Having fun with this Four Job Fiesta

[Chronicler]

For those unaware, Four Job Fiesta is a self imposed rule set in Final Fantasy 5. In the traditional Final Fantasy 5 experience, you go on a journey to save the four magic crystals, and each time you get to a crystal you unlock 4-6 new jobs (classes), which can be mixed and matched in all sorts of fun ways.

How the Four Job Fiesta works is you only take one job from each crystal, chosen at random, and must have at least one party member using one of each job you've taken at all times, for a total of Four Jobs, one for each party member, once you've unlocked them all. It was started as a charity event but it's super fun and can be recreated all on your own with just some dice or a random number generator.

I've done some in the past but my runs usually peter out once I get a bad job. Been reading up on the charity even recently though and I've learned in an officially run Four Job Fiesta the rules aren't quite so harsh as they seem. They're a charity event, obviously the name of the game is participation. They don't want it to be a super hardcore thing that's offputting to more casual players, though they have ways you can turn it into that if you're so inclined. In an officially overseen Four Job Fiesta, if you get a job you simply don't want to deal with, all you have to do is pay the charity $5 to swap it out for a job of your choice.

I've decided to incorporate that into my personal run. I feel like if I ignore the rules willy nilly that kind of defeats the point of the venture but a $5 opt out is a nice little compromise.

Anyway, with that pre-amble out of the way, the first job I got was the black mage, which honestly I wasn't super excited about. It's been a while since I played but I remember black magic being pretty lackluster, and it's not very exciting when most of their progression as a class is just casting stronger versions of the same three spells, but I was talking to some people online and it sounds like I might've been using the class wrong in my previous playthroughs, so I decided to stick with it and see what I could discover about the class.

The first major obstacle was Garula, the boss of the Water Crystal I need to beat to get my next class. It was super frustrating because I was right there, one battle away from what I need, but I couldn't beat him.

I couldn't figure out what I was going to do. It didn't seem like levelling up was increasing my health or my damage all that much. There's not much of a trick to Garula. He's just a big beefy dude with a lot of hitpoints and who hits you very hard and launches more counter-attacks the lower he gets in health. Normally, you might use a Knight's ability to nullify physical attacks and take physical attacks in place of his allies to great effect here. Or there are some spells that could blind Garula and make it hard for him to hit you, none of which a black mage has access to. This is pretty much just a hit for hit slog to see if my spells can kill him before his attacks can kill me.

Finally what I figured out is the Ricard Mages nearby, they drop an item called the Flame Rod. The Flame Rod increases the power of all your fire spells by a whopping 50%, and you can break it to cast Firaga, a much stronger fire spell than I would otherwise have access to at this point in the campaign.

So I killed those guys until I had enough flame rods for my whole team, cast fire repeatedly, and when a companion was about to die I'd have them break their rod. That did the trick nicely.

So in come the water classes. Time to roll the dice and see what I get. I end up landing on the Red Mage, which I'm pretty excited about. The red mage is honestly a kind of dumpy class in this game, at least on its own. It's an all rounder that can wield lots of great weapons, but lacks the strength to use them very well, can cast both white and black magic, but only the lower level spells, can wear some nifty armors but doesn't have a lot of hitpoints. Its crowning achievement is the Doublecast ability, which allows it to cast two spells per round, and which is transferable to other classes.

So once my black mage gets trained in Double Cast it's gonna be much more badass, and I think what I'm gonna do is if the opportunity presents itself I'm gonna try and give my red mage an ability from the earth or fire class to make it a bit of a better physical attacker.

So far I haven't had to use my $5 opt out, but the next one has the Beastmaster, so I might end up using it if I roll that one. Or maybe the bard too. On the fence about the bard. We'll see how this goes.

 

[Urdnot_Wrex]

How are things going? Finished the challenge, or ran out of money?

