time. Over here... nothing happened in 1992. V was skipped over, the third game in the series to have this happen to it. The other two, Final Fantasies II and III, were long in the tooth by the time #1 made it over here in 1990. V did get over here eventually, however. It was one of the first major big fan-translated ROMs back in like 1998 or so (which is how I first got at it, in 2000 or so when I was a teenage ROM fiend) and officially translated in 1999 and bundled with VI for the Final Fantasy Anthology on Playstation. Unfortunately that translation is... well, it's shit. They translated an enemy called "Wyvern" as "Y Burn". I am not making this up. Later still, in 2006, V got remade for the Game Boy Advance. Now it had four all new classes to play with, a bonus dungeon filled to the brim with super enemies and a new super boss, and a GOOD translation! Later ports for iOS and Android followed in 2013, and a Steam version of those in 2015. The Steam version being what I played this year. Got all that? Great!
Now, Final Fantasy V's main method of character progression was the Job System, a mechanic introduced in Final Fantasy III. The idea is, at certain points in the story, magical crystals grant you the ability to change into certain "jobs". So you've got straightforward stuff like Knights and magic users, more flavorful stuff like Berserkers or Ninjas, and then just plain weird shit like Geomancer or Dancer. You unlock four sets of these jobs within the first half of the game, and then can go wild with them. Each job earns ability points after winning battles, and once you get enough you learn some ability that class has; magic for a Black Mage, or the Throw command for a Ninja. The kicker is that you can set the abilities you learn as a sub-ability for any other job. It's possible to get a Knight that casts magic, or a mage that punches the shit out of things with the power of a Monk. Clever mastery of this system can turn your party into walking gods that tear through anything... but the Four Job Fiesta isn't about learning every ability and blasting through. No, it's far more complex than that. The Four Job Fiesta is a challenge run in which, of the 20-odd Jobs available in the game, you only get to use four. You don't even get to pick, exactly; you tweet to a Twitter bot called Gilgabot that manages the Fiesta whenever you unlock a new set of jobs, and Gilgabot assigns you one of those jobs. You can switch who has what job, so long as your team has one of everything you've been assigned, and there's plenty of interesting variants as well to make the thing tougher on yourself; having the roll come from any eligible job and not specifically from a set you just unlocked, for example. Or Berserker Risk, which we'll get to. There's a lovely interview that US Gamer did with the creator of the FJF that you can find here that explains more about all this, but the point is that the Job System makes Final Fantasy V such a goddamn open-ended and accessible experience that it's still possible to clear it with such restrictions. Which I've done a few times before, and I did again this year! So that's what this writeup is. A trip report of my experience with Final Fantasy V in the Fiesta this year.
So, here's what I'll do. Final Fantasy V is... a special game. In most other RPGs you'd just have to level up to deal with a hard boss, or change your tactics around. Final Fantasy V's bosses have certain vulnerabilities, and ones you might not even expect. Nearly everything in the game can be utterly cheesed with the right ability setup, and multiple classes can gain access to this. In my run, I was able to exploit the hell out of many of the bosses, and I took notes on how I cleared each of them. I'll go through the game boss by boss, keeping plot elements as vague as I can (since you really should play Final Fantasy V, Fiesta or no) and go into what Jobs I rolled and how I tricked the game out. Hopefully it will prove to be an interesting time. Let's get into it!
It takes about 30 minutes or so of introduction and a quick dungeon delve or two for you to encounter the power of the Wind Crystal and get your first set of jobs: Knight, White Mage, Black Mage, Blue Mage, Monk, and Thief. Of those, Blue Mage would be most desirable because it can learn certain special enemy attacks, and if you know what you are doing you can wreck this damn game with them. I rolled Blue Mage in my very first Fiesta and it was fun as all hell. This time, however, I rolled Thief. It's a class with relatively low attack and defense, but its claim to fame is stealing items. As well as letting you dash on the world map. Which, the GBA version let you do automatically and made the Thief version faster, but the Steam version doesn't have that default dash. Thank God I rolled Thief or I'd be going way slower. To get the jobs, I had to fight a boss called Wingraptor. It's a big bird that alternates between attacking with a multi-target wind attack that deals 25% of your HP in damage, and turtling up. You just attack and defend. That's it. The same goes for the next boss, Karlbaros. You can't actually buy weapons for a full party of thieves at this point in the game, so two characters were stuck doing practically no damage with their fists. At least I had access to free Potions via stealing them from low-level enemies, so two healbots and two knife-fighters dealt with Karlbaros without too much trouble.
