WK does an FFV Let's Play?

Okay, so I've begun work on my next article on FFV and decided I needed a refresher course. Now, I still have Romancing SaGa and Legend of Mana to finish, but I'm wanting to start this game up soonish.

It will likely be an informative Let's Play, showing off strategies and secrets, with explanations on some of the mechanics. To make this interesting for me though, I may let the community choose which classes my party will be, and up to three classes for sub-jobs to choose from once they're all unlocked.

My question to everyone is whether this would be something anybody would want to see? It will likely be text and screenshots.

I'm down.

Like you even have to ask.

https://i.imgur.com/Ygw2Jxj.gif

Good enough for me, once I finish Romancing SaGa, I'll boot up FFV and start it up. I've been devising some rules to give myself for the playthrough to make it more interesting for me, and hopefully the readers.

Get to it sir! I look forward to it with much anticipation!

Okay, sorry that took so long but RL and Romancing SaGa's actual difficult final boss took longer to get around to this, but I'll be starting this up pretty soonish. As stated in the OP, this will largely be a walk-through type LP with me talking about secrets, battle tactics, and general helpful information for people trying to make their way through this game. I may have some funny quips here and there, but this isn't that kind of LP and I'm well aware of the fact I'm not as funny as I think I am. Despite being a walk-through, I will say now that FFV is not a game I know as well as other titles. As I mentioned in my Top 100, this is one of those games I often enjoy but wonder why I don't play it as often as I really should. So people who love and know this game like the back of their hand can feel welcome to share their own knowledge and not to expect to learn anything new from this. I will be playing the Fan Translated RPGe version of the game so Butz and all that comes from that. I will likely just be taking screenshots as it will be easier for me than video.

So let me start this by setting up the guidelines I wish to follow for this:

• With the exception of showing off certain strategies and likely the two superbosses, I plan on never having more than one of the same class in my party at a time, this includes sub job abilities.
• After every update, I'm going to leave it up to the readers to decide which Job Classes I use. Though I will choose who gets what role, because the last thing I need is people trolling me to keep Bartz as a Beastmaster or Galuf as a Dancer for half the playthrough. I will also change out certain classes between dungeons if I need them for particular reasons such as a Thief for stealing things and the Blue Mage learning. I will largely be using the classes chosen during the main story events.
• I don't plan on really grinding too much until probably the very end outside of showing off a few key leveling points, and acquiring a few "must have" abilities.
• With that said, I may grind up a few jobs on the side for the sake of having options and keeping this interesting. Would be boring if I just kept Lenna with nothing but magic or keep Bartz using Doublehand/Duel-Wield the whole game.
• I will take requests for explanations when needed.
• I may likely change these rules if I feel they are detrimental to the LP.

For the most part, the format I'm thinking of going for this game will likely be a simple walkthrough of the main quest, with interjections of me explaining the various mechanics in the game along the way, as well as showing off where summons, good stealing options, and Blue Magic acquirement can be done.

Due to all the info I'll be going over, updates might get a bit sporadic cause FFV is a surprisingly deep game mechanically speaking, and it takes a while to do these write ups. Chances are, the early updates will only cover a single dungeon to save time. I may end up just updating on a certain day to save my own brain functions, so don't be surprised if I suddenly just start updating on Thursdays or Friday every week.

Also, a favor I ask is that viewers do send a bit of feedback, regardless of how pointless it can be. I've seen too many LPs die from lack of participation from the audience and I know very well that if I feel like no one is paying attention to this, I will grow bored and simply drop it. So please stay active if you can.

Will do my best!

So I started FFV last night and the LP can begin. Due to the limitations of how many pictures I can upload, I'm going to have to be selective of the images I see, thus the story side of things will be a bit disjointed.

When the game starts proper, Lenna watches as her father leaves Tycoon Castle to investigate a disturbance he felt concerning the Wind Crystal. Lenna senses something is wrong and leaves, Faris watches as the wind dies down on her ship, Galuf is rushing to stop something, and Butz is just chilling with his life partner Boko. The crystal breaks and the story eventually let's the player control Butz.

You don't have many options at first, you must simply head east to investigate the meteor. What's interesting to see so far is how much FFV utilized old assets from previous games. The world map tile set is pretty much directly taken from FFIV, whereas dungeon and battle graphics are all new. The opening sequence with the illusion of the sun rising is quite effective and while the field sprites are still the squashed sprites similar (and some taken directly) from IV, they are far more animated than the previous title.

I've changed the setting to Active Time battle and raised the battle speed to its fastest. Contrary to what you may think, battle speed doesn't actually affect your party's ATB gauge, it actually just affects how quickly the enemy can act. By setting it to it's fastest setting, most of these low runt goblins get their turn before Butz, so this is really more for increasing the game difficulty for the player than trying to make the game run faster. In fact, it's not until FFVII that the Battle Speed affects the overall time it takes to fill the ATB Bar so anyone replaying the 16-Bit entries should remember this.

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Much like how FFIV was tightly scripted in the beginning, FFV is also pretty scripted in the early sections. Butz comes across Lenna being dragged off by Goblins and a fight ensues. Fun fact: the goblins in these early scripted fights are different from the regular goblins found on the world map. They are four levels weaker than their Random encounter variation, have no access to Goblin Punch, don't drop any items and have exactly 1HP. None of this is important, but it's still interesting nonetheless.

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After rescuing Lenna, Butz and her introduce themselves with the player being able to finally name Butz. While Butz is the official romanization of the name, his name is actually pronounced as Battsu with the Ba part sounding like Bah in Bah Humbug, as opposed to the English version of Ba as in Baby or Bu as in but. So saying his name sound like Butts is actually incorrect and in fact, Bartz is closer to how his name would be correctly pronounced in Japanese. To further add to this, it's very likely that Bartz is a poorly translated shortening of the German name Bartolomäus, which as you can tell by just saying that name out loud is the German version of Bartholomew. This makes it a similar situation as Sabin's Japanese name of Mash, which is actually a strange romanization of the Japanese sounding equivalent of the name Matthew. So in essence, Butz/Bartz is really just Bart, while Sabin/Mash is actually suppose to be Matt. That will likely be the last linguistic l;esson we'll have for this game until ExDeath and Krile show up as their names are also a bit funky between translations.

That aside, the team meets Galuf and we're introduced to the second character in the franchise history to have the amnesia trope surprisingly enough. Granted the amnesia plot point will continue in some shape or form for the next five games in the series after this, so the idea Square uses this trope too much is still pretty sound despite it being more common in the Golden Popular Age than in their early years. Lenna needs to go to the Wind Shrine and Galuf tags along cause he needs to as well from what little he remembers. Butz decides he's been a Good Samaritan enough for the day and parts way with the team. Before leaving, head to the bottom right corner of the map to find an easily missed chest containing a Phoenix Down.

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Head left and up, to eventually enter a canyon area and have an absolutely hilarious scene where Boko bucks Butz off of him and they share a Rocket/Groot exchange about how Butz should have stuck around to help the ineffectual Lenna and the amnesiac Galuf. As though fate itself is guiding him, Butz has to rescue them from both an earthquake and Goblins. These are those same unique Goblins as before since they only appear in the fights in these scripted scenes. I don't have to worry about healing cause Butz's health is restored after each scenario. In fact, FFV is deceptively user-friendly in the early game, before it suddenly takes the kiddy gloves off.

With nowhere else to go we head into the cave where we're greeted with a healing spring. I always love how in 16-bit era RPGs, healing springs are always rare and only found in early dungeons. This does make this area an ideal leveling spot, but I'm going to tell you now that physical levels don't matter as much as job levels. In fact, the early game when Job classes are not available is about the only time I would ever suggest power leveling in FFV. Unlike the Tactics series, the party's stats are static and linear in growth. The Job mechanics alter stats but only as long as you have the character in that job, so there is no meta game like in the FFT series where you'll want a character to sit in a class to get stat bonuses. Levels only really matter for Monks and Blue Mages, but I'll get to that later. The only real reason you might want to gain some levels here is to get money and hope that the Goblins (now the actual ones) drop the Leather Cap helmet accessory since the party is woefully under-equipped.

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This does bring me up to one thing I do wish to address which are weapons. Mechanically speaking, weapons work differently in FFV than any non-MMO/Ivalice FF game within the main series and due to all three of my party members having different weapons to start with, now would be a good time explain this. In a nutshell, the damage algorithms of weapons scale with multiple stats instead of just strength, this means that certain weapons are more ideal for certain jobs and characters.

Butz begins with a basic broadsword. There are two types of swords in the game, basic swords and Knightswords. Knightswords are way better than actual swords seeing how the weakest knightsword (Flametongue) is stronger than the second best regular sword (Great Sword). On the other hand, basic swords can be used by a variety of classes whereas knightswords are restricted to Knights and Freelancers. All the sword weapons in the game, including katana's but not ninja blades scale with the strength stat in their damage algorithm, making this an ideal weapon for Butz due to having the highest natural strength stat.

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Lenna is equipped with a knife, and Faris has a Dagger once she joins. Knife weapons scale with strength and agility, but have a lower basic attack than swords. This makes this a better weapon for Lenna than Butz due to her strength stat being the worst of the five but having the second highest agility compensates for this. Knives, Ninja Blades, Bows, whips and Boomerangs all use this algorithm as well.

UPDATE!!! Okay, this information about weapons using Agility in the damage formula is partially incorrect. Some weapons are supposed to factor both Strength and Agility, but due to a bug in the formula, it doesn't work correctly because the formula has a tendency to reduce the value of a character's Agility stat to either 0 or 1. So weapons like knives, bows, ninja swords, and a few others do not work correctly and generally hit for less. There are exceptions such as the Man-Eater and the Twin Lances, which use the Spear algorithm of just Strength. While the Chicken Knife uses a completely different formula and avoids this bug. As far as my research has shown, this has never been fixed, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Pixel Remasters or even the Mobile version did address it.

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Galuf doesn't have a weapon and instead fights barehanded. Barehanded is a bit tricky cause its base damage is 3, but it actually hits twice to compensate for its low attack power and inability to really scale with anything. This makes it pretty weak, and you'll want to get Galuf a weapon ASAP. Barehanded does get some interesting improvements once you acquire the Monk class but I'll get to that when we have the class.

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So starting off, the party isn't in the most ideal shape, especially considering Cecil and Kain were fully armed in IV. Luckily, everything is pretty weak in the early game. Farm some Gil in the cave, and hopefully you might get a leather helmet. We'll likely come back here later for the pirate treasure, a side story, and to acquire two Blue Magics from the enemies. Pick up the treasure and discover the secret passage to the pirate hideout. Here, the party will see that Faris ship can move without wind power and Galuf suggests they steal the ship. You can explore the hideout but sleeping pirates prevent entry anywhere.You can overhear a sleeping pirate talk in his sleep inside the ship to get your first hint about the ship's true locomotive power. Unable to get the ship to move, the party is caught by Faris and the rest of the crew. Lenna reveals she's a princess and in the midst of figuring out how high the ransom should be, Faris spots Lenna's pendant and has the group tied up instead. After some deep reflection by all parties involved overnight, Faris decides to help Lenna instead and reveals that Syldra is the ship's true source of power. With that, the team heads towards the Wind Shrine!... or not, we're going to have ourselves a little detour instead.

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Heading northwest, the team finds the town of Tule. We'll have to come back later for story reasons but it's important to come here now to pick up a few things before heading to the Wind Shrine. First, talk to the man in green who asks if you've been to the Beginner's Hall. You can answer no and he'll walk you over to it, or you can ignore him and head to the building southwest of town. While there is no real information to be gleamed from the teachers here unless this is your first time playing an RPG, the place is filled with free items. You can obtain some Leather shoes, a tent, and an ether for bothering to explore and talk to everyone here. Explore around town to find more gil, potions, and another pair of Leather shoes to equip.

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In the armor shop, pick up three Leather shields as Faris starts with one, if you need to, pick up two extra leather helmets if the RNG hasn't been in your favor for enemy drops. In the weapon shop pick up a Broadsword for Galuf. It has a rod and staff, but there are easier and free ways to obtain them, so save your money. The magic shop is the real reason why we're here and I suggest blowing through all your cash to obtain all six available spells. This way, once the classes are unlocked, they won't be useless until you get to a town to buy them some magic.

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Before we leave, we have two more things to do. Go to the Pub and talk to the pirates who mention Faris is asleep upstairs. Here you can witness a pretty hilarious optional scene where Butz and Galuf question there sexuality. Downstairs, you'll see a stage with dancers. They will trell you to stand on the stool closest to the stage and look at them, this activates a fun dancce sequence that would make horndog Cecil proud. The real reason to to do this though is to get the dancers off the stage so you can access the piano. Have Butz play the piano to begin the long quest to obtain the Hero's Song/Rhyme for the Bard class.

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With the party fully equipped, head back towards Tycoon castle and try to make land fall somewhere south of the Pirate Hideout entrance where you left Boko. This will activate a side story where Butz learns that Boko tried to follow him into the cave and got injured. Thankfully the pirates discovered him and are taking care of him until he recovers. With the pirates feeling groovy about the party, you can finally explore the hideout and pick up some treasures connected to the inospicuous switch near the entrance to their hideout. Nothing terribly useful, but better to get it now while its relevant than coming back later when most of the items won't be as useful.