I'm not familiar with the Final Fantasy games, so I can't really comment on that part, but the idea to "punish" a certain occurrence in a game with a donation to a charitable organization is pretty neat. It could be implemented into other games as well, like for every death of a party member, for every reload, for every time you fail to disarm a trap or whatever else comes to mind... an interesting challenge, and failure is less harsh when you know it's for a good cause.

 

[Chronicler]

Truth be told I haven't made all that much progress. They started an event in Granblue Fantasy and I've been farming it pretty hard.

I got to the next crystal. There wasn't really all that much noteworthy about it. The boss is this big nasty fire elemental with multiple distinct forms that it switches between. I remember in previous playthroughs having to be pretty careful about how I attacked it in which forms. But apparently when your whole party is loaded up on black magic you can just hit it with your strongest ice spell repeatedly and it'll die in a couple rounds.

Got the Beastmaster class from the crystal. Swapped that out for the geomancer, which is a personal fave, with the way it turns the terrain against the enemy, even though it's never been the strongest class. Been reading up a bit on how you can spruce up the geomancer. Apparently despite its main ability being magical in nature, its magic stat is pretty weak, which can be rectified by equipping the black magic ability from the black mage. And there's an item you can find somewhere in the game called the "Rune Bell" which powers up all elements except water the same as that Fire Rod I mentioned earlier. Gonna see how that pans out.

 

[Chronicler]

It's apparently the time of year where they run the official charity event, so I'm gonna take another crack at this.

On my first roll I got a monk. It's a perfectly good class but I don't like robbing myself of the joy of finding weapons throughout the campaign, so I paid for a reroll and got the knight. Still not necessarily my preference but it's good enough and I feel like I'd be a nuisance if I went for another change after that.

Gonna try and make this thread more like the Final Fantasy thread I did, since that was fun and you all seemed to like it. Make it a bit of a walk through the game.

The showrunner of Digimon Tamers once talked about how his bosses didn't think boys would want to watch a show with a girl as one of the main characters, so he basically made Rika the coolest character on the show to compensate.

I suspect something similar might have been going on behind the scenes in Final Fantasy 5. When you first start the game up, the party is three men and a woman. You've got Bartz, the kind of free spirited traveller. Lenna, the bleeding heart princess. Farah, the pirate. And Galuf, the amnesiac old man. You can pretty easily imagine some corporate suit giving this the okay for being bland and inoffensive to the sensibilities of a little boy.

Pretty quickly however you discover that Farah is actually a woman. She was taken in by pirates at a young age, and as she put it, "would you wanna be the only girl on a pirate ship?". So just like that we've moved from a party with one token feminine princess to a part that's 50/50 men and women and is kind of playing with gender roles a little bit. But as we continue we'll find it's not quite done shaking things up yet.

 

[Chronicler]

This encounter is fun. This creature creates illusions of our loved ones, and we fall under its spell. Normally you'd expect us to overcome it through some clever bit of perception or force of will or the power of friendship, but in this case Galuf's an amnesiac. He just plumb doesn't remember this girl calling him grandpa, so the effect is kind of lost on him.

You'll notice both Lenna and Farah were got by Lenna's father, King Tycoon. Farah also was compelled to help us when she noticed that Lenna had the same mysterious necklace Farah's had her whole life, from before she was taken in by pirates. They're not being especially subtle in telegraphing where that's going but it's still an interesting dynamic we're setting up here, because all of the characters have history from before the game started. We'll learn more about King Tycoon, Bartz's dad, and Galuf's grandaughter as we go along, but most of these characters know more than the player does about the story at this point in the development.

 

[Chronicler]

This woman's just an asshole. She's not really a part of the whole villainous scheme with the fate of the world in the balance. Not another underling of whatever sinister puppetmaster seems to be controlling events. She just kind of happens to run into us while on her way to something else and decides to make herself a problem.