The next area is the Ship Graveyard, a spooky place with skeletons and whatnot. As an aside, in 2000 on the ROM I couldn't get past this because there's a point where you go underwater. My emulator couldn't do transparencies so I didn't know what to do until I looked up stuff online and realized you could turn off the background layer to remove the water. Ah, classic. It's here that I screwed up a little and made things harder on myself. See, I had a handy-dandy guide to what you could steal from enemies, and the ones in the Ship Graveyard didn't appear to have anything worthwhile. Unfortunately it turns out that some of them drop items when you win a battle, and that's different from stealing. I could have had some more daggers for my thieves. Instead I had to fight the Siren boss with half of my party doing pitiful damage. Thankfully there was a way past this, albeit a silly one. Siren is a boss that shuffles between "normal" status and "undead" status, and in undead status she spams powerful magic at your face. Being undead in a Final Fantasy game, though, healing actually harmed her. I hucked dozens of potions that I had stolen at her face for 50 damage a pop and somehow managed to pull out a victory. Very tough. At least I could buy some daggers in the next town and have an actual full offense. Which I would need for the next boss fight, against a pair of dragon poachers named Magissa and Forza. Magissa fought us solo for a bit, but after a few turns of stabbing her she summoned her buff husband and he would just straight up wreck my poor thieves with his strong attacks. The only real solution at this point was to gain a few levels. I came back after a few tries and was powerful enough to get rid of Magissa quickly, so she was out of the picture and not spamming extra attacks at me once Forza came in. With her gone, I could get into a rhythm of attacking Forza and using three characters hucking potions to heal up the ~150 damage he could do with one crushing blow. Eventually we prevailed, and got ourselves a flying dragon.
Walse Castle, home of the Water Crystal, was next up. In crisis we had to scale Walse Tower to find the Crystal, but it was guarded by a normally peaceful monster named Garula who suddenly went apeshit and attacked. This battle would have been tougher, but the thieves had an ace up someone else's sleeves to swipe. The Wyvern enemies in the tower held Mythril knives which could be stolen, and these were a significant damage upgrade for the thieves. As for Garula himself, he's the type of boss who counters your attacks with powerful ones of his own. All that really needed to be done was being cautious and not going all-out with the attacks, instead healing after his counters and going back to attacking. It was no trouble, and with him felled, we gained our Water Crystal jobs! The set this time was Red Mage, Time Mage, Summoner, Mystic Knight, and Berserker. Of those, there was really only one I could possibly get. That's right, it's Berserker. Now, a few things to explain here. Berserker is kind of a running gag in the Four Job Fiesta. It's a class that has very high physical attack power, but there's a huge drawback: you cannot control their actions at all. All they will ever do in battle is swing at a target (in the Steam version, always the nearest target) every turn, until the battle is won or they keel over at 0 HP. One of the additions you can make to your Fiesta run is a "Berserker Risk"; every 10 dollars donated via the Fiesta adds a Berserker to a pool, and those with Berserker Risk up their odds of getting multiple Berserkers on their team. This is basically a huge disadvantage for any fight where you'd like multiple people working on a strategy to take down the boss besides "hit it really hard". I got two of the damn class when I was fool enough to take on Berserker Risk one year, and it was something. So that's not what I picked this year. I went with a "No 750 Run", which basically removes all the magic-casting classes from your pool of jobs that can be rolled, because last year I got TWO Time Mages. Time Magic was ridiculously good and all, but I was all maged out and wanted something different. With No 750 in place, that took out three of the five jobs I could roll for the Water Crystal, leaving Mystic Knight and Berserker. But, with an entire damned pool of Berserkers that needed to be given out to players, the odds were way above 50/50 in favor of getting a Berserker. Thankfully, I knew my way around the game. I could deal with one Berserker, and there were even still some clever tricks to be had using one. So, now I had three Thieves and one raging animal-skin clad barbarian with a knife. Great. How is this going to go?
