I - FOUR JOB FIESTA

Hey folks! Do you like to impose restrictions on yourself in games in an attempt at "having fun"? Do you also enjoy rolling the dice and letting a twitter bot decide your fate for 20-40 hours of your life? Well have I got the game for you!

It's the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta! What is that, you ask? Well you could go to this website for all the info, but I'll break down the basics for you. As you may or may not know, Final Fantasy V was the first game in the series to have a robust and fun to use job class system. FFIII also had one, but the mechanics behind it made it a little bothersome. The rules are simple. There are four points in the early game in which you obtain a couple crystal shards that grant you access to a few of the job classes in the game. Each time this event occurs you tweet at the aptly named "Gilgabot" and it will assign you a job. Now here's the rub, you may only use the job classes that the bot assigns to you for the entire game. So, of the 20 jobs in the pool, you only have access to four. And yes, you can be assigned the same job (depending on the rule set) more than once if you're unlucky.

Now there are variations to these rules. You could play a Normal run, which will grant you one job from each crystal. You could also choose to do a Team 750 run in which you can only get jobs that can use rods (rods cost 750 gold), or a Team No750 which grants you only the ones that cannot. I'm personally doing a Chaos run, which means that the bot can assign me any job from any crystal even if I haven't gotten it yet. The first job always comes from the first crystal, so you have something to change into, but after that it's up to chance. I could get assigned a job from the 4th crystal when I get the second one and simply not be able to use it until I finally get it.

The other tricky part to this is the rule that you must always have one of each class you are assigned. Once you've obtained all of the classes, there's no doubling up. Say you get Summoner, White Mage, Knight, and Dragoon. You can't just switch everyone to Summoner to cheese a boss by nuking it with Bahamut every turn. You are required to have one of each which can get tricky in spots. Luckily, characters can learn abilities as they level up their jobs of which you can pick one to use while in a different job (So you actually can have everyone nuke bosses with Bahamut). Probably the trickiest of the rule sets is Natural. Natural means that each character is assigned a job. They cannot change their job. They are stuck in that job and cannot learn other job's abilities. Personally, that sounds not very fun.

You can go to the website I linked above for all the info. This event is to raise money for the Child's Play charity and they've already surpassed their goal of $10,000 which is awesome. The best part is, you can play too! This event goes on until September 1st and you can play as many times as you want!. The site lists everyone playing and also has links to everyone streaming the game as well, if you're into that.

II - MY FIRST FIESTA

So this isn't my first fiesta. I finished that one this morning. I got Blue Mage, Summoner, Dancer, and Dragoon for my four jobs. Obviously, there are jobs that are much better than others and let me say, I got fairly lucky with my loadout here. Blue Mage is an excellent job and could probably solo the game. A number of their spells can instantly kill enemies (and some bosses) and they have access to a lot of unique abilities that bypass some basic restrictions of combat.

As for my other classes, they did alright for me. Like I mentioned before, Summoners are great for absolutely wrecking bosses and I never had any issue with any random encounter. Turns out, nearly every random battle can be won by summoning Titan, Syldra, or Bahamut once or twice. The only issue here is running out of MP. Luckily, Dragoons learn an ability granting you an attack that steals a modest amount of HP and MP from your target. Not bad. Give that ability to a Summoner and your MP woes are pretty much solved. Dragoons are also excellent physical tanks and it was nice to have some physical damage in my party. I never really did find Dancer all that effective, but being able to equip a Ribbon was nice. I mainly used her as my second Summoner.

Overall, I didn't have that rough of a time. I got a decent lineup and knew a lot of the boss strategies from back when I played years ago. I hit a few stumbling blocks, but it was fun figuring out strategies with what I had available, and that's really when this gets fun and satisfying.

III - ROUND 2- FIESTA ON, BARTZ!: Part 3!

But let's get on with it. I decided to play again and share my playthrough here because I had a lot of fun the first time and I wanted to share this in case anyone else wanted to get in on the Fiesta.

Obviously for my second playthrough I couldn't have the same name for my character. Those familiar with FFV may know the main character as Bartz, but I decided to go with his fan translated SNES name.

The start of the game is pretty simple. You have no jobs so everyone is a Freelancer. Most, if not all, battles are won by using the A button to attack. Maybe you'll need a potion here and there. Probably not though, even the first boss is pretty weak.