She's a summoner, which is a bit of a twist on how we've known summoners to be. In Final Fantasy 4 Rydia is the primary summoner you interact with, and as she forms pacts with the various summoned creatures they all put her through tests to make sure she's noble and true and stuff. Magissa must have a different arrangement with her guy though, since she is decidedly ignoble in her ideals.

 

[Chronicler]

So the premise here basically is that much like in Final Fantasy 1, there are four crystals through which the elements flow forth, breathing life into the world.

However, with modern technological developments, we've recently learned to amplify the crystals, drawing forth more power than ever before, ushering in a new golden age of prosperity.

Except it turns out that's kind of bad? The Wind Crystal recently broke under the strain the machinery was putting on it. So now we're on a holy quest to stop the others from breaking before it's too late. It's... not going well.

The crystals chose us as their champions, and they lent us their power. Gameplay wise that means each broken fragment of a crystal gives us a new class with fun new abilities to use. So it would actually be profoundly unsatisfying for the player if we ever successfully prevented one of these things from breaking.

 

[Chronicler]

I'm not as familiar with this game, so I don't actually remember what this dude's deal is, but I remember he comes back later. I let him free, so we'll see if that turns out to be good or bad when the time comes.

 

[Chronicler]

We arrive at the water crystal to find it being attacked by a normally peaceful creature.

A knight has already arrived, and is trying to protect the crystal. After he falls in battle, he apologizes to "Lord Galuf" for failing him, seeming to recognize our senile old fool.

Just what is going on, and how is our dear friend Galuf?

Brief aside, while even Bartz's thoughts are withheld from the player at times, he's the viewpoint character. He's the only character the player gets to name, and he's the one we follow whenever the characters separate from eachother, so it's interesting that he's not the amnesiac. It's a bit of an RPG trope to have the RPG character be amnesiac to turn them into a sort of blank cipher for the player to project themselves onto, but that's not what they're doing here.

 

[Chronicler]

After we fail to save the Water Crystal, we can revisit the meteor that recently crashed nearby, and find that a door has opened, allowing us to enter it. Within we find a portal, and naturally we walk through.

Meteors don't usually have doors or portals, do they? We exit from a matching meteor closer to the fire crystal though, so that's convenient.

 

[Chronicler]

The city of karnak has been amplifying their fire crystal, and they're pretty cool with open flames just hanging around wherever in their city.

 

[Chronicler]

So it turns out monsters have been coming out of these meteorites, so when we come out they naturally assume we're some sort of malicious trickster creatures posing as men, and lock us up.

We end up in a cell with Cid, the man who invented the crystal amplifiers. He's incredibly broken up over having invented the machine that will quite likely end the world, but nobody will listen to him and stop using them. But when the fire crystal begins to crack, they come to him for help as the only man who really knows how these things work, and he vouches for us so we all get out.

 

[Chronicler]

Here we hear our first words from the puppetmaster. Just like the normally docile beast that was attacking the water crystal, the queen seems to be possessed when we arrive at the fire crystal. Some entity that is not the queen speaks through her, and seems to imply he'll be revived when the crystals are shattered.

Confession time: I don't actually remember who this dude turns out to be. Like obviously there's some Big Bad Evil Guy who gets to reign in terror if the crystals are all destroyed but beyond that I'm pretty in the dark here.

 

[Chronicler]

On your way to the Library of the Ancients there's this little bitty patch of desert.
While you're walking through that desert, sometimes this guy will spawn. He will pretty much instantly murderize you. He's orders of magnitude harder than anything in the surrounding area or even than any of the bosses you've fought up to this point.

I don't know if he's some kind of easter egg or what.

 

[Chronicler]

A persistent issue in this story is transportation. The first crystal to die was the wind crystal, which made traditional sailing an impossibility. Luckily Farah happened to have the only ship in the land that still worked, because it was pulled by her lifelong companion Syldra the seamonster.

Syldra heroically sacrificed herself to save us, but then we found Lennah's old Wind Drake, which could fly us around but not over mountains.