The very next dungeon would bestow some Fire Crystal jobs upon me if I could clear it, so that was nice. It was also very important because of one enemy lurking inside: the Poltergeist. These happy little monsters had a very special prize for my thieves to pilfer from them; Hi-Potions. A Hi-Potion heals 500 HP when used, and you can't actually buy them from stores this early in the game. It was time consuming to steal them, yes, but having them this early would prove to be a life saver. The boss, however, was the first real big challenge since Forza and Magissa. Liquid Flame swaps between three forms, and has powerful fire attacks that either do heavy single target damage or percentage-based multi-target damage. Those single target attacks were actual Fira spells, that run on MP. I actually ran this jerk out of MP fighting him, but my team was all but beaten down. The only person left alive was my Berserker, at a mere 2 HP and equipped with a hammer. Two of the forms were out of MP for their Firas, but the "humanoid" form would still be able to use its Blaze attack to hit my Berserker and end the run. So it was that I watched my berserk buffoon beat back the burning bastard with blows. He never switched back to humanoid form and I won. A small miracle. The only problem was that the castle housing the Fire Crystal was set to explode in ten minutes, and was filled with monsters. But also treasure! Very valuable treasure! I managed to grab some Elixirs, and items that had a chance to block physical attacks. (One of which, the Elven Mantle, I already had a copy of from raiding Walse Castle.) The Main Gauche was a new knife for my thieves, as were the Mage Mashers that I stole from magic using enemies along the way. With minutes to spare, I cleared out of the castle. With the Fire Crystal you have another five jobs to roll from, but you only get three right now: Geomancer, Beastmaster, and Ninja, with Ranger and Bard unlocked later. I rolled up Beastmaster, and this is where the fun really began. The Beastmaster's special ability is to "catch" monsters, and I should note that the other big RPG about catching monsters was a good five years off when Final Fantasy V came out. If you weaken a monster down to 1/8th of its HP, you can capture and store it. In a later battle you can release it for a one-time attack, and different monsters have different special abilities. Believe me, this opened up the doors to extreme shenanigans. So long as you had a handy guide to tell you all the released special attacks, and the HP needed to catch a monster, you could prep for a difficult boss and shut it down totally with little effort. Of course, with a raging madman attacking everything in sight, you needed to improvise and unequip them beforehand. But shenanigans happened almost immediately.
The next boss battle was against the summoned beast, Ifrit. He's a lot like Liquid Flame, in that he spams multi-target fire attacks and single target Fire spells. I got real lucky with my Mage Mashers here; they have a chance of casting Silence on an enemy with a hit, and I managed to silence Ifrit and shut down half of his damn attack pattern. Once that was done, it was nothing to outlast him and beat him down. The problem came from the next boss fight in this area, Byblos. A beefy beast who seemed to evade a good 70% of my attacks, used status debuff spells on my team, and buffed himself to lower the damage I could do. Worst of all was his Drain spell, which took ~200 HP from a character and healed himself for the same amount. With all my miss chances and his debuffing/buffing, I couldn't do that same amount of damage before he did another Drain. I was really banging my head against this boss. The monster I chose to catch and release was a Goblin. Normally one of the weakest foes you can encounter, if you manage to get the thing to low HP and catch it (which isn't so hard when everyone is attacking barehanded), it unleashes Flare, one of the ultimate magic spells in the game. I had two Beastmasters at this point releasing two of these, but it still wasn't enough. In desperation, I asked a forum thread for help on this. Lots of people on lots of sites I visit like to join in and discuss their FJF runs and whatnot, and someone in one clued me in on a different monster I could catch. Page 32's release ability was an instant death attack. Byblos is not resistant to instant death attacks. I caught a Page 32, went back to Byblos, released it... and bam. One hit. The boss that had stonewalled me was down. This is what I mean when I say FFV's bosses can be cheesed if you know what you're doing. Many of them are vulnerable to instant death in some way, and the ones that aren't have other tricks. With Beastmaster as one of my jobs, I had access to a lot of these tricks now. I knew about Page 32 and its instant death move now, so that would help a lot.