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With all the done, you can finally head northeast to the Wind Shrine. It's pretty cool seeing how many things you can get done so early in the game. FFV is surprisingly content rich for people who don't follow every story beat and actually sxplore a little.

When you enter the shrine, you'll see some people to the left who all once worked in the shrine or for King Tycoon. Lenna learns her father is at the top of the tower but hasn't returned since the monsters attacked the shrine. Talking to the man on the left of the healing pot will reward you with some free potions and hey, there is a healing pot. Told you this game was really noob friendly in the beginning.

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This is a pretty short dungeon but it has a few branching paths leading to another broadsword and some other minor treasures. Give the broadsword to Faris and give her Dagger to Lenna to maximize your offensive potential.

Surprisingly, the enemies in this dungeon drop some decent items for this point in the game and there is another Blue Mage skill to obtain as well for future reference, and a damn good one at that. The main enemies to be on the lookout for are the Black Goblins (drops Leather Shoes and knows Goblin Punch), the Moldwynd (drops Elixers and knows Aero), and the Mani Wizards (drops Rods). I lucked out and got an elixer. Surprisingly enough, a lot of enemies in Butz's world actually have a low chance of dropping Elixers, which is important to acquire now cause we're going to need quite the stockpile later.

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For now, just explore the shrine and approach the eagle looking boss Wing Raptor.

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Wing Raptor continues on a tradition started in FFIV, the opening boss that teaches you how ATB is different from standard Turn Based combat. Like the Mist Dragon, or Whelk and Guard Scorpion for later fans, Wild Raptor has a tendency to fold its wings around its body in a defensive posture at which point any attack on it will result in the beast countering with Claw, a powerful phsycal attrack that ignores defense. If you've been keeping your levels low, this an be quite dangerous. So it's important not to be slamming commands as quickly as you can cause unlike the next two games, you're not going to get an in-game exlanantion about this mechanic before he accidentally pulls it off. I of course, ifnor this advice and Butz takes a serious hit hat requires me to use a potion on him. The attack to really watch out for though is Breath Wing, a powerful group hitting Wind attack which does low damage but can quickly stakc up if you play too recklessly. Thankfully, this bird is pretty weak and goes down after they jump out of their guard mode.

On the next floor, there is a well hidden treasure in the far southeast corner of the room that contains a staff.

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See, told you to save your money in Tule. With that, you can jump into the crystal room where the party discovers that the Wind Crystal has shattered and you witness a sequence where the four are blessed by the crystals and Lenna's father beckons the party telepathically to seek out and protect the reamining crystals. We also get some damn job classes finally and a hilarious side event where Boko explains how the job system works.

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With that, I now have four party members, and six jobs at my disposal: Knight, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, Blue Mage, and Thief. So now it's time to hear your suggestions for the starting classes of my team. I'll go over the pros and cons of the classes chosen in the next update.

Wonder who you go with for each dude! Loving the write-up so far. Kinda makes me want to do a thing of my own one day. I honestly never knew about the battle speed thing! Did they actually change it for FFIV DS?

Also, I used to always go active on all atb games, but then o got tired of it and decided to set them to wait. Makes me feel old.

As far as I can tell, the DS version of FFIV works the same as the original version. Interestingly enough Ozma in FFIX apparently has a unique ATB mechanic where if the player inputs a command before his ATB bar fills, it will auto-fill and he'll go before the player. There are minor variations within the system depending on the entry starting with VII. For instance, status effects are not affected by the ATB until FFVIII, so playing on a low setting in VII and XII will make abilities like Death Sentence and Slow Petrify more dangerous for the player. XII also has more ways to affect the ATB and the ATB affects how quickly an abilities charge time will take, so for players who like it fast, you should pretty much play it on the highest speed setting.

As for what jobs I utilize, I'm up for suggestions. I picked up magic so I can use the mages right out the gate and I've already highlighted two areas with Blue Magic. Though I said I would do a write up on the classes picked for me, I may just do one for all six on the next update. I'll give people a few days to give me suggestions and will probably play the game a bit later this week. I'll probably cover up to reaching Walse in the next playthrough.

I think it’d be cool if you made Galuf a Monk and Faris a Blue Mage. Turn Bartz into a Knight to capitalize on his strength, and then either have Lenna be a Reg Mage to round out the party or make her a Thief to make things a bit more challenging without having a healer at all. Whichever one of those options you pick it should be interesting as it’s still less safe than having one character be a dedicated healer from the start.

Okay, so the requests so far:

Monk
Blue Mage
Knight
Thief

No White Mage.

Anyone else want to make a request of who my party should be?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

No White Mage.

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Scared? :3:

While a White Mage would be super useful for the next part, it's not for the party preservation. Though a White Mage is pretty much the MVP for Magissa/Forza battle.

Honestly, I don't actually use White Mages terribly often if the class choice is left to me, and while it might be awhile before I can acquire White Wind or the Chemist class, I don't think I would absolutely need a WM until Walse for the Shiva battle since she can be a real pain if you fight her early enough. I'll definitely need one later but I feel I can make it through the early sections without much trouble as I don't feel FFV gets particularly difficult until Galuf's World.

You can still replace thief with red mage

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fynn

You can still replace thief with red mage

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Actually Red Mage isn't available yet. You get the class with the Water Crystal of Walse.

My available classes, excluding Freelancer, are:
Knight
Thief
Monk
White Mage
Black Mage
Blue Mage

Oh trout I forgot!

Welp, thief it is when it comes to my vote.

Update!

Well with Fynn's suggestion, I made Butz a Knight, Lenna, a Thief, Galuf a Blue Mage, and Faris a Monk. I'm going to give an overview of the classes and post the real update a bit later once I dwindle down which screenshots I want to use.
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The Knight class is the armored bruiser of the Job Classes.
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Overall the Knight grants the following:
Strength: +23
Agility: +1
Stamina: +20
Magic: -14
Ability: Guard
Innate: Cover
Class Type: Take
Weapons: Knives, Swords, Knightswords
Armor: Heavy armor including gauntlets, helmets, shields, and Light Armor

With the ability to equip heavy armor and use shields, Knights are naturally durable, especially with the Stamina bonus. They are loosely based off of Cecil's Paladin form, gaining his innate Cover ability to protect weaken allies and gaining the ability Guard, which significantly reduces all physical damage that hit them which works great with their innate Cover ability. The skills this class teaches are mostly situational. Doublehand, their Lv. 3 ability, is easily the best skill they teach, granting a +13 bonus to Strength which I'll remind you, their swords naturally scale with. This skill is easily their best offering being the best support ability for melee classes until Dual-Wield and/or Rapid Fire are obtained. Most of their other skills are situational at best. Cover is only really useful for durable classes like Knight and frankly I feel the Monk is the best choice to use the skill. Guard is a pretty useful skill if you know you're up against a heavy melee hitter and want to use a squishy mage, otherwise don't bother. Equip shield can be useful since shield block attacks and elemental ones can no-sell their respective element making them a viable defensive support skill if you're using a class that can't equip shields. Equip Armor is not as useful as it sounds, since Heavy Armor tends to lack the special bonuses most other armor types grant. Equip Sword is a much better skill than you might think, largely due to its ability to let you use not only Knightswords, but also granting the user the Knights +23 Strength, which makes it pretty excellent for classes that need more oomph.

Overall, I find the Knight is a Take type class, by which I mean it's a class that is strong on it's own and benefits from using other class abilities as opposed to having a great skill selection itself. Mystic Blade, Dual-Wield. Rapid Fire, Bladegrasp, and even high level magic like White or Time. This is a class that can carry you through the whole game and is one of the best starting classes as usual for the franchise. While it's very equipment dependent, said gear is often the best in the game.
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Thief is a dungeon crawlers best friend.
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Stats
Strength: +1
Agility: +16*
Stamina: +2
Magic: -6
Ability: Steal
Innate: Secret Passage, Vigilance, and Sprint
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Knives and Boomerangs
Armor: Light Armor, Armlets, Cloth Armor, and Thief Gloves

Thieves are a mix bag. Combat wise, they leave much to be desired with low stat gains outside of agility, and while their weapon type scales with agility, it also has to scale with strength which will likely be low, evening it out. On the other hand, knives tend to come with special secondary effects that offset their crummy attack potential. Thieves are also pretty squishy overall and won't last long on the front lines without a meat shield like Knight or White Mage medic on constant alert. Course you don't use a Thief for combat potential, unless this is any of the post-FFV entries cause hot damn if Locke and Zidane aren't OP in their titles. Instead it's their support abilities and signature Steal command that make them desirable. Letting you score lots of goodies early on and helping you find hidden treasure behind invisible paths and locked doors. Not to mention the Sprint option and Back Attack protection are wonderful anti-frustration features. Most of their abilities are pretty useful with the possible exception of Find Passage if you're using a guide or are a veteran who simply remembers where all the good stuff is. Sprint/Dash is also not as useful for anyone not playing the original Super Famicom version since Square came to their senses and added a dash command in all their later ports of this game. Steal, and especially Mug are easily the best skills they grant which work well with other speedy classes like Ninja. Vigilance is an underrated ability but one that will be very useful in a future dungeon. Back Attacks are annoying but usually manageable, yet FFV decided to have some really nasty enemies in this game primarily show up only in a back attack formation, and this handy skill will likely save you from a few extra party wipes. Flee/escape is great for low level runs or inexperienced players who simply want to have fun since it grants 100% success rate in running from battles. Artful Dodger is a weird skill, cause all it does is grant any class the +16 Agility the thief possesses. It may seem like useless skill, but given to a class like Hunter or Ninja whom use weapons that scale with Agility and Strength and you can see them gain a great boost, especially since one class can't make use of some of the other useful melee skills.

Overall Thief has some great skills to give to other classes, but the weak stats and limited build options make this more of a Give type of class. With that said, if you're looking to make a great endgame party utilizing the Freelancer/Mime combo, you need to master this class. You not only gain all of the innate skills but Thief gives the highest Agility bonus to the Freelancer/Mime classes.

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Monk's are the best damage dealers in the early game.
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Stats
Strength: +26*
Agility: +1
Stamina: +26*
Magic: -23
Ability: Kick
Innate: Brawler and Counter
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Barehanded
Armor: Light Armor, Armlets, Cloth Armor

Granting the best Strength and Stamina bonuses in the game, Monks are certainly a class you'll want to master for the Freelancer/Mime classes. What's really odd about the class though, is despite having the highest strength bonus of any class, as far as I can tell, the class never makes any use of it. Monk's use barehands as their only weapon type, and barehand normally has an innate power of 3, basically Attack = 3. With the Brawler skill, this formula changes to Attack = (Level*2)+3 meaning the attack of a Monk is completely dependent on their level and not their stats, even Kick is based on the formula. So the class that gives the highest strength bonus ironically doesn't need it. The only way to boost their power is to gain level or equipe them with the Kaiser Knuckles which changes the base power of unarmed to 50. Course Barehanded attacks twice, so regardless of how the damage formula works, this class is pretty OP in the damage department, especially in the early game. Another weird element of the class is that despite Kick being the default ability for the class, it's not a learnable skill. Only Monks and technically a Mime can use the skill.

Several of the classes skills are pretty useful. Brawler grants a class both the Monk's strength bonus and allows them to fight barehanded. Due to the damage algortihm, this makes the skill highly useful for mages who don't need to worry about losing out on the strength bonus due to their handicaps and they can fight just as well as a monk. Counter is an amazing ability, especially for Knights who can utilize it with the Cover/Guard combo to mnake them work double dute as a meat shield and meat cleaver. Focus is a pretty good skill that uses up one turn to double normal damage the following turn, though it will remove any special abilities in the algortithm such as elemental wekaness if used on a character using a weapon. Not so useful for slow classes but speedy ones will find it useful, though Jump is still superior. Chakra is a great free heal ability that is very useful in the early game, especially since it also heals Poison and Darkness. The rest of it's skills are just HP%+ type skills that have so-so usefulness. I often feel they were put at the end to discourage average players from mastering the class so they won't get the stat bonuses for Freelancer/Mime classes the game never tells you about.

Overall, while the class is prety powerful with some great skills, it doesn't mesh well with other class abilities, giving it few exploitable options. It's ridiculous Magic Stat penalty, which is tiued with the Beserker for worst, makes it pointless to use any spell type dependent on Magic Power such as White, Black, Red, and Summons. Like many classes that are genuinely self-contained in their design, Monk often works best with some of it's own skills such as Focus and Chakra. It's a Give class that works well on its own.