We left the wind drake behind when we went through the meteor portal, but Cid had invented a magnificent Fire Powered Ship, using the amplified Fire Crystal. Instead of sailing with the power of the wind, it uses an engine to move about with the power of fire. But then the crystal broke, so that was kind of useless.

Mid here is Cid's grandchild, and his relationship with Cid is really cute. He adores his grandpa more than anything. His grandpa never gives up. When Cid learns that while he's been hitting the books looking for a way to take this adventure back on the road, his grandpa has been wallowing in sorrow at the local pub, he's devastated. He runs off to see the truth of it for himself.

In the end a talk with his grandson turned out to be just what Cid needed to get back on the old horse. Mid doesn't understand it yet, but to a large extent he is the source of his grandpa's strength. Cid works to create a better future, a better world for his grandson, and more than anything else he just couldn't bear to disappoint Mid or betray the faith Mid has put in him. So, all hope isn't lost. Not while Mid says there's still a fight worth fighting.

 

[Chronicler]

The scene with Mid and Cid shakes loose some memories of Galuf's own grandchild, and just like that he remembers who he is and why he's here.

Galuf comes from the stars. He came to this world once before, and used the power of our crystals to seal away the Wicked Warlock ExDeath who had been causing problems in their world, and now that the seal is weakening he returns to... do something about that I guess.

Our world has become a proxy battleground for a more advanced civilization.

My first thought is that it kind of seems like the environmentalist metaphor starts to fall apart here.

 

[Chronicler]

We get exactly one trip out of our fancy new flame powered ship before an earthquake sinks it.

But we find a black chocobo. They're low fliers that can only land in forests. That's just as cool... right?

They try to hype this thing up. Everybody thought it was extinct. But it's pretty profoundly disappointing to immediately trade your state of the art fire powered ship away for this thing.

 

[Chronicler]

Yeah, I guess we're kind of directionless right now. We don't know where the earth crystal is, but we've heard reports of King Tycoon, Lenna's father, venturing into the ruins beyond the Desert of Shifting Sands.

The thing is, nobody's ever managed to get to the ruins beyond the Desert of Shifting Sands, on account of the shifting sands. They just take you right back where you came. Allegedly King Tycoon was floating though, which allowed him to subvert the issue.

I remember this being really tricky and not exactly the most fun part of the game.

 

[Chronicler]

Aw yeah! We're in business! King Tycoon was acting a little weird, zipping about in the shadows and not speaking a word, but he lead us to the Airship. It was a little run down but that don't matter none, our home dogs Cid and Mid got us covered.

I seem to recall that this is pretty much the end of our transportation troubles for the time being. Our adventure may one day take us places even this airship can't go but this is effectively the end of the transportation quest chain.

 

[Chronicler]

So right now I'm kind of preparing for this battle. It's a turtle with very high defence.

My team is mostly pretty physical. I have the Knight, the Spellblade, and the Ninja. So that defence is hitting me pretty hard.

One thing I haven't communicated is that this story has a lot more quiet character building moments than Final Fantasy 1.

You're given an opportunity to visit Bartz's hometown. There he remembers his parents deaths. When he was very little, his father was always out adventuring while he stayed home with his mother, who was very sickly. Then when his mother died, he went on the road with his dad, which was how he lived until 3 years ago, when his dad got sick and died. His dad always wanted to be buried with his mom, which he couldn't manage, but he carves an addition onto her tombstone in honour of his father's passing.

After it's revealed that Farah is Lenna's sister, you can visit their old castle. It brings back a lot of memories of Farah's early childhood, before she fell overboard and was picked up by pirates. She expresses a desire to rekindle those lost connections, starting with Lenna.

Neither of these scenes really further the story. They're not mandatory checkmarks you need to hit, and they actually require you go off path from the main story in your exploration to even encounter them.

This was a Super Nintendo game, which isn't exactly the most advanced technology, but text isn't necessarily the precious resource it was on the NES, so they can use it much more freely.