The Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta 2016: A Trip Report (Part 2)

(Well, hello there! This is part 2 of a trip report for the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta! But you probably knew that from the title already. If you've not read Part 1 yet, you really should before jumping into the story halfway. This ain't one of those out of sequence blog posts, that wouldn't make any sense. Anyway, you can check out Part 1 right here if you haven't yet. I've been an even busier bee and I bothered to write a full review of the new Kirby game, Planet Robobot! If my opinions on Kirby games are something you're into, pop right over here and give it a read. Okay, enough expository banter! On with the writeup!)

Wait, I just said that. Shit.

When we last left our glorious Fiesta heroes, they were jumping into an interplanetary warp to chase after the main antagonist of the game. They hopped on in and warped to a whole other world, got captured by him but then busted out, and made a break for it across the Big Bridge, which has one of the best tracks in the game. Halfway across was our first boss fight of the game, against the recurring villain who is also the Fiesta Twitterbot's namesake: Gilgamesh! This goofy guy can be a bit tricky, with a lot of health and a desperation phase in which he starts Dragoon jumping on your team's heads for lotsa damage. I had a secret weapon, though. Well, not so secret. I caught a bear before jumping into the warp and let it loose on his face at the start of the fight. In hindsight I probably should have saved the bear for the aforementioned Dragoon jumping phase because it does so much damage, but I didn't. I survived without too much trouble, though. That poor bear. I Pokemon caught it with my Beastmaster powers and took it to another planet and let it out against a weird red guy in armor. I'd be pissed off too. Anyway, following that we got blasted to another continent and wandered around for a bit until we found Moogles. This led to a mini dungeon with a "boss" that's like an undead T-Rex. As awesome as that sounds, all it takes is using a Phoenix Down on it to win. Any Fiesta team that's not four Berserkers (and god help you if you rolled that) can make this fight a joke. After some more plot, our mission was to climb a mountain and find some Dragon Grass to heal up our dragon friend. But that's not what I did right away, oh no.

See, the dragon lives in Bal Castle, and Bal Castle has a basement with a big locked door in it. Eventually you can get back there and fight the Odin summon for the right to summon him, but we don't need to do that. Although Odin will come in later. No, the basement of Bal Castle has a single enemy type within it: Objet D'Art. They're stone statues with a lot of health and the ability to petrify people. However, two important things to note about them. First, they can be instantly killed if you use a Gold Needle on them, and Gold Needles can be bought in Bal Castle. Second, they give 2 ABP per Objet defeated, and you encounter them in groups of either two or five. This is a prime place to level up your Jobs, and that's just what I did because I had my sights set on the Samurai's ultimate ability. I figure, while I'm explaining that, I might as well go over all the abilities my classes have. So you can see the full set of tools I had to work with in this Fiesta.

Berserker: All but useless to me. The Berserk ability makes the character act like a Berserker, with high attack power but the inability to control them. If I wanted more goddamned Berserkers I'd have picked Berserker Risk. Equip Axes... lets you equip axes. Could be useful for a weaker class like my Thief or Beastmaster, but I had better abilities for them besides high attack power.

Thief: Most of these are support abilities innate to the Thief, and I always would have a Thief on the team due to Fiesta rules so they were redundant. Regardless: Find Passages shows you hidden passages in dungeons and whatnot. Flee is a command that lets you instantly run from a battle, and it was very helpful when I couldn't be arsed to fight and the regular run command refused to work. Dash gives you the ability to Dash, and as I mentioned before it's such a convenience that the GBA version just gave the thing to you. Steal lets any character steal items. Stealing items is a good thing, if you've not gleaned that by now. Vigilance prevents back attacks, and I love it. Back attacks are annoying because they swap your battle positions and you get whacked in the fight first. Not having to deal with them was a plus. Mug is a nice one: it combines a Steal attempt with a regular attack action. Helpful when you're fighting. Artful Dodger gives the character equipped with it extra agility, like a Thief's innate agility. I stuck this on my Berserker to make them faster. It's a nice capstone.

Beastmaster: Calm is something I never played with. Supposedly it acts as a Stop spell, but only against magic beast type enemies. Control has a 40% chance to take control of a monster and let you select its actions, at the cost of not being able to use your Beastmaster. This is helpful sometimes, but it's hampered by the fact that I constantly had a raging idiot who smacked things in the face. Attacking a controlled enemy snaps it out of the control. This is bad. Equip Whips lets you equip whips. I might have used this exactly once. Catch is the capstone ability, and it lets any class do the monster catching thing. As you'll see, unleashing three monsters in a boss fight can be a good thing indeed.

Samurai: Mineuchi does regular damage and some other special stuff I'm not sure about. Didn't toy with this. Zeninage is the gold-tossing thing that is overpowered as shit and very good. Shiradori gives anyone equipped with it a 25% dodge chance for an attack. Don't know if this stacks with stuff like the Elven Mantle or Main Gauche. Equip Katanas lets you equip Katanas. The capstone, however, is Iainuki. Iainuki is a goddamned instant death attack against all enemies, and it has a highish hit rate. It was something I wanted badly for my current Samurai. Unfortunately you need 540 ABP to unlock this final ability. Fortunately I was in Bal Castle with a shitload of Gold Needles and about 15 years' experience in grinding in old RPGs. I threw on some Emerson, Lake, and Palmer albums (Brain Salad Surgery is the shit, y'all) and got to work. After a little while. I had my Iainuki ability. Oh yeah, and learned a lot of abilities for my other classes.