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Making their series debut, the Blue Mage
Attachment 75424
Stats:
Strength: -8
Agility: +1
Stamina: +3
Magic: +23
Ability: Blue Magic
Innate: Learning
Class Type: Give and Take
Weapons: Knives, Swords, and Rods
Armor: Cloth/Robes, Light Armor, Shields, Hats, and Armlets

Meet one of the game's three "Veteran Classes" I call them that cause only a veteran of the series is ever going to bother putting in the effort to make the most of the class and learn how they work out of sheer boredom. Blue Mages learn select enemy skills that are used on them in battle. Contrary to what you may beleive, the Blue Mage doesn't actually have to survive the battle to learn the skill, as long as someone on your team wins the battle they learn the skill in. Another bonus is that all learned Blue Magics are shared, so you only need to learn the spell once. There are 30 Blue Mage spells available in the game. Unlike conventional magic, Blue Magic tends to be less direct in it's useability. Many of the skills either inflict status effects on the enemy or party, or utilize unique formulas that only damage enemies of the right Multiple of a number. The few normal offesnive spells it possees like the Aero class of spells or Aqua Rake utilize uncommon elements that few ennemies have defenses against, making this a pretty strong class when used right. I don't think any game in the series with the exception of FFIX have ever really given this class justice without changing the class basic arounds like VII and XI did. You will be surprised how many enemies in this game, including several bosses can be crippled by a Blue Mage with the right skill, it's almost ridiculous and you would be hard pressed to find a game where the class can be this OP. With the exception of Learning and Blue Magic, the other two Blue Mage skills are garbage. The stat changes are only slightly different from a White Mage with a slight dip in Magic but increase in Stamina which is neglible in the long run. Of anything, I feel like the Blue Mage would have been better served getting the stat bonus/penalties of the Red Mage as Magic isn't a terribly useful stat for the Blue Mage since only a few of its skills utilize the stat. On the other hand, this makes the Blue Mage work well with another magic class as it's secondary job since it's stat bonuses are comparable to the White/Black mages. The fact it can use Rods and Knives to boost elemental power and can naturally use shields, makes this class actually a potentially better Black Mage than the class itself. With that said, Blue Mages tend to lure players into thinking they're decent front line fighters since they can use swords, but you really need to treat the class more like a Mage.

Overall, the Blue Mage is a difficult to master but incredibly rewarding and fun class to use who can easily be made into a powerful secondary or primary mage dpeneding on the sub-job given. they can be decent fighters in the early game, but you'll want to put them in the back row and treat them like a Mage for most of the game. Learning can be an annoying skill to use, as most players would prefer not to waste a slot, but proper use of the class can be pretty rewarding. Blue Magic is just a great class cause it's not as dependent on Magic Power liek other magic, making it pretty ideal for melee classes with steep Magic penalities or quirky classes that get mediocre bonuses. It's honestly one of my favorite classes in the game.

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Once I use the other two starting classes, I'll do an overview of them as well. I'll do one for each class I actually use in the game. I'll likely have the actual real update posted either later tonight or more likely sometime tomorrow.

Just popping in to say I haven't played FFV and I want to avoid spoilers for when I do.

Good luck with the LP though!

Okay so one change up, I completely forgot about North Mountain, so today's episode will end before that point instead of Walse, meaning we get another shot at playing Job Classes.

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So I have my quirky team of Knight, Monk, Thief, and Blue Mage. All I can say for now is that despite the game's best efforts to make all the starting classes relevant in the beginning, this isn't exactly the ideal team for this part of the game. Ideally, I would drop Thief and Blue mage for the White and Black Mages due to the nature of the next major area I'm heading towards. Still, there are some things I can do right now with these classes.

I head back into the Wind Shrine in order to pick up the two Blue Magics in here and make the most of the Thief class. Black Goblins possess Goblin Punch which is an average physical attack with a few quirky properties that have some interesting potential much later in the game. One of which is the fact the game does 8x more damage if the attacker and target share the same level. Something I learn painfully when my team reach Level 7, and the Goblins start ganging up on poor Lenna.

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Speaking of which, I'm having Lenna steal potions off of all the enemies I encounter and hopefully I'll get a few of the rare drops like Elixirs and Leather Shoes as well. Since I don't have a dedicated healer yet, this is a good way to have some quick healing unless I choose to cheat... This is also important cause sadly, the next two areas don't have much in the way of great items to steal or use of the class dungeon crawler skills. In truth, Walse is where the Thief really shines cause the enemies in the area have invaluable items, and Vigilance will be incredibly useful to avoid a certain trolling enemy the devs threw in.

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MoldWynns possess Aero, which most players probably don't know about because they only use it on their sixth to eighth turn. Unfortunately, the Monk becomes a huge liability since they have innate Counter so it takes a while to even see the spell because the damn things keep attacking Faris and she in return beats them into the ground. It takes a few attempts but thankfully, the first time the enemy lasts long enough to use the skill, they use it on my actual Blue Mage! Hurray! With that done, I head back to the Pirate Hideout to fight the Steel Bats, they use Vampire, which turns into a great asset later as it's the most effective healing (for the Blue Mage at least) I have available at the moment without a White Mage.

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I can't progress through the canal due to the gate being locked, so I head back to Tule to meet with Zokk, a friend of Lenna and quite possibly the inspiration for Dr. Zot in FFIX. We get some interesting story moments here with a bit of foreshadowing on Butz's past and connection to the Dawn Warriors. Zok gives him the key and we can proceed to the canal.

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The canal is pretty short with only two new enemy types and a Jumbo Prawn type enemy as a boss. Fun Fact: The squid/octopus enemies in this area only target the female party members. Devs getting pervy stuff past the radar again. The boss of this area isn't too much of a handful except for one attack that does a lot of damage to a single party member. My party doesn't have too much trouble taking him down, though if you want a quick and easy way to beat this guy, turn everyone into a Black Mage cause he's extremely weak to Bolt/Thunder magic and you can take him down really fast.

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We get a heartfelt scene with Syldra helping the party and lose our ship in the process. The party winds up in the Ship Graveyard. This is where a Black and White mage would come in really handy as every enemy in this area is undead and weak to healing and fire magic. Most enemies don't carry anything important though some can still drop elixirs while the golem looking enemies do have Ethers as a rare drop but good luck getting that. There is a flail in the first area, but since I don't have a white mage, it goes into the inventory. Roughly halfway through the dungeon, you'll get a hilarious sequence where the party finally discovers Faris' true gender. The added heal up and save point are just added bonuses. The last stretch has a few easily missed treasures but the most important is the World Map. You can get one later but it's so easy to find it here that it would be a shame to miss it now.

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Just as the party feels their out of spooksville, the team is confronted with apparitions of important people in their lives. Butz thinks of his mother, Lenna her father, we get another not-so-subtle hint about Faris's true identity. We also get to meet Krile for the first time but in an odd case of amnesia actually proving to be useful, Galuf doesn't really fall for the apparition and instead snaps the party back to their senses before Siren makes her series debut.

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Siren is a bit of a tricky boss, she jumps between two phases, living and undead. Her living form is weak to melee while her undead is weak to magic. She can silence characters and hits surprisingly hard for a future summon that is usually physically frail. Sadly, she's not a summon in this title. The easiest way to deal with her is similar to the crab battle earlier, even make a team of monks or black mages and just nail her when she shifts to the appropriate form. Also, note that she drops a treasure when she dies but what you get depends on which form you end up dealing the fatal blow to. Her living form drops Bronze Armor, while her undead form drops a Bronze Shield. Since both become available in the next town, it's not terribly important which one to go for, but I went for the armor since it usually costs more. The lack of a dedicated healer did cost me here though as Siren wailed on my team pretty bad. Galuf largely stayed alive due to Vampire. Her levels is too low to make use of Goblin Punch and since Blue Mages have low attack power, I had him using Aero and healing instead. Everyone else attacked except for Faris, who used Focus which she learned earlier in the dungeon. I did sadly have to use a Phoenix Down to save Faris after she got nailed twice in a row with her heavy critical attack.

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Once finished the party leaves and you need to head south to reach Carwen. The party still needs to reach Walse to save the Water Crystal but they no longer have a boat and conventional ships aren't going to work. So what is a a ditz like Butz suppose to do? The next update will cover North Mountain and end with the team reaching Walse for real this time. Should I switch out the jobs or keep going? Everyone is level 2 with their current jobs which gives me a few, though not seriously great customization options.

Man Blue Mages are so damn badass in this game. I can get behind the current party, Knights as well as Archers (Rangers in this game) tend to be my favorite job in any job-based game (they also totally dominate in XII Zodiac) and I may have made the endgame a bit too easy for me doing so, but I did make sure to max out Thief and Monk on everyone to have maxed out Freelancer stats eventually. Not sure if you'll use them, or if they're too OP for your taste.

I seriously didn't know that about the battle speed. Nor did I know as much about the nitty gritty details of, well, everything. But I've only played the game a couple of times.

Also blue mages are fantastic. Though I never actually have the patience to learn most of their spells.

So I have one vote for just sticking with this party. Does anyone else want to suggest a different line-up?

Blue Mages aren't that good early game. I always have a White Mage just to have a dedicated healer. Not a bad line-up though. I think Blue Mages learn !Learn so you can give that to Galuf if you do switch.

I like the party as is. It seems it’s giving you a decent enough challenge so far - just as I intended ;)

I really don't have much of a preference. You can keep the present jobs or change them as you see fit. Part of me is interested in seeing you continue if only because it's a team I would never have picked for myself.

Okay, so just to get this out of the way, let's do a quick overview of the last two classes from the Wind Crystal.

White Mages are the go to team medic of any scrub.
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Stats
Strength: -7
Agility: +1
Stamina: 0
Magic: +25
Ability: White Magic
Innate: Nothing
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Staffs and Flails
Armor: Hats, Robes, and Armlets

The foundation of any good adventuring party, White Mages are a bit of a downgrade compared to previous incarnations in the series. Largely cause they lost of a lot of their versatility and good support options to Time and Blue Mage in this entry. Blue Mage has most of the same status inflicting spells that White Mage has going for it and losing Haste and the Aero spells hurt this class overall. Thankfully it still has Protect and Shell until TA2 Zing! The weapon options are not terrible, but nothing to write home about either. Staves base their damage off of the users Magic stat instead of strength and damage is calculated on the targets M. Defense rather than their actual defense stat. Flails works like axes and hammers which base damage on strength but ignore 75% of the enemies defense, but with the low strength stat, it's only a minor trade off.

Still, the class is solid overall. The White Mage is pretty useful before you get the second set of Jobs due to consistent healing as well as the life spells, not to mention a few instances in the early game makes them pretty useful such as the undead Ship Graveyard and being able to Silence a few annoying bosses. Holy, as usual, is also a pretty powerful spell though the Mystic Knight makes better use of it. It's a class I would recommend leveling up as you go and then giving their skills to another class instead. The class basically teaches six levels of White Magic which allows another job use a certain amount of the spells. In addition, the ability grants the job a part of the White Mage's magic power with it, so even magically inept classes can make use of the spells, though you'll only see noticeable power the higher level of White Magic you've learned. Their final skill is MP+10% which is absolutely useless and one of many final Mage skills that feel like they exist to troll the player with. With that said, they can be made useful by either giving them a secondary magic art to play with Like Blue or Summon magic, or you can give them barehanded and watch as they beat the crap out of everything for the first half of the game.

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Black Mages are the fireball throwing glass cannons of the team.

Stats
Strength: -9
Agility: 0
Stamina: -2
Magic: +31
Ability: Black Magic
Innate: Nothing
Class Type: Give and Take
Weapons: Knives and Rods
Armor: Robes, Hat, and Armlets

Normally in these types of class overviews, this is the point where we rip into Black Mages for not being as cool as summoners, but funny enough, their not terrible in this game. Largely cause having to find summons is more of a hassle in this entry, and because the Black Mage can use Rods. Rods work in battle with the same damage algorithm as Staves, but unlike Staves, the Rods real use is their passive elemental boost properties which can keep the Black Mage a viable party member for at least half of the game. Granted once you get access to most of the elemental summons or if you happen to know what you're doing with a Mystic Knight, the class does fall to the wayside. Even Flare can't help it despite being a pretty snazzy spell in this game, and Time Mage stole Meteor from them as well, though surprisingly, the Black Mage is better with it.

Like White Mage, the class teaches tiers of its magic that grant use of more spells and boosts the users magic based on the Black Mage's stats, This is where Black Mages can be pretty useful cause while it may seem redundant to give Black Magic to say a summoner, the extra magic boost it rewards is pretty useful. In fact the best use of a Black Mage is similar to the White Mage. Either hand them other Magic styles like Time and Blue so you can see how powerful Aero and Meteor can really be, or give them Barehanded. With the second highest Magic stat in the game, BM isn't a bad option if you want to field some magic users as Blue Magic and Time Magic do see some benefits from being used by the class. Course Summoners are still the Achilles Heel of this class. Don't worry Black Mage, VI makes you awesome again. To add insult to injury, the Black Mages final ability is MP+30% which is just as useless as the 10% variant that WM teaches. You would honestly think they would give you the Equip Rod skill, but I'll save that rant for Time Mage.

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So the party reaches Carwen and we get a little shopping done. There are a few more spells to learn for both Black Mage and White Mage, we get access to better armor for the Knight and Blue Mage, and we get access to the RegalCutlass (Long Sword in the official translation which is boring if you ask me) and the real prize is a hidden Ice Rod. This weapon is pretty awesome cause in the hands of Black Mage or Summoner, it grants a passive 50% increase to Ice Magic. It can also be used as an item where it will cast Blizzaga before breaking, so don't do that. In fact, most weapons that cast magic when used as an item in this game will break, so it's an awful feature in this game compared to FF1-IV.

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The party doesn't know how to reach Walse cause the mountains and sea are blocking their way. Just as luck would have it though, a drunk in the local bar is babbling about seeing a Hiryuu in the local mountain and Lenna knows there is only one in the whole world. Before we head out, we let Butz practice a bit more on a piano in town which is the second piano needed in the Hero Song quest.