Next up was a boss who spells doom for any Berserker Risk player: the Sandworm. It's a boss that ducks in and out of holes on the battlefield, and you have to hit the Sandworm and not a hole, or else you get counterattacked with a gravity spell that removes 75% of your health. Couple it with Sandworm's own attack that slowly drains your HP and you have a problem. Couple that with a character who blindly attacks the hole in front of them all the time and you have a major issue. Thankfully, with only one Berserker, the carnage was mitigated. No instant death shenanigans this time, just a simple pattern of attacking and healing and outlasting the Sandworm. The next area you go to is Crescent Island, and it's where you find the Ranger and Bard jobs. It also has an enemy called Harvester, and any Fiesta player with a Berserker should fight those for a while. They have a chance to drop an item called the Death Sickle, an axe that Berserkers equip that also has the chance to cast an instant death spell on an attack. Given that so many of the bosses are vulnerable to instant death, it's one hell of a good weapon to get. Mine took an agonizing bit of a grind to drop, but it was worth it as demonstrated by the next boss, who tries to attack when you claim an airship. Cray Claw is a joke. My Berserker hit it, the death proc happened. That's it. The next boss, Adamantoise, was also hardly anything. It was weak to ice damage so I caught an Ice Soldier back around Walse for that, but it didn't really swing the fight in any way. What did was my Berserker getting the death proc again after a while. Like I said, this thing comes in handy. So the last few bosses were a breeze, but next up was a real challenge; a flying fortress with cannons to take out.
The cannons on either side I took out with some lucky Page 32 releases and physical attacks. Once all four of those were done, it was time for the main boss, Soul Cannon. The main issue here are the missile launchers which launch missiles at you. The damage is healed easily by Hi-Potions, but they inflict the Old status on you, which degrades your stats as the battle goes on and makes your attacks weaker. Not good. All that fighting and stealing items left me with a good chunk of gold, though, so I went over to an optional town and bought an Angel Ring. 50,000 gold is a lot of currency for this point of the game, but this ring would negate the Old status. I put it on my Berserker since I figured they'd be the biggest damage dealer. My Beastmasters caught some Sand Bears in the Sandworm's desert. All they do is a physical attack, but it's a powerful as hell physical attack that did a good ~2000 damage to the launchers/Cannon. My team got Old, save for the Berserker, and now for Soul Cannon. It charges up a powerful laser attack that does incredible percentage-based damage, but I had Hi-Potions and a Berserker immune to Old. Everyone healed up like mad, and after some time Soul Cannon went down. The only drawback is that I had to spend another half-hour stealing Hi-Potions, but oh well. Inside the flying fortress would be the Earth Crystal, and the final roll of jobs. In our way was a flying serpent named Archeoaevis. I let bears loose on its face, and then attacked and healed up. It was moderately difficult but not too challenging. So I had my final job roll, from a set of four: Dragoon, Chemist, Samurai, and Dancer. Chemist in particular is a ridiculous job that mixes together different items for different magical effects. A player with Chemist who knows what they're doing can utterly trivialize the game. I've always wanted to play with it, but I didn't get Chemist. I got Dragoon.
Unfortunately, this was unacceptable for me. I rolled Dragoon last year, you see. Dragoon is a nice enough class involving jumping out of the battle and back down onto an enemy's head, and at least one ability had good synergy with my Time Mages... but I wanted something new. Lucky for me, the Fiesta has the Job Fair. By donating a bit of money, you're allowed to swap a rolled job for a different one. An Earth Crystal re-roll was only 3 bucks and it was for a good cause, so I took the chance. The mulligan happened and I got Samurai. As it turned out, this would be the second most powerful job from the Earth Crystal set. Its signature ability is Zeninage, or Gil Toss as it's been called in other translations. You literally hurl your money at enemies and it does incredible multi-target damage. The drawback is that it costs gold to use. 50 gold X your Samurai's level for each target hit. Still, it's a great "last resort" attack. The next boss fight was Purobolos, a set of six bombs that would explode and revive each other unless you did something drastic. Like, say, I don't know, using a single use of Zeninage to do ~2000 damage to all six at once and instantly win the fight with no effort. Oops. You have to love the irony that I paid for a class that pays to deal extreme damage. Up next was Titan, an earth-elemental summon whose final attack is a powerful Earthquake. If I had Time Mages and a Float spell, I could easily trivialize this. I didn't have Time Mages this year... but I did have a Beastmaster. An enemy called Gaelicat is encountered back on the mountain where we fought Magissa and Forza, and its release casts Float on a random party member. With repeated shenanigans I got Float on everyone and went after Titan. It wasn't an issue at all. He did nothing to me. After that is a boss called the Manticore. It's weak to instant death. Page 32 got let out and Manticore went down like nothing.
This is the point in Final Fantasy V in which you warp to another world, and since it feels like I've written a shitload so far, we'll take a break here. I'll come back in a day or so and write up even more about the bosses I encountered, and all of the tricky tricks I employed to bypass them. This new world doesn't have Page 32 in it, so that's out. It does have a few fun things you can do, though, and my job loadout has tricks I've not elaborated on. Look forward to it!
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