Monday, June 16, 2014

Final Fantasy V: Four Job Fiesta Start

The Four Job Fiesta event started up this weekend. I'm giving it a shot because I'll take any excuse to play a really good game! The idea is you get assigned one job from each of the four crystals and then have to play the game using only those jobs and keeping at least one of each job in your party at any given time. You can swap around who is which job in order to mix and match abilities and such but you need to keep all the jobs active.

I'm playing the fan translated version of the Super Famicom version on emulator. I think that may end up being a mistake since it doesn't have a run button. It also doesn't have bad loading lag like the PSX version so maybe it all shakes out in the wash? On the plus side I can watch LCS on my tv while playing FFV on the emulator and that pushes this format over the top for me I think.

I got to the wind crystal in short order and tweeted to the bot to get my first job: Monk! Monks tend to fit my style of play in a Final Fantasy job system game quite well. They have a lot of hit points and they're good at physically attacking things. They also have a support ability which transfers the highest strength boost in the game which may or may not come in handy when I get later jobs. It doesn't really lend itself to fun combos that I know of, but it's an autoattacker that does lots of damage and scales well with levels so I should be able to beat things by grinding if I need to.

It is also, it turns out, awesome in the early game. I've watched a few streams of people starting out as a thief or a white mage and they spend so much time healing up (often by drinking potions) that I'd just sort of assumed that was the way things worked. I did one early boss fight where the boss attacked for 3 potions worth of health. So I spend a few rounds using items with 3 of my 4 monks and attacking with the 4th one. Then I realized that the people I was watching were attacking for 12 and I can attack for 200. So I stopped healing and just punched the enemy to death. Pretty sure I could have just damage raced the boss right from the start. The next boss has a phase change where she turns undead and becomes immune to physical damage but you can hurt her with potions. I killed her before she changed phase. Thieves have to fight her for many phase transitions! Monks just murder her.

I let my strength go to my head and tried to kill Shiva before unlocking my second job. Turns out she can cast a spell which hits my party for 60% of their max health, and she has 3 friends with so much health it takes a full round for me to kill one of them. And I'm dead in 2 spells? Yeah, not going to happen at this level. Oh well!

Off to the water tower where I got my next job: Red Mage! Red mages get to cast white and black magic spells, and they get to wear armour and use swords and stuff. They also have one of the most powerful abilities in the game when you max out their job level as they get to cast two spells per turn instead of one. On the downside they can only cast the first three levels of spells. So while they're awesome early on they're really bad in the end game. If I had black mage instead of monk they'd be awesome since I could give them the black magic ability and then they could double cast high level spells, but I don't. In fact I think every other class that could combo with a red mage is from the first two crystals so I don't think I'll ever have a good combo for them.

On the plus side I now have a healer, and I have someone who can equip (and therefore break) rods. So my team is really awesome now. Punch things for big damage, use my healer to heal up. I may well fall off in the late game? Maybe just buying all the rods and having my red mage break them will be good enough? And who knows what I'll be getting from the next two crystals...

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