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North Mountain is short but offers some unique elements, one of which is an environmental hazard. There are purple flowers on the mountain that will inflict poison on your party if you walk on them, so be careful while moving around. Most of the treasures are fluff, but their are other valuables. The tombstone looking enemies have two things to offer us. Thieves can steal Silver Spectacles from them, which not only offer the same defense bonuses as Leather Shoe accessories, but has the added benefit of giving us protection from Darkness/Blind. The enemy has one other gift, they know the Blue Mage skill Flash. Unfortunately they don't have enough MP to cast it, while you can get this skill later, I opted to hand over an ether I know I'll never use to get the spell now.

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The other enemy to look out for are the flying cat enemies. They don't have any blue spells or good items, but they're one of the first enemies you'll come across to reward 2 ABP instead of the usual one. This makes this mountain a decent early leveling spot, though I would save any serious grinding for later. I used them after the boss battle of the dungeon to level every characters job up one more level. Speaking of Bosses...

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North Mountain is kind of a bad day for Lenna overall, she gets poisoned by a poacher named Magissa. In some translations, Magissa wants to ransom her, in others she wants her to be a plaything for her husband... Yeah. After a seriously goofy rescue by Faris and the others we enter the fight. As you'll no doubt noticed, I switched Galuf to White Mage for this fight for a few reasons. Ideally, I would want to have both White and Blue Magic here but I didn't want to grind too much and instead opted to deal with the lesser of the two evils. Magissa is primarily a spell user, but she's not immune to Mute/Silence, making this fight ridiculously easy if you have a White Mage and the spell handy. In fact this trivializes the fight so much some players may not realize that if you wait around long enough, Magissa is joined by her hulking juggernaut of a husband Forza. If I had bothered to keep the Blue Magic, it's possible to Blind him with Flash which makes him a sitting duck as well. Both go down pretty easily, and I even learn White Lv. 1 for my trouble, which will become Galuf's sub job when I switch him back to Blue Mage. Neither boss carries an item you can steal, making Lenna kind of useless in this fight, but they both drop an item. Magissa drops a Whip, which only Beastmaster's and Freelancers can use. The damage it does scales with Strength and Agility like Knife weapons but also does full damage from the back row as an extra bonus. The Power Drink is mostly useless. The item is suppose to double attack power but it's bugged, and can only increase the damage of Goblin Punch. I'll likely sell it unless I can find a good Mix recipe for it.

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After this, we find the injured Hiryuu, who was on the mountain looking for a rare healing herb that only works on its species. Lenna braves the poisonous plants to get the dragon the herb, and in return the dragon heals her. This is kind of cheesy since you almost feel like their would have been an easier way to get to the plant, but for those who have played the game before, this scene has a bit of an extra punch to it if you remember the full backstory behind Lenna and the Hiryuu. With that the party has a flying dragon to traverse the world, but he can't fly over mountains. We also get a funny foreshadowing to Butz's traumatic childhood when he mentions he's afraid of heights.

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Now the party can reach Walse, but we're going to head back to Tycoon Castle instead, largely cause I don't like going where I'm told and partly to loot the place. Most of the items are pretty decent, Elixirs and Cottages, as well as more Ethers. Talking to the Chancellor activates a scene where Lenna confronts Faris about the possibility that she's her lost sister Sarisa. The whole sequence feels somwhat reminiscent of the Figaro Bros. scene in the next entry. The next morning, we're given permission to raid the castle treasury. I explore th castle and bypass some of it's bizarre architecture to find some hidden treasure here and there. The main trreasury contains a Katana, Diamond Bell, and Shuriken. I won't have any of these classes for a bit, but it's nice to get them now for when I do. I must say, I really appreciate the unique look and layout of Tycoon Castle.

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With that, I head to Walse finally. The Weapon shop only has one new item, a Battle Axe for the Berserker class. the Armor shop has some nice armor upgrades for the whole party and the magic shop sells our first sets of Time and Summon magic. The only other thing of note here is the little girl who talks about the Garula, which I must say is giving me flashbacks of FFXV, as well as a frog you can find in the north of the town. He doesn't ribbit, instead he tells you that it's not so bad being a frog. Apparently, this frog is a running gag in the series. During FFIII's time, someone drew a mini-comic about it with jokes where the team got turned into frog's to bypass part of the dungeon and instead decide that being frogs isn't so bad and simply end their journey there to live as frogs. Square liked the joke so much they've had a frog NPC repeat the line in both FFIV and V. I did got o Castle Walse, and was promptly destroyed when I entered the basement by an enemy called the Jackanapes, but I'll discuss him next time.

Current setup:
Butz - Knight with Doublehand as secondary ability
Lenna - Thief with Escape/Flee as secondary ability
Galuf - Blue Mage with White Lv.1 as secondary ability.
Faris - Monk with Chakra as secondary ability.

I'll likely tackle Walse Tower and Shiva next playthrough.

Wait the Regal Cutlass is actually a longsword or vice versa? A cutlass is nothing like a longsword. I am disappoint Square.

Wait the rods boost elemental power already? Huh, I don't know if I ever realized that. Kinda wanna see a Black Mage now ^^ they're such a classic staple job that's pretty much always great to have.

Slight change of plans, due to obtaining a five new jobs after Walse Tower, I've decided to postpone taking down Shiva and will let you guys decide my next set of jobs. Besides, there is a surprising amount of stuff to do just now in Walse.

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After doing a bit of shopping in Walse, you may enter the castle and surprisingly explore a bit. There are a few items to be found here, but the two most valuable are in the basement. Unfortunately for the player, the dungeon is crawling with a single enemy called the Jackanapes. It's an Imp looking monster with mid-game stats. In fact, you won't run into this enemy again until Castle Ex-Death nearly halfway through the game, except this version is stronger because it absorbs all elements and is immune to most status effects. They even have a Blue Mage skill but frankly, it's not worth going for it at this point because there are easier ways to obtain it later, and it's not one of the better skills to begin with. Remember when I said Thieves become really handy at a certain point? Well here we are, the Jackanapes usually show up as back attacks so Thief's Vigilance skill comes in handy here and helps you get a fighting chance at least. There is a way to beat them early in the game, but I'll need some levels first, which I don't have. A team of +Lv. 16 Monks with the Berserk status that the enemy Blue mage skill will happily provide can potentially win these fights, but I can't do this yet at my current progress. To add insult to injury, these enemies drop abysmal XP, Gil, and ABP, so they're not even worth fighting in the first place. They only seem to exist for the sole purpose of screwing you out of the full-powered Brave Blade. I'm not running, so I'll save the basement for a little later in Butz's world. Consequently, I forgot this fact during my previous play session and was promptly destroyed.

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The other point of interest here is the hidden dungeon behind the waterfall, this leads to Shiva and mainly has most of the enemies from Walse Tower in here. I'm going to choose to come back later cause the levels and some other valuables at Walse Tower will make the Shiva fight much easier when we get there. The last thing to do here before talking to the king is visit the prison. Here' you'll meet a few thieves begging to be let loose. One among them if Lone Wolf the Thief, and if you cut your teeth on FFVI before this entry, you might be fooled into letting him out. Don't. He will honestly just screw you out of a few items, a few of which are pretty decent, and you get nothing for your troubles either. So we'll just let him stew in there a little longer until the end of the game.

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After this, talk to the King of Walse. Lenna pleads with him to deactivate the amplifier but the King won't hear any of it cause the prosperity it brings (despite his dungeon crawling with demonic spiders) is too good for him to bow to rumors. The debate would have gone on longer, but a meteor crash lands not far from Walse Tower. Worried, the King and his guard rush to the tower leaving you to follow them. When you arrive, you learn a Wild Garula has gone mad and has rushed into the tower, laying waste to the Kingsguard. Interestingly enough, you can face Garula as random encounters if you bother to walk to the tower. As befit of their in-story description as docile creatures, they will actually never attack you and instead run away if they survive to the fourth round, which is very possible cause they're damage sponges. That aside, your party climbs the tower to save the crystal.

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To make things interesting for me, I've mostly kept the same classes but switched around who has what. Butz is now a Monk, Lenna is a Black Mage, Galuf is a Thief and Faris is a Knight. Part of the reason for this is because the tower is a pretty decent leveling spot, so I'll be able to gain a few more skills to play around with. Lenna is the only change-up cause we want to see that Ice Rod in action. As you can see from the images above, the rods make a huge difference.

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There are a few enemies to look out for in this dungeon. The Ice Soldiers drop RegalCutlass, but you can steal the superior Mythril Sword from them as well. The Wyvern enemies have Mythril Knives to be stolen and are a guaranteed drop for potions, which is nice cause these guys have that nasty Wind attack the first boss had, so running into two of them can be dangerous. By far, the most dangerous enemy in this dungeon is the wizard ladies. They have nasty time magic spells like Slow and Stop at their disposal and their Drain spell will take 180hp from a character which can be more than half their health depending on their job. They only carry Rods, so don't waste time stealing from them and instead kill them ASAP. Course the rewards for doing so are grand. A group of three of them will give you 3 ABP, the highest amount we've gotten from a steady random encounter so far, even more important is that they will sometimes drop the super useful Fire Rod, which will come in handy for the Shiva battle later. I actually lucked out and managed to get two while traveling the tower. The last enemy you'll run into here is the Elf Toad, this unassuming enemy is the key to making this dungeon into a bit of a joke. See, if you kill all but one of them, the guy will use Frog Song on you, you would be amazed how many enemies in this dungeon are susceptible to this spell.

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I steal the items I need, gain a few job levels, and once Lenna reached the first level of Black Mage, I switch her over to Blue Mage to double my chances of getting Frog Song to hit my party. I ended up gaining a few more levels than I meant to because the Elf Toad didn't want to show up for a fight. Also, if you ever low on healing items and not using a white mage or its skill set, you can still just quickly change a character to one to do a little maintenance if need be. I usually make my melee characters do so since their MP is mostly going to waste anyway. The dungeon is kind of kooky, with the player having to climb the overgrown vines in order to reach certain treasures and the next floor. It's pretty snazzy and otherwise the dungeon is pretty straightforward.

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On the top floor, we watch the Wild Garula face off against a strange man before charging its way towards us. The Garula can be a tricky battle for a low level team. He'll counter most of your melee attacks with his own and he's surprisingly fast. With that said, if you're packing enough firepower he'll go down super easy, and in fact I killed him before I could show off another more fun strategy for beating him so I had to reset and redo the fight. Since Garula only has a Hi-Potion or regular potion for stealing, I switch Galuf to a White Mage and throw him in the back row with Lenna. Lenna has Black 1 as her sub-job and is equipped with the Ice Rod to boost her Ice magic damage. When the fight opens, I have Butz and Faris guard while I have Galuf cast Mute/Silence on the boss. He has only one spell, but it's designed to bork this strategy if you don't mute him first. I then have Lenna cast Frog Song and voila! Garula Toad, and he's now completely harmless. He can't even damage my mages in this state. He does know the Toad spell which is why you need to silence him but if you're ever doing a low-level run, this is an easy way to get around this guy and the first of many ways where a Blue Mage is going to be the bane for bosses in this game. By the time Silence wears off and he's able to change back, Faris finishes him off with Focus powered sword attack.

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With that over, the mysterious soldier reveals he knows who Galuf really is but dies before he can tell it to him. Doesn't that just figure? The Crystal shatters anyway cause of the amplifier and the party collects the shards and the new job classes. Before we can pick up the last one though, the tower begins to shake as the destruction of the crystal is now causing a massive earthquake which will sink the entire landmass and tower into the ocean. Perhaps this is ExDeath's doing and the first sign of his revival but it might also just be for dramatic effect. Their is no way to reach the last crystal and instead an exit opens up. The team escapes but falls into the sea where an injured Syldra appears and rescues the team. Unfortunately, the strain is too much for the old girl and she dies for real now, leaving the team a little shaken. The scene is surprisingly sad actually, but I think it's because I'm a big softie when it comes to animals.

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The team appears next to the Walse Meteor and the Hiryuu. If you properly explored earlier, you will no doubt had noticed that the party is landloclked. The Hiryuu can't pass over any of the tall mountains and so we've explored what's available in the world now. If you visit the Walse Meteor, Klutzy Butzy will trigger a teleporter inside of it that transports the team to the Karnak Meteor, which is our next destination in the plot, but first we head back to Walse to go pay a visit to an Ice Goddess living rent free in Walse Castle and in serious need for an eviction notice.

So to give an overview of the team.

Butz: Knight Lv. 3, Monk Lv.2
Lenna: Thief Lv. 3, Black Mage Lv. 1, Blue Mage Lv. 2
Galuf: Blue Mage Lv. 2, Thief Lv. 3, and White Mage Lv.1
Faris: Monk Lv. 3, Knight Lv. 2

The new classes we just unlocked are:
Red Mage
Time Mage
Summoner
Berserker
Mystic Knight

Ideally, I would use a team of two Mystic Knights and Two Black Wizards for Shiva, but what team should I use for the next real portion of the game. I'll do overviews for the classes picked.

Berserker and Mystic Knight for sure since I rarely use them. And because I don't hate you completely toss in a time mage and dealers choice on number four.

And I can't specifically remember with certainty, but odds are good I let lone wolf out every time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Slothy

Berserker and Mystic Knight for sure since I rarely use them. And because I don't hate you completely toss in a time mage and dealers choice on number four.

And I can't specifically remember with certainty, but odds are good I let lone wolf out every time.