The story is your basic RPG, Final Fantasy fare. There are four crystals. The big bad wants to destroy those crystals. Your party of four awakens as Warriors of Light. A dude has amnesia. (The old guy) There are moogles and chocobos and pirates and thundagas. It's a Final Fantasy game. It's also really good. It doesn't take itself too seriously and the translation is goofy as all hell.

There's even some jaunty humor around the androgynous fellow in your party. Faris is presented as a male pirate captain, but that quickly changes when Bartz, sorry, Butts and Galuf get a couple glimpses of...some things.

Getting down to it though, your first task in the game is to check out the Wind Crystal in the aptly name Wind Shrine to see why the wind is no longer blowing. Butts, being a wandering traveler, finds Lenna and saves her from some goblins and the pair find the amnesiac Galuf near a fallen meteor. Lenna and Galuf decide to check out the Wind Crystal and Butts joins them after some soul searching. They come across a pirate cove and decide to steal their ship after they notice it can sail without wind. Turns out the pirates have a tamed sea dragon thing named Syldra which basically carries the ship around.Captain Faris catches them in the act, but she notices that her and Lenna have the same pendant and decides to travel with them to find out why. The group travels to the shrine and come up upon the Wind Crystal as it shatters, much to their surprise.

This is the point where you are granted your first job classes. I revved up the old Gilgabot and discovered that my first job was Black Mage. NOT BAD. One of the best actually.

So now my party is really squishy and smacking things with some wooden rods isn't really effective. Luckily, things tend to die when you set them on fire.

The group decides to travel to the remaining crystals at the behest of Lenna's ghostly father, King Tycoon. Unfortunately, along the way the ship gets caught in a whirlpool and Syldra sacrifices herself to save the ship. Without wind, however, the party is left to drift endlessly. Eventually, they land in a ship graveyard full of undead creatures. I proceed to more or less burn the entire thing down cause, you know, fire > undead. When the group finally hits land, they are confronted by a Siren who projects images of their family. Butts succumbs to the image of his dead mother, and Lenna (and inexplicably, Faris) collapse at the sight of Lenna's father, King Tycoon. The trick doesn't work on Galuf though, for his amnesia has caused him to completely forget his own granddaughter. He proceeds to rouse everyone else out of their stupor and it's BOSS TIME. Oh man, the first real boss of the game! This could get rough, everyone is at a low level and...

The Siren changes to an undead form like 3 seconds into the battle. Probably not the best idea while staring down four wizards with a fire spell.

And we're off to the next crystal and my next job...next time.

Thanks for reading and if anyone decides to join the fiesta, I'd love to hear about it!

Part 2 is here!

There was no original translated SNES release. FFV didn't come to North America until, uhh, probably sometime during the console generation just past. There were some fan translated ROMs kicking about. I played a very early one in which the main character's name was "Butz".

@sinusoidal: Right that's the one I was referring to. I'll adjust that to not confuse people.

@sinusoidal said:

Woah I didn't realize that was fan translated. I played that years ago back when I was in an exploring-games-I-never-payed-attention-to-originally phase. Always thought that was a weird name for the character, but just kinda shrugged it off. The more you know I guess. I kind of want to go back and try this game again.

@sinusoidal: Wasn't it in the Anthology package on the playstation? if not the first official English version was the GBA version.

Yeah, Anthology was the first English release I'm aware of.

@theblue This was a great read, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Sadly I have exams this summer, so I won't be able to participate, but I'm planning on living vicariously through your blogs about the experience.

Ah, it's good to see you playing the best Final Fantasy game. I've considered participating in this before, but I have too many other games I'd like to get to first this summer. Still, looking forward to you inevitably getting Geomancer or Bard and suffering through that.

Final Fantasy V is so good and so underrated.

@countmacula: Thanks so much! I figure if at least one person might enjoy reading these, I'll keep doing them.

@arbitrarywater: But bard is one of the best classes! Those songs are crazy good. You're right about Geomancer, though. As of right now I still have one class left to roll so I could still get one and cry myself to sleep.

There is TOO much Final Fantasy on this website now.

Great write-up by the way.

I was going to chronicle my VII playthrough but I think this place needs room to breathe.