On we went towards the mountain, but I wasn't done making my classes better just yet. In the next town there was a weirdo in a well who would give us a goodie if we could catch him a frog. So off we went to catch a frog enemy for him. It didn't take long, and with the frog plus 10,000 gold we got a new item: the Kornago Gourd. This thing was a godsend for my monster-catching shenanigans. Normally you have to lower a monster down to 1/8th HP to catch it. Anyone with the Kornago Gourd equipped can catch a monster at 1/2 HP or less. What a helpful trinket! As for the mountain, it was nothing at all. The boss was Dragon Pod, a big carnivorous flower that spawns little Dragon Flowers to hassle you. I had my Samurai charge up a use of Iainuki. It takes two "turns" to use, but the results are effective. Bam. Instant death. No need to even catch a monster with my new tricks, or throw gold. This was going to be fun to play with.

Next on the agenda, our old pal Gilgamesh was harassing the attack fleet of a friendly king who we became... friends with. I could have killed him quickly with an instant death thing, but I had to wait. See, from this point on Gilgamesh has rare equipment on him that you can swipe. Before I wrecked him I had my Thief steal the piece he had on him this time, the Genji Gloves. After that, guess what. Iainuki? Nope! Turns out I lied. There's a shellfish enemy called Aquathorne that you can catch, and its release is a Banish attack just like Page 32's was. Gilgamesh didn't even get to summon his gargoyle buddy, Enkidu. Too bad. With him out of the way, our kingly friend led us to a tower that helped power a barrier to shield Exdeath's castle. We were going to blow the damn thing up, but before that I had some prep work to do. Inside the tower is an enemy called the Reflect Knight. Its rare drop is a Reflect Ring, a ring which gives that character innate Reflect. That shit bounces magic spells back at their casters and it was great and I wanted four. So I went to work. The RNG gods were nice to me and it didn't take too long. Now I had to deal with the boss atop the tower, Atomos. Atomos is not a very nice boss, and a big scary roadblock for a lot of players. When every party member is alive, he spams Comet magic that will almost certainly KO somebody. If someone is KOed in this fight, their body is slowly pulled towards Atomos, and engulfed if it reaches him. Yikes. I wasn't worried. I had a plan. Remember that little dungeon with the undead T-Rex? An enemy down there called Lesser Lopros has Breath Wing as its release attack, which does 25% of a monster's max HP in damage. Atomos wasn't immune to this, and since I'd ABP grinded to hell and back I had three people capable of catching monsters. And a Kornago Gourd to make it easier! The only wrinkle now was surviving the Comet attacks long enough to hit him with those... but I had a way around that too. I deliberately KOed my Berserker before the battle began. A KOed party member means he'll be satisfied and start sucking, giving me time enough to let out my Loproses and deal 3/4 of his HP in damage. He has 20,000, give or take, so I only needed to do 5000 damage after that. Easy street, and I even revived the Berserker... only for someone else to die to the Comets. Oh well, he was down!

The next area is Moore Forest, and you encounter the four crystals of this world which attack you for intruding upon their domain. Normally they're real nasty business, and each one spams a different high level elemental spell when it's at low HP. Fire spams Firagas, Water spams Aqua Breath, Wind spams Aeroga, and Earth spams Earth Shakers. You could get around this in many ways. Have your team floating to negate the Earth attack. Give everyone Fire Rings that cause Fire attacks to heal them, then get the Fire Crystal at low health and keep it there while you focus on the others and get free healing. Or you could just do what I do and Iainuki the shit out of them for an instant win. I love this goddamned ability, it's so good. After this fight is a very touching scene that I won't elaborate on even though the game is almost a quarter century old. On to Exdeath's Castle! It's a nasty scary place with pulsating living walls, very Gigeresque almost. Near the top we had another fight with Gilgamesh, and he had another piece of Genji equipment on him. I stole that, and then released a monster found in the Castle itself; Yellow Dragon. It does a lightning attack that again deals 25% of max HP in damage, but Gilgamesh stops fighting after 13,000 damage. The dragon took off about 8,000 of that which made things easier. All that was left now was Exdeath.


Oh, christ. Exdeath turned out to be unexpectedly resistant towards my usual set of tricks. I couldn't Iainuki him, for one thing. I expected that, but I had a plan. Once you get him down to half of his 32,000+ HP he starts using lots of magic spells. I farmed those Reflect Rings for exactly that purpose, to bounce all the shit back at him. Great idea, but I still had to knock out 16,000 HP of life off of him. No problem, I thought! I can catch those Yellow Dragons! That's 75% right there, he'll go down like a punk! I caught all three and went into battle and let them loose. Miss. Miss. Miss. Huh? I tried again and they kept missing. I don't know if it was always like this, or if the Steam version I was playing fiddled with things, but even hitting Exdeath with one Dragon was difficult, let alone all three. I told myself I'd settle for two. I couldn't even get that to happen. I had to try with one, and that was tough because he doesn't just attack with spells. He has a physical attack too. Not to mention a terrible Zombie Breath attack. If it kills you, you get zombie status. It's like Berserk, Confusion, and KO. All in one. Horrific. I had to resort to some Zeninages to get enough damage in to hit that second phase where he eases up on the worse shit and casts magic I could reflect. Eventually, after a tough fight and a shitload of Hi-Potions, down he went. We did the space warp again, ending up in the final world.

I like splitting these up between warps and worlds in the game's plot, so we'll end here because I could probably hurl out another 3000 words about the endgame to this shit. Or not! We'll have to see when I get to it in the next little while! Until then, I leave you all shivering in anticipation. I coulda cut off the "pation" and started the Part 3 post with it, but ah well. See you for the finale, kids!