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Honestly, I feel the Mystic Knight is the best of the bunch and Berserker is underrated. There is one class in this grouping I feel is kind of troutty but not the one people would think. Not a bad lineup though.

I'd say start off with 4th choice Red Mage and switch to Summoner after getting Shiva to show it off better ^^

Alternatively stick with Red Mage for now. I'm sure Summoner will have plenty of opportunity to be shown off later especially with getting Shiva now (*cough* Ifrit *cough*)

Also, is it the Time Mage you're not fond of?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Karifean

I'd say start off with 4th choice Red Mage and switch to Summoner after getting Shiva to show it off better ^^

Alternatively stick with Red Mage for now. I'm sure Summoner will have plenty of opportunity to be shown off later especially with getting Shiva now (*cough* Ifrit *cough*)

Also, is it the Time Mage you're not fond of?

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I'll tell you when I do the overview. It's not even a terrible class, but it has some glaring problems compared to the other available classes in the game.

I'm liking the idea of a Mystic Knight, Berserker, Time Mage, and Red Mage to take down Shiva. Though I'm still leaving the door open for any other suggestions.

I'm for seeing a Mystic Knight, Berserker, Time Mage, and Red Mage.

Definitely want to see Mystic Knight and Berserker in the line-up since they’re my favorite of the bunch, and a red Mage and time Mage feel like a good way to round up that party.

Sorry this has been quiet, I had a rather eventful weekend which ate into time and mood to play. So before my next update, let's do a run down of the four new classes I'll be using. I'll do one for Summoner when I finally use it.

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Attachment 75495
Mystic Knights spellblade masters who enchant their weapons for stronger attacks.

Stats
Strength: +14
Agility: +14
Stamina: +14
Magic: +1
Ability: Spellblade
Innate: Magic Wall
Class Type: Give and Take
Weapons: Knives and Swords
Armor: Shields, Heavy armor and helmets, gauntlets, and Cloth

Debatable the best class of the bunch, Mystic Knights are one of two classes in the base game (four in the GBA one) that gives all positive stat increases. While it's not as significant as specialized classes, it's high enough to give the class some wiggle room with abilities. Interestingly enough, their spellblade skill grants the user both a strength and magic bonus, though the magic one is kind of not great. The real strength of this class is how kind of broken their spellblade abilities are.

So right off the bat, a weapon imbued with magic will ignore Reflect status, though if the enemy has natural defenses against an element (resists, immune, absorb) then the damage algorithm are treated the same as if being hit with a spell. On the other hand, if the enemy happens to be weak to the element, they will take significantly more damage depending on the spell used and ignores their defense.

• Fire, Ice, Bolt, and Poison do 2x damage if enemy is weak to it.
• Fire, Blizzara, and Thundara do 3x damage
• Firaga, Blizzaga, Thundaga, Bio, and Holy will either instantly kill the enemy regardless of health unless they have the "Heavy Status" in which case they do 4x damage.
• Flare works differently and is the great equalizer, it adds +100 to battle damage power and ignores 75% of the enemies defense making it always do high damage regardless of their defenses.
• Status spells will hit for 100% if the enemy doesn't have immunity, and Drain/Osmose will only work if the damage of the attack is greater than one.

As you can tell, that's quite a doozy of some damage potential and its not uncommon for a Mystic Knight to see the damage cap before the other classes. The class honestly doesn't have too many weaknesses and they work great with doublehand and dual-wield abilities or Rapid Fire. The only real weakness I can give them besides Magic Wall kind of being a crappy ability in general is their limited weapon selection. One look at regular swords will make you notice their is a bit of a drop off with their damage potential towards the middle as the game expects you to switch over to Knightswords. The other issue is that like other mages, your damage potential is based purely on where you are in the game what spells you've found. There is an odd point around the end of Galuf's world and the beginning of the Merged World where the class may be lacking due to poor weapon and magic selections but they become serious powerhouses towards the end of the game. I guess the other issue here is that you need to have good knowledge of enemy elemental resistances as their spellblade bonus doesn't mean much without it.

Since they have great stats overall, you can sub a lot of abilities with them and make them have more traditional magic as well unlike other warrior classes that usually need the magic boost from the abilities to cut into their steep magic deficit. Still, it's probably best to focus on their damage output, but there are few enemies in this game where a team of Mystic Knights can't solve the issue. I think the most telling thing about this classes brokeness is how little it shows up in for later entries. I mean X-2 had a neutered version of the class with Warrior, but TA2's Parivir and 4 Heroes of Lights Spell Fencers are considered game breakers.

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Attachment 75496
Berserkers are animal skin wearing death machines on the battlefield.

Stats
Strength: +21
Agility: -9
Stamina: +25
Magic: -23
Ability: None
Innate: Berserk
Class Type: Take
Weapons: Knives, Axes, and Hammers
Armor: Heavy armor sets, cloth, and shields

My vote for the most underrated job class in the game. Most players ignore this class due to the nature of it making it boring but practical. Vets on the other hand will likely see that this class has a a lot of hidden potential with the right builds. Despite having the second highest strength in the game, Berserkers are pretty much the best damage dealers in the first world and with the right setup, they can carry you until the Merged World and then some. A large part of this is that their stats lie. Berserk status adds a 50% percent bonus to damage and their primary weapons of Axes and Hammers scale with strength and ignore 75% of the enemy's defenses. It is not uncommon for this class to be the first to see four digit damage. Add in the fact that many of their weapons have great secondary effects and you have a real beast on your hand. Obviously standard abilities like Doublehand and Dual-Wield are their best sub-abilities but if you want to take real advantage of weapons like the Gaia Hammer and Rune Axe, you can give them Black or Summon magic to boost their magic ability as well.

The real joy of the Berserker class is pretty much in the set-up and watching it wreak havoc on the battlefield, but most players find this boring cause they prefer choosing commands even if the only thing Berserker is really built for is hitting things really really hard. The real problem with the class is that it's abilities are kind of useless for other classes overall, and by endgame, high level summons, spellblade abilities and rapid fire will overtake their damage potential. Throw in the fact that the Rune Axe is hardly an ideal "ultimate weapon" for the class, and it becomes obvious that you probably will want to drop this class by end game. Still, they are a terror in Butz's world and one of the key classes needed to get around some of the early game demonic spiders like the Jackanapes and Metal Nutkins.

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Attachment 75497
Time Mage is the team support unit helping players master the ATB system.

Stats
Strength: -5
Agility: +2
Stamina: -3
Magic: +24
Ability: Time Magic
Innate: None
Class Type: Give and Take
Weapons: Rods, Staves, and Knives
Armor: Hats, Robes, and Armlets.

Tied with Blue Mage and Samurai as my favorite long term classes to debut in this entry, Time Mages are a different kind of mage which specializes in support magic with a few non-elemental if quirky spells to give them a more well-rounded build. Time Mages are all about manipulating the flow of battle. That might seem like a given since most people know about Haste and Slow, but the arsenal of tools at the classes disposal in this entry is much more varied. Speed for instance will change the Battle Speed to 5 for that battle, meaning if you're playing on the fastest speed setting like I will, it will lower how fast the enemies get their turn. The game breaking Quick spell appears in this game allowing a character to effectively get two turns in with the right build. Return is one of the cooler spells that I wish had appeared in more entries, it basically restarts the battle from the beginning which is great for dealing with battles that go south, if a character is erased by the ability Encircle, or when attempting to get a rare steal. Their selection of status magic is also nice with Regen being a decent healing ability and spells like Old and Silence being useful against certain enemies. Their offensive push is a mixed bag. The Gravity spells do percentile based damage but since gravity isn't an actual element in this entry, the only thing it doesn't work on are enemies with the Heavy Status like most bosses. This means the spells work on more enemies than players are used to, but as usual, not on the ones where it would be useful. Comet and Meteor do randomized damage making them powerful but inconsistent moves and X-Zone is a pretty snazzy instant death spell. Overall, I feel the class has a pretty strong bag of tricks going for it.

The other bonus for the class is its high magic bonus which makes it great to sub other magic skills and the fact it can use the mage trifecta of Knives, Rods, and Staves which means they can get elemental bonuses for every known elemental type making them really good with said magic skills. Oddly enough, much like the Blue Mage, their magic stat doesn't play a whole lot in their spell algorithms outside of Comet and Meteor, meaning their high magic stat isn't terribly useful for using their spells, meaning that Time Magic can even be given to classes with crippling magic penalties and still do alright with it. Equipping Time Magic will also garner your character a bonus to their own magic stat depending the level of the skill. The only bad thing about the class is that despite the high magic bonus, their ranked fourth overall in the base game for magic power, meaning that it's a much better idea to transfer their skills sets to a classes. The real oddity of the class is that they have the Equip Rod skill. As mentioned before, the real merit of Rods are their elemental boosts they give, and yet Time Mages never learn any spells that can take advantage of it, nor do they get much benefit from Magic boosts from them either making it really weird that Square decided they should teach this ability since the class can only take advantage of Rods if you give them Black or Summon magic.

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Attachment 75498
Red Mages are the Master of None class

Stats
Strength: +8
Agility: +5
Stamina: -6
Magic: +8
Ability: Red Magic
Innate: None
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Knives, Rods, Swords and Staves
Armor: Hats, Clothes, Robes, and Armlets

Well you wanted to know which one I felt was kind of crap and here we are. Red Mages have fallen quite a ways since their last appearance in FFIII and with the exception of FFXI and XII:TZA, I don't feel this class ever quite recovered from the nerf they suffered in this entry. Granted "nerfed" is a strong word in this case. In truth Red Mage has simply been balanced to work like it was suppose to in past games and that presents us with a very mixed class. Red Mage is a truly a class that can do a bit of everything, but is certainly not a master of any of its traits. The stat gains it has are not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but they're not great either, making the class fall behind any class that pools all of its points into a particular stat. Not helping it here is that the class can only learn up to Lv. 3 spells for both White and Black Magic, and while those are generous spell selections and the class no longer has to pick and choose which spells to use, a combination of the meager stat upgrade and the fact you'll gain these spells not long after you acquire the class leaves very little room for the Red Mage to feel like a class that grows. In truth, Red Mages are pretty awesome when you first get them and will likely start to fall quickly behind other classes around the time you jump to Galuf's world, making this one of the classes that has a very short usability window.

It's not all bad news, on the brightside the class has access to all of the weapons needed to give them elemental bonus damage for their spells which gives them a bit more longevity, and likewise, the class can use up to three magic types with the subjob system. Ironically, Red Mage suffers from being undermined by other mage classes. You're better off giving their Red Magic skill set to another mage class so they can use three different types of magic. In fact the Blue Mage ultimately undermines this class cause it can frankly do their job better than them. Blue Mages have almost the same equipment pool with the major exception being that Blue Mages can equip shields while Red Mages can't, giving them better survivability along with the elemental bonus. While Blue Mages are not terribly great melee fighters, their significantly higher magic stat, allows them to use the Red Mage spell lists on a closer caliber to their respective mage classes. Hell if you don't care about shields, then the Time and Summer classes also have similar advantages over Red mage where they can equip all of the elemental boost weapons and have higher base magic stats. This pretty much means the only strength the Red Mage has is that they are a decent fighter who can use magic unlike their magical brethren, but the subjob system undermines this advantage cause you can easily give a Knight or better yet, a Ninja some magic as their sub-job and get equivalent results.

Overall, the only point in using a Red Mage is to get Doublecast. The class is so mediocre to be almost worthless which is kind of sad really. Again, it's not a terrible class, but the subjob system and it's inherent mechanics completely undermine the point of the class. If Doublcast had been an innate ability, or if the class had a better stat boost, it could have remained relevant, but frankly it's not worth using other than getting doublecast and to dress a character in the always stylish Red Mage outfit. One fun fact though is that equipping Doublecast on a character gives them Red Mages spell power despite not having access to their spell list, unless you equip the class with a magic power with higher base magic ability. In the end, master this class for doublecast and to hand their magic over to a better mage so you can have a bit more versatility, but I would honestly only use the class in Butz's world and then leave it until the end of the game so you can quickly master it for the final skill.

I like how Bravely Default made Red Mages viable in this type of job system again simply by changing their focus to a new mechanic introduced in BD.

But yay for Mystic Knights and Berserkers! I was sure I was pretty much the only person who liked them. Honestly, all you do with your physical fighters is attack anyway so why not have it automated? Same reason why I absolutely adore Umaro in FFVI

Note to self: use mystic knights and berserkers because they sound so much more awesome than I thought they were.

My favorite thing about the Berserker is how the girls have tiger heads and the boys have wolf heads and tigers are more aggressive of the two. Even little Krile has a tiger pelt.

Just pulling a Squenix by announcing a future announcement. I've had real life get in the way this past week from doing a proper update, but I'm almost finished with he next block of the update I want to do which will do part of the Karnak segment as well as taking down Shiva. I've been using the team suggested so far as it works pretty solid for what I need done. Assuming I don't have any more drama today, I'll try to get to a stopping point and post the next update tonight or tomorrow night.

Sorry this took so long. I did the Shiva segment awhile ago and then rl drama kept me from getting back to the playthrough until the last few days. I'm posting this update now, but I'll add pictures later when I have more time.

Attachment 75507Attachment 75508

So I turned Butz into a Berserker since he knows Doublehand already. Lenna becomes a Time Mage with a Fire Rod and Black Magic 1 as her sub ability. Galuf became the Red Mage with Learning as his sub ability. Faris is the Mystic Knight with Chakra as her sub-ability. With Walse Tower done, the team heads back to the castle and we discover the king did in fact make it out alive and that another meteor landed near Karnak. We also head through the backdoor and find the area where Shiva was sealed away by the Water Crystal. The dungeon is pretty straightforward with no treasure.

Attachment 75509Attachment 75510

The real challenge of this fight comes down to when you fight her and how you're going to get around her bodyguards. She's accompanied by Ice Commanders which are Ice Soldiers with better stats, they even carry the same loot and are also vulnerable to Frog Song. A low level party with no access to Lv. 2 magic like myself could find this battle a bit of an uphill battle, but thankfully there are some easy tricks to win this fight without putting this off until I finish Karnak. The easiest way to beat her this early in the game is to simply use a Fire Rod as an item on her. As I mentioned earlier, Rods when used as items tend to cast Lv. 3 magic and at this time frame in the game, that can pretty much kill her outright.

I don't need to really resort to this thankfully. Since I acquired two Fire Rods in the last area, both Galuf and Lenna do respectable damage with fire spells though Galuf will primarily be a healer. Shiva and her escorts are all weak to fire so the 2x damage from Fire Sword makes Faris one of the best damage dealers in this battle. Butz with his Greataxe being doublehanded and hasted by Lenna also results in him being able to kill the Ice Commanders with a single blow making him just as effective as Faris in this fight. The fight goes by pretty smoothly to be honest as long as you focus on high damage. If I backtracked after Karnak I would have access to Fire 2 which would have made this fight even more ridiculously easy.

Attachment 75511Attachment 75512

With that done, the team heads to the Walse Meteor and uses it to teleport to the Karnak Meteor. There isn't much to explore yet on this continent so head towards the castle. There are three enemies to look out for on your way there. Grass Turtles are uncommon enemies that drop Turtle Shells which are a valuable Mixing item for Chemists. Thankfully it's a 100% drop for them so fight a few if you can. The Zuu's are the toughest enemies on the map with more health than they deserve. They drop Elixirs but I would honestly not bother farming them. The real important one are the dog enemies fought in the forest areas on the map. These guys have the Blue Mage Skill ????. This skill does damage based on the difference between your characters current health against their maximum. So if your character has 150/300 of their health, the spell will do 150 damage. Not terribly useful this early in the game but the potential will make it quite useful by the third world or when you finally get access to a chemist...

Attachment 75513Attachment 75514Attachment 75515

Karnak is under martial law due to monsters trying to invade the castle, including a werewolf who emerged from the meteor who is thought to be the ringleader. Head into town, several shops are closed and others are selling great gear at ridiculously low prices but before you can buy something, your party is arrested due to a citizen spotting you emerging from the meteor making everyone assume your with the werewolf.

Attachment 75516Attachment 75517

In Karnak jail, you meet FFV's Cid who lives in Karnak and is responsible for a lot of its technological achievements including the Fire Ship. He also discovered his machine was cause the crystals shattered and was arrested when he tried to deactivate the device. Cid tries to escape his cell using gunpowder but instead just winds up in your cell. Luckily the Prime Minister arrives to free Cid because gosh darn it, he was right and the Fire Crystal started to crack and now the Fire Ship is acting up cause it's still trying to drain energy from the crystal. Cid asks your party to look into it.

Attachment 75520Attachment 75521

From here we can finally return to the city and actually buy some stuff. Unfortunately, the cheap prices are gone since they were only that cheap due to the Fire Crystal making it easy to make. Luckily the magic shop is open and we can get access to the Lv. spells, and Life/Raise. Most of the gear is great and all the magic is useful as well. There is another piano in the Pub needed for the Hero Song quest. Now it's time to head to the Fire Ship.

Attachment 75518Attachment 75519

The Fire Ship is one of my favorite dungeons in FFV, it's way less straightforward than previous ones and has more puzzles in it as well which makes it stand out. The black ghost enemies teach Flash, but I already obtained it earlier. The only enemy to look out for is the dragon/gargoyle looking creature. The enemy isn't special and like most enemies in this dungeon, they don't have anything useful to farm/steal, but if you defeat is last in a battle, two puppet robots show up which nets you more Gil and XP. These guys are the first enemies to have the Blue Mage spell Exploder/Self-Destruct and funny enough, this is one of the few entries where this move actually has a purpose, but that will be much later in the game. Unfortunately, getting Blue Magic with a team having a Berserker is kind of tough but thankfully they will always use the move if you hit them with Bolt magic, at which point you just have to hope it lands on your Blue Mage.

Attachment 75522Attachment 75523

There are a few nice items in this dungeon, the most important of which is the Thieves Gloves, which raises the success rate of Steal/Mug. You'll eventually reach a point where you have four chutes to choose from which leads to a conveyor belt that sends you to four different paths. The far left path sends you back to an earlier section of the map. The chute next to it sends you to the save point and where you need to go to finish the dungeon, and the other two lead you to treasure.

Attachment 75524Attachment 75525

When we reach the end, we discover the missing Queen of Karnak is causing the ship to still drain power from the crystal. She appears to be possessed and we get our first true foreshadowing of Exdeath. He summons Liquid Flame to fight us. LF is pretty much the first real nasty boss in this game, especially if you either don't know what you're doing or have not taken time to properly level/equip your team. He switches from three different forms: Humanoid, Tornado, and Hand. Two forms are weak to Ice, one no-sells it and all three hit you with a nasty counter when you hit him. Humanoid uses Blaze which is a nasty group hitting fire attack, Tornado heals itself but uses Magnetic Polarity which will force back row teammates to move forward and if the character is already in the front row, it hits them with Stop instead. The last form counters with Fire 2. Since he doesn't have any blue magic skills, I switch Learning with White Magic 1 on Galuf in order to boost his healing magic cause I'm going to need it. Interestingly enough, all three forms drop a different item, I advise taking out his Tornado form as it drops the Flame Bow, while I beat him the first time, and won it, my second attempt got me a flame scroll from beating his human form instead.

After this, the party heads to the underground duct to the castle basement where the Fire Crystal is held. We meet up with the werewolf who recognizes Galuf but the conversation is interrupted by a possessed guard who activates the amplifier and causes the crystal to shatter. Unfortunately, this causes a chain reaction that is now going to make the castle explode in ten minutes...

Attachment 75526Attachment 75527

If I had to list off places where the dev team are purposely trolling the player, this might make it to the top of my list. Most players hate timed sequences anyway, even worse in RPGs with random battles, but the amount of dickery built into Karnak Castle is on a whole new level. The castle is filled with treasure, of which almost 90% of them are Monster-in-a-box with enemy types designed around eating up your clock. While a good 80% of the treasure are simply Elixirs, those are not bad items to get either. The enemy groups in this area are actually really great for ABP farming as they all drop 3ABP per battle, the mage enemies have Mage Mashers and Gaia Gear you can steal, the Gygas has easy to steal Elixirs, and the guys also have the Aero and Aero 2 spells for Blue Mages. This place was just designed to eat away your time and tempt you. Also heaven help you if you start trying to run away from battles unless you're going after the Chicken Knife instead. I actually got killed due to the timer running out by expoloring the castle more than I should have. I sadly got Aero 2 on this run but failed to achieve it the second run through.

Attachment 75528Attachment 75529

There are fifteen treasure chests scattered about the castle but you only really need six of them. Once you start at the Save point, backtrack to the pot in the earlier room cause it will restore your whole party. Save. For this sequence, I switched around a few things. Lenna was turned into a Thief so I can have the Dash and Steal abilities and I have time magic as her secondary. Galuf is switched to a Blue Mage with Red Magic 2 as his secondary cause as I stated before, the Blue Mage is better at being a Mage than a Red Mage. The two treasures in the dungeon are gimmies for the most part with money and a elixir. On the B3 floor, hit up both treasures here for a Shuriken and a Ribbon, just try not to linger in the battles for too long. Ignore everything and climb to the second floor where the castle diverges onto two paths leading outside to the outer wall and into two towers on either side. In the right tower is a Main Gauche, which is a fantastic knife weapon, and the left tower contains an Elven Mantle which is a great accessory. Ignore all the treasure chests on the way and use the shortcut on the inner second floor areas to save time. Head back to the first floor and pick up the two treasure chests here. One contains a Lightning Scroll, while the other has the White Magic Esuna spell. Hopeful you have over two minutes left on the clock. Head outside to hit a scripted battle. Before that though, I turn my whole team into Blue Mages. The boss of this castle has a a rare Blue Magic ability that won't be available until Galuf's World but the ability is more useful in Butz's world so you need to grab it now. Butz has double-hand sword, Lenna remains a thief but I switch out time for Learning, Galuf remains the same, and Faris is a blue mage with Sword Magic 2.

Attachment 75530Attachment 75531

The encounter feels like a redo of the typical random encounters of the Sergeant and dog enemies, but if you kill all the dogs quickly, the game hits you with an overly long conversation for a time limit segment before he transforms into Iron Claw. The boss is actually pretty weak with low HP and no immunities. He has the Blue Mage spell Death Claw which reduces and enemy to single digit HP and inflicts paralyze. Once he uses it, I go all out and crush him. If you don't care about the spell, a Berserker can potentially kill this guy with one blow using a double-handed Mythril Hammer.

With Iron Claw gone, the team escapes and we watch Karnak Castle explode. The shards of the Fire Crystal scatter, but three land by the heroes, granting us Geomancer, Mediator/Beastmaster, and Ninja. From there I head into town to save and rest in the inn.

I have three new classes and I still have Summoner which was never used as well, so who should my new team be?

Hashed berserkers with doublehand are great

Idk, I think you should stick with this party for now, personally. I was never a fan of the three initial fire crystal jobs. The ninja is great but Beastmaster is overwhelming and Geomancer is far better in III. Though I guess one ninja couldn’t hurt. I always maxed the berserker on someone before changing them to ninja and giving the equip axe. Stuck with it until around the end of world one since axes are pretty spiffy at the start.

I'm definitely itching to change Galuf's job, Red Mage was certainly the weak link in this team build. Beastmaster certainly has some issues, but it also has a few fun tricks if you know a few things about them. Geomancers can be useful if you have the right build for them and Ninja's are an upgrade from IV but not their usual game breaker either. I still have Summoner as well.

If I have access to a certain location soon, I'll probably do a bit of Job grinding so I can make some more interesting builds. Karnak would have been perfect but the timer and the fact it keeps going even when you're in the menu screen meant I couldn't take much advantage of it. Sadly the best leveling spot isn't available until Galuf's World.

Let's change Red Mage to Summoner then ^^

You should level ninja. Know what's better than one Axe in two hands? Two axes in two hands!

https://i.imgur.com/AjgV7Ok.png

I may just switch out the whole team to be honest. Partly to discuss the new classes, and partly because Ninja isn't a bad job to start grinding early, and Beastmaster is actually going to be useful in the next section. Firgure I shouldn't neglect Geomancer at that point since this class is a bit better than people give it credit for.

I'll likely post an overview tomorrow on the new classes and then get to doing the Library of Ancients and reaching Crescent. From there I believe I have the chance to finally find one of the leveling spots in this game and the means to do so. I should also be strong enough to deal with the Jackernapes in the Walse Castle Basement as well.

So let's do an overview of the four jobs I haven't used yet.
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Summoners are the bane of any black mages existence.

Attachment 75535

Stats
Strength: -10
Agility: -1
Stamina: -1
Magic: +33
Ability: Summon
Innate: N/A
Class Type: Take
Weapons: Knives and Rods
Armor: Hats, Robes, and Armlets

In terms of raw magic stats, Summoner is the strongest mage in the game with a whopping +33 bonus to magic and not even counting the extra damage afforded by using Rods/Air Knife to boost the overall damage. Suffice to say, they do exceptional with any magic sub job you give them. Another cool factor is the fact some of the summons have defensive purposes. Golem is a welcome addition that will help any player trying to run a squishy mage party, and Phoenix makes it's debut in this entry giving you a powerful offensive/revive attack. Carbuncle also debuts in this title and may actually be one of the few times the class is pretty useful outside of a gimme fight (Edea in VIII) or adding some weird secondary element to their function (FFIX).

The real drawback of the class is that you have to earn their abilities by hunting down and fighting all of the summoned beasts. Granted the game throws a few of them at you like Syldra and Phoenix but some of the nastier fights int this game can be the summons if you try to obtain them super early, and finding many of them without a guide can be a pain. Like most mage classes, their skills are mostly tiers of their magic ability. Their final skill is Call, but I find it to be a worthless ability considering how much grinding you need to get it. It randomly summons any summon in your possession for no MP cost which sounds nice until you remember you have worthless summons like Chocobo and Remora, or how many endgame monsters/bosses have specific elemental immunities that make Shiva, Ifrit, and Ramuh impractical. Still, this is a top tier class that can do most of your mage needs spectacularly.

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Beastmaster's are the class for taming monsters.
Attachment 75536
Stats
Strength: +13
Agility: +1
Stamina: +8
Magic: -3
Ability: Catch/Release
Innate: N/A
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Whips and Knives
Armor:Light Helmets, Cloth armor, and Armlets

Probably the strangest class in this title. Beastmaster's offer a lot of potential and sadly fall a bit short in some places, but I honestly feel this class falls into the same camp as Blue Mage and Chemist for being pretty powerful as long as you know what you're doing. The stat spread isn't bad thankfully and the character can sub just about any major magic/melee ability they want and get decent results. It does suck a bit that the class doesn't get a decent boost to agility considering Whips scale with it along with strength. On the brightside, whips not only do full damage from the back row, but most of them come with cool secondary effects or stat increases to them to compensate for some of their shortcomings.

Skill-wise, the class is a bit weird. Calm is suppose to inflict Stop on Magic Beast type enemies, but it's glitched and doesn't do this. Instead it casts Stop on anything that isn't a Magic Beast. Did I mention Most Whips innately have the ability to inflict Paralyze on Magic Beasts? Control is easily their most valuable skill as it allows the Tamer to take direct control of a monster in battle effectively removing one enemy on the field and giving you a fifth ally. Course it doesn't work if the enemy is berserked or gets hit with a physical attack. Still, this ability is invaluable in both making it easier to acquire Blue Mage skills and bypassing a few really nasty enemies in parts of the game like the Shield Dragons that roam about the Sealed Shrine. Catch and Release is their main skill and probably the most awkward. Basically, if you can knock an enemy to below 12.5% or their health (50% if equipped with the Korongo Goard) the tamer will capture the monster and have the ability to release it later in battle in which it will unleash a powerful attack. This is where some in-depth knowledge or a guide comes in handy as enemies don't always use the spell/ability you think they will. Some enemies will simply just do a normal physical attack, others just flee from the battle. Some have the ability to cast boss only sklills like Almagast, so you really need to know these things to get the best out of them.

On the downside though, Release is a one time deal, which is one major issue with the ability. If the Tamer had the ability to carry multiple monsters or could use their release ability more than once, they would be way more useful. Other issues stems from the monster ability being directly pulled from the monsters stats which again requires you to know which monsters have a good ability and stats to back it up. This and their unfocused stats and gear keep them from being much of anything more than a novelty class but one that is still fun to mess around with, especially if you plan on getting all of the Blue Mage spells. Also, I find it incredibly funny that the Shephard class in the DQVII remake re-used FFV's version of the Beastmaster outfit.

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Geomancers use Feng Shui to conquer their enemies.
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Stats
Strength: +4
Agility: +2
Stamina: +4
Magic: +24
Ability: Gaia
Innate: Find Pit and Light Step
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Knives and Bells
Armor: Hats, Robes, and Armlets

Before I played the Famicom version of FFIII, I would have said this might be the worst incarnation of the class in the series that I've played. With that said, they're better than you might think. The only other class besides Mystic Knight to only give positive stat upgrades, they have the added bonus of being one of the easiest classes to master in the game as well. Geomancers are designed around dungeon crawling. Find Pits and Light Step makes some of the more obnoxious dungeons in this game a breeze and when it's combined with Thief's Find Passage ability, you won't have to worry about some of the dirtier tricks the game has to offer. On the flipside though, these skills would have have been so much more useful in the previous two installments as FFV marks the franchise starting to move away from damage floors and pit traps. You'll be thankful to have these skills in the dungeons that have said obstacles but they are thankfully few in number making these skills not as useful as one may like.

Gaia is the real attraction here, and FFV debuts how the skill is largely remembered. Gaia will activate one of four abilities based on the terrain of the battle. Every terrain gives the Geomancer four different commands to use but unfortunately for the player it's partially random. I say it's random because which effect you get is based on an algorithm that takes your Geomancer's level into consideration. When Gaia is used the game generates a number between 0 and the character's level. This number is taken in blocks of tens so 0-10 gives one skill while 11-20 would activate a different skill. In the early game, this means you'll likely only see one of two abilities at most but as you level the class you'll eventually see some of the real powerful skills like Leaf Dance, Windslash, and Earthquake. The higher your level, the more likely you'll see the higher tier skills than the throw away lower tier ones. So there is a way to manipulate this ability. Gaia also doesn't cost any MP to use and the damage algorithm uses magic stat for damage making this a really powerful ability to give to mages if you want to conserve their MP. The classes high magic stat also makes them a nice choice for magic abilities as well.

The class also uses the unique Bells as weapons. The Diamond and Tinklebell do damage based on the users Magic and Agility, and the attack uses the enemies magic defense to determining damage. Oddly, if the Geomancer is silenced, the bell does no damage. The Rune and Gaia bells use the same formula as axes, though the Rune Bells is bugged and doesn't have the Ranged ability like the other bells so it will do less damage from the back row. On the brightside, the Rune and Gaia bells also boost elemental damage. The Gaia bell obviously increases earth damage, which is great cause the bell can randomly cast Quake for free. the Rune Chime boosts all elements except for Water which makes it super useful if you're subbing other magic for the class or can be used by your second Mime while the other uses the Magus Rod. Overall, the class isn't bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if many players used it early and found it underwhelming so they benched them for the rest of the game despite being more useful once leveled up.

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Ninja's are the glass cannons of the melee classes.
Attachment 75538

Stats
Strength: +15
Agility: 14
Stamina: +3
Magic: -10
Ability: Throw
Innate: Duel-Wield and First Strike
Class Type: Give and Take
Weapons: Ninja Blades, Knives, and Throwing Weapons
Armor:Light Helmets, Cloth Armor, and Armlets

Of all the incarnations of this class in the series, this may be the most balanced version players ever got. The class has some good strengths that are tempered by a few glaring weaknesses. Ninja's were potent in FFI, broken as all hell in FFIII, nerfed hard with Edge in IV, and Shadow brought the class back to broken status and never really looked back afterwards except for the weird monk hybrid that is Amarant. Ninja's are designed to deal out high damage with their throw command and hoepfully dodge recieving damage with their agility and skills cause this class can't take a hit very well. Unlike other Melee focused classes Ninja's can't wear heavy armor and they have a puny Stamina bonus so they're practically working on the base character. This makes it difficult for the class to deal with battles where blows are going to be traded. Thankfully FFV fixes Edge's issue of never dodging by giving the class some optiosn with accessories like the Elven Mantle, Main Gauche, and Sasuke's Blade which all have secondary effects to allow for better dodging ability. Even better is the class has access to an improved Image ability. In addition to no longer consuming MP, the skill is bugged and allows for the player to stack three shadow clones instead of just two.

In truth the class is built around making is to the enemy never has a first turn. The innate skill of First Strike raises the classes chance of going first in battle in addition to the classes naturally high agility. While the class is restricted to middling based damage weapons, they can equip two of them, allowing the class to often do justr as much damage if not more than their doublehanded knightsword weilding brethren. Throw has a more consistent damage algortithm than it did in previous isntallments and scales with the Ninja's Strength and Agility which are both pretty good. Throw in the high based damage of the unique Throw items and Ninaj's can easily do 2k damage before even reaching Galuf's world. Course this game balances this out by making Ninja throwing weapons incredibly expensive. Interestingly enough, Ninja Blades are a unique weapon exclusive to Ninja and Freelancer as Ninaj's never teach a skill that would allow another class to use them. Course there are only four of them in the game but it's a real shame cause they scale like Knives do and they all give at least +1 in speed.

Course the real reason to bother with this class is to gain the holy ability that is Duel-Wield which is easily the best support skill for any melee class that isn't Monk. In the hands of a Ninja, ir keeps them comeptively useful, in the hands of other melee classes like Knight or Berseker, it makes them a gamebreaker. Thankfully Ninja's are still a pretty class on it's own as well.

Hate to do this to everyone, but I may have to put this on hiatus for awhile. I've had another project come up that is taking precedence at the moment, so I don't think I'll have the time to work on this let alone play FFV to get the screenshots needed for updates. So it's on hold until further notice. I'm sorry and wish to thank everyone who followed along.

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No problem, man, take all the time off you need. Will be waiting for future updates whenever they happen!

So earlier this week I found a little time to do some work on this, so it's update time! I'll add screenshots later.

When I left off, we just acquired the Fire Crystal, and for the sake of expedience, I opted to change the team into the classes I haven't used yet.

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Butz drew the short straw and became the Tamer/Beastmaster/Trainer or whatever the hell you want to call it. For my own personal sake, I gave him Bare-handed as his sub job to make him useful in battle. If you're wondering why I chose Butz for this role, it's because he's the only teammate who never leaves the party, meaning I'll always have access to Control once it is learned.

With her higher magic ability, I opted to let Lenna be the Geomancer, whom I must say ended up being the MVP of this session for various reasons. I gave her steal as a sub command, though in hindsight I should have made her a black/time mage instead.

Galuf is continuing his trend to be a mage despite his stats placing him more in the physical department, but as usual, playing the long game with Galuf's development is usually the right way. He got to be a Summoner with an Ice Rod and Learning as his sub skill.

Faris by default, won the lottery this time and got to be Ninja with Buildup/Focus as her sub ability due to not having the best weapon selection for such a class at this point.

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With Karnak castle blown to smithereens, the party returns to the Fire Ship to talk with Cid, who is so shell shocked by witnessing the destruction of the Fire Crystal y his own invention, that he proceeds to leave, head to town, and find a bottle to wallow in at the local pub. Consequently, if you visit the inn, you'll find the queen survived as well but is completely mad and delirious from being possessed by ExDeath and gives us another foreshadowing of what's really going on here.

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Cid proves to be inconsolable, so the team leaves and discovers the wall separating Karnak from those dirty free-loading scholars at the Library of Ancients was destroyed with the castle, so we take a journey south but not before saving and taking a quick detour into the desert. There is only one real enemy in this place, the Dhorme Chimera. I would highly advise saving before attempting this fight, as this guy can make short work of an underleveled or poorly built team setup. The boss usually gets a preemptive attack and will usually open with the Blue Mage spell Aqua Rake. This is one of the strongest damage spells the Blue Mage can get, so I advise trying to get it early but this enemy can be a handful. You can also attempt to steal a Trident from them as well but be warned that the success rate is low, and this is an enemy you want to kill quickly. Galuf gets killed in the fight, but thankfully, the Blue Mage/Learning character doesn't actually have to survive the battle to get it as long as the party wins the fight.

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The team arrives to the Library of Ancients who are in a bit of an uproar. Apparently the scholars have been spending so much time learning they haven't been doing much upkeep with the place. Several books are possessed by evil demons, and the resident demon exterminator Ifrit has disappeared. Even worse, the prize scholar of the place, Mid has wandered off into the deepest parts of the library and hasn't been heard from for awhile. So it looks like the team has their work cut out for them. You can either go up, or down, going up lets you take to the scholars and get a hint concerning Ifrit while going down will lead you to the next plot point.

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The enemies in this area are obnoxious cause there is technically four of them but they're technically one enemy as well. The haunted books simply flip through their pages and have you battle one of the demons possessing it, the issue is that it's random and some are worth more than others. As it stands, you don't really want to fight Blue head demon or the giant green tick enemies as they give you crap for rewards. The Tiki Mask enemy is the one you really want to tussle with but tends to be the most shy of the bunch. The gargoyle enemies have Aera, the second tier Areo spell to teach Blue Mage, while the Blue Demon head has Lv. 5 Death, and the Tiki Monster has Moon Flute. Sadly, I still have not learned Control yet, so with the exception of some luck with Aera, I'll have to come back for the other two Blue Mage spells. The gargoyle pages also have Green Berets to steal, which are a nice head piece at this point in the game, while the Tiki Enemy has Ninja Suits but both are rare steals, so come back when you have Control. If you want to Capture any enemies at this point with Tamer, my suggestion is either the Zuu enemies outside the library, or the Gargoyle enemies. Zuu uses a really powerful Wind Slash move while the Gargoyle uses Banish, which is pretty potent this early in the game.

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Besides all the Blue Magic, there are only two things to acquire here: A Ninja Suit for Faris, and the Ifrit summon. Ifrit is located in a poorly hidden secret path. He'll be grateful that you freed him from the book he was trapped in but still wants to fight before joining you. Ideally, a team of Mystic Knights and Summoners using Shiva and Ice 2 will make short work of him, but my team isn't ideal. Thankfully he's actually a push over compared to Shiva so even with my less optimal team, he goes down pretty easily. From here, I switch out Galuf's Ice Rod for a Fire one, as just about everything in this area is weak to fire and Ifrit can do over a thousand point of damage with the elemental boost from the rod.

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Overall, the dungeon is smaller than the last two and while it has some switch puzzles here and there, it's surprisingly straight forward. When the team reached Mid, they're attacked by everyone's favorite "Wait, is he actually helping me?!" surprise teammate in FFTactics, Byblos! Byblos is a surprisingly obnoxious boss fight if he gets lucky or you get cocky. He loves to hit the team with status magic like Confuse, Toad, and Dischord (halves levels) while also weakening your team with the Blue Mage spell Magic Hammer which destroys MP. At low health, he'll start hitting the team with a powerful Drain spell to restore his health and easily send the target into critical condition. There are two ways to deal with him:

1. He's weak to fire, like extremely weak to fire. If you have four Fire Rods, you can take him down in a single round with a team of Summoners casting Ifirt.

2. Remember how I made it a point to learn Death Claw in the last dungeon? Yeah, he's weak to it and it makes this fight even more trivial as this move reduced him to single digit HP and paralyzes him making him susceptible to a sneeze.

So yeah, this fight goes really easy. I wish I had learned Magic Hammer cause now I'll have to wait until Galuf's World to acquire it, but Byblos is an annoying fight, and Magic Hammer isn't exactly an MVP skill for Blue Mages until FFVII. With the battle over, we get to finally meet Mid, Cid's bookworm and even more oblivious grandson. Confession time: My first exposure to this character was actually in the best forgotten sequel to FFV, the anime OAV, Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals, where his obnoxious snobbishness was cranked up to 11, and he was inexplicably de-aged from fifteenish judging by his official character art to like nine or ten for the anime. Anyway, Mid talks about how awesome his grandpa is due to his indomitable spirit which leads the party to sheepishly mention that the old man is currently drowning his sorrows in a local bar. Mid takes a book he was looking for an rushes off to Karnak.

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You know what I always find amusing in RPGs? When a character rushes off to meet someone ahead of you and while you can leave and take the next fifteen hours grinding or doing sidequests, no matter what, you'll somehow manage to arrive before they do. Mid snaps Cid out of his pity party and shows him a book that will allow the Fireship to move without the aid of the Fire Crystal or wind. So, in essence the ancients had cold fusion technology. Cid and Mid rush to the ship to get to work and tell the party to rest up. Here Galuf has a heart to heart with the team as the physical and verbal abuse he witnessed Mid giving his grandpa Cid triggered Galuf's own PTSD concerning raising his granddaughter Cara (Krile) after his deadbeat child and spouse took an indefinite second honeymoon after her birth leaving him to raise her himself. He also remembered beating down an evil Warlock named ExDeath with some cronies and that he's an alien.

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I've always been curious about the nature of Galuf's World in relation to Butz's world. Like do you think it has it's own orbit and is farther/closer to their solar system's star, or do you think it's trapped in the same orbit and simply on the opposite end of Butz's world's orbit making it impossible for the people of his world to see it? This is one of the weird things about V's world that is almost unique to it. I think VIII is the only other game that shares thios trait of having a really cosmologically messed up world that begs further investigation despite how irrelevant it is to the narrative.

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Anyway, the next morning the Fireship is ready to go and I get my first real taste of exploration in this game. Up until now most of my modes of transportations had been locked away in isolated areas, giving me only a few places to explore, but the Fireship opens up a larger part of the map, though I'm still a ways off from true exploration. I head south and once you spot a cave entrance inside a mountain area sismilar to the one by the Pirate's Hideout, it's time to park it and move out. There is a cave entrance not far from this map oddity, and we're going to save before going in. I should be heading to Crescent village, but I took a detour here cause this cave is one of the better leveling spots in Butz's World. The cave is home to only two enemies. Nut Eaters and the rare Skull Eater. The Nut Eaters are pathetically weak and always come in groups of three. This also means they always give you 2 ABP. The Skull Eater is the creature to watch out for, it can easly pull off 1500-2k damage on your party by this point and it's extremely fast and nearly indestructible despite only having one or two HP, but you want to fight him cause he rewards 5 ABP. there are two methods to deal with this guy by this point in the game.

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1. If you have Control and actually have it land, use the monsters special skill Incisor to OHKO itself.
2. Use Geomancer's Gaia, if Will o' Wisp is used, it ma confuse it and cause it to kill itself, if it uses Stalactite, it can pierce it's defenses and easily kill it.

There is another easy was as well, but involves doing the Crescent part of the story. For now, I plan on grinding a few job levels. One fun thing about the Skull Eater is that this enemy will flee from battle, sometimes on his first turn, and if he does, you still get rewarded the 5 ABP he gives. What I really like about this level spot is that the XP/Gil gain is actually low, so you don't really have to worry about overpowering your party by leveling up a few jobs here within reason of course. I'm thinking I'll get most of the team up to Lv. 2 minimum with their respective job builds, meaning Butz and Faris will focus on Melee while Lenna and Galuf focus on Magic, with a few side skills like Blue Mage's Learning, and Tamer's Control for good measure.

Wooo! You're back! But don't feel bad if life holds up any future updates. I enjoy this greatly but we all understand.

I love this part of the game for some reason. People give V crap for being goofy but i feel that the parts around the ancient library and the Earth crystal are awesome mysteries and they sent chills down my spine

Oh nice, im a mage for once. Usually im a knight or some other physical attacker

That’s because WK is forward thinking and knows you’re gonna be replaced by Krile ;)

I know it's been a few months, but I might be starting this up again soonish. Perhaps not this month, but maybe in the new year. I've finally got around to doing that grinding in my last post and since I'm sort of between games at the moment, I figured it would be a nice time to jump back into this, especially since I've been in an FF mood again gaming wise.

So when I last left off, I went to the cave near Jachol to do a little leveling with the Skull Eater enemies. I probably stayed there a bit longer than I should have but I have most of the cast up to Lv. 2 on most available jobs so now I have some wiggle room with builds. As mentioned before, I like this cave because the enemy types give out low XP and Gil so even with the long grind fest, my party got maybe two levels max from the whole ordeal. Other nice things about this place is that you can steal Tents from the Skull Eater and they drop Elixirs occasionally. The regular Nutkins drop Potions, so I don't need to shop too much.

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So I went exploring with my new ship and headed towards Crescent Island which simply has one town and chocobo forest on it. Entering the town triggers a cutscene where the ship gets swallowed up in a whirlpool. The townspeople simply take it in stride but I just lost my fancy new ship. Much like FFIII, it seems like transportation devices have a short lifespan in this game. The town sells some gear for Hunters and Bards so I pick up a few things.

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If you go to the pub a man there has two NPC enraptured with his lecture. You need to talk to each of them to trigger a different piece of info from him. The whole town hints to a connection with the missing Earth Crystal while the old man mentions Black Chocobos. There is also a Bard living in town and he has a piano in his place. Talking to the Bard gives you the Life Song. We need to remember this place because this Bard also teaches another Song but we need to get better at the piano first.

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We obviously have to go to the Chocobo Forest but there is one thing we need to do before hand. On the island are a few enemies we need to deal with. The Black Flame enemies can teach the Blue Mage spell Dark Shock/Dischord. This spell will half and enemies level which is useful for making enemies levels divisible for the other Lv. _ spells the Blue Mage can learn. The other thing is the enemy with two sickles in their hands called Harvester. These guys drop an item called the Death Scythe. This is the best Axe in the First World with high attack power and 33% chance of inflicting Instant Death. Two-Handed, a Berserker can actually OHKO a few of the bosses in this part of the game. This is also the weapon I've been waiting for to deal with the Jackanapes in the Walse basement. ;)

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We that out of the way we enter the Chocobo Forest where the mythical Black Chocobo turns out not to be extinct like people thought they were. Butz has to catch the old bird. After a bit of a struggle with cornering it, Butz catches the bird and decides to test her out. She barely clears the forest before they both come crashing down. Faris examines the bird and discovers she's having issues because she has to Fire Crystal Shards stuck in her throat, giving the party access to the last two jobs from this crystal: Hunter and Bard. I'll give my overview of them in the next update.

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The Black Chocobo functions like a better Wind Drake, able to clear most mountain ranges and such. The only stipulation is that the little chickadee can only land in forests, so she can't get us to every location. I should head back to the Library of Ancients to discuss my missing ship to Cid and Mid, but first off, let's take a detour to an isolated town in the mountains.

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Lix is Butz's hometown, and considering this is the premier place to obtain Ninja weapons and gear and the fact it's an isolated mountain village; my fanon is that Butz comes from a secret hidden ninja village and he's secretly a ninja. This is alos the only place in the game you can listen to one of my favorite tracks in the game, Home Sweet Home. Chatting with various people will trigger a few cutscenes here such as Butz gaining his fear of heights. His old home is now occupied by a Bard.

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If you listen to the music box, you'll trigger a flashback concerning Butz's mother and the Bard will give you a new song if you speak with them afterwards.

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If you stay in the inn, you get to stay for free and trigger a cutscene where Faris finds Butz missing. She finds him outside his old house near a grave of his parents and we get another cutscene concerning his past and his father Dorgann. Afterwards, the two discuss their parents for a bit with Faris still questioning her connection to Lenna.

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Once I buy up a few items, we head back to the Library of Ancients where Cid and Mid casually deflect the news of the Fire Ship being sunk and say they'll just make a new one. Instead they drop a bombshell on the party when they mention that the King of Tycoon has been spotted near the ruins of Gohn. The party needs to investigate but the Black Chocobo can't reach the place and instead they'll have to cross the Desert of Shifting Sands. I'm going to make a few more stops to two optional towns first. I also need some Gil for the gear there as well. Before leaving the library, I battle one of the books to finally gain Lv. 5 Death Blue spell. I also want the Moonflute spell but I'll have to wait until my party is no longer divisible to 5. So two towns to visit, and will head into the desert to fight an obnoxious sandworm.

So I have two new classes, what should I make my party be for the next round? :D

Job Class Overview!
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Rangers use bows to strike down foes from the back row!
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Stats
Strength: +16
Agility: +12
Stamina: +1
Magic: -5
Ability: Aim
Innate: None
Class Type: Give*
Weapons: Bows and Knives
Armor:Light Helmets, Clothes, and Armlets

Okay, so awhile back I mentioned there were two classes I didn't care for in this game, well here we are, Rangers are my other least favorite class. They are a mixed bag much like Red Mage, where most of their strengths can be countered by a different job. To make matters worse, only one of their skills is worth getting and much like Red Mage, I'm probably more irked I have to put up with these two classes every time I play FFV just so I can have an optimal team.

So on the plus side of things, Rangers have a really nice stat spread, even their hit to magic isn't hard enough to make a player shy away from giving them magic as a secondary skill, especially Time or Blue magic which don't factor in the Magic stat much into their abilities. Bows also allow them to fight from the back row letting them do damage on par with other melee builds at reduced risk of taking damage themselves. This is also the class that gives us the creme of the crop in terms of melee skills which is Rapid Fire/X-Fight. This is an interesting skill which halves the damage of each successive attack getting weaker with each blow. The skill is unfocused so if you're fighting multiple enemies or one with innate multiple targets like Neo-Exdeath, this skill will choose the targets randomly. It also disables the secondary abilities of weapons like the Gaia Hammer's random Quake casting. On the flip side, the four attacks will ignore the enemies defense and evasion giving them 100% accuracy and higher damage than expected. It does not ignore spellblade magic allowing you to soup up the damage if needed and the skill will not trigger counter moves. Next to dual-wield, this is debatably the best melee ability in the game.

With that out of the way, let's go into the problems with this class. Next to Ninja and Dancer, this class has the worst armor selection in terms of defensive ability for a melee focused class. You pretty much need them to be in the back row so they don't get killed and unlike the Ninja class, they are not built for dodging unless you build them for it. The other issue here is that Bows are not great weapons compared to some of the games heavier hitters, or more correctly, I should say that bows have too many drawbacks that by the time some really great ones come your way, a player should already have invested enough resources into a dual-wielding warrior. Bows have some issues, they have the lowest accuracy of any weapon in the games except for Rods. Most weapons have 80-99% accuracy except for Bows which mostly have 70%. This means that you pretty much have to use the classes Aim skill instead of Fight command to guarantee the attack will land. Not bad for Hunters who have innate Aim skill, but kind of bad idea for any other class. To make matters even more annoying, Bows are dual stat scaling, needing high strength and agility to be most effective which means the weapon has a lower base damage and is not a good fit for any class that isn't the Ranger itself or a Ninja and Thief. Granted, Bows have awesome secondary abilities like the elemental bows in the early game, the Elven Bow's high crit rate, or the Hayate Bow's innate Rapid Fire ability. The issue is that the bows that have the best secondary skills and higher hit rates are mostly on the back half of the game where a player will likely be using more specific builds and have access to the equally awesome weapons from other classes. The other issue with Bows is that they are Two-Handed innately, meaning they don't get a strength bonus with the Two-handed skills and they can't be dual wielded either. This severely limits their build options.

This brings me to the overall issue of the class which is that it doesn't have many good build options, in fact most of the classes best secondary skills come from itself. Rapid Fire is a great skill for the class but is honestly better with other builds. There are not many secondary skills to help this class as a melee fighter which is what it's built for, the few I can think of are either more optimal for other classes or are high end skills that are not worth the effort like the Thief Agility skill. This leaves the class to work more like a mage where the options are to either cover their weaknesses or build them for versatility. As mentioned before, magic sub jobs are not a bad idea, and the Ninja class has several abilities that can keep this class alive as well.

* Another issue I have with the class is their poor choice of abilities to teach. Rapid Fire is basically the only skill worth taking from them. Animals works like the Geomancer Gaia/Terrain ability where the animal they summon is based on the users level. While there are some fantastic summons among the list, the randomization factor and the more meager field of choices makes this a risky gamble. By end game with a real high level party, this skill can be pretty awesome since Wild Boar and Unicorn are both pretty snazzy, but by those levels you have better options overall. Aim is an okay ability that only the Ranger really gets any use out of it. While the game has a few enemies with ridiculously high evasion to deal with, there are not enough of them and usually better options for dealing with them making this skill not that useful. I've already mentioned the issues with Bows so the Equip skill isn't great anyway, especially since you need Aim to make it worthwhile to begin with. Rapid Fire is about the only reason to bother with the class.

Now, I know I've just spent the last few paragraphs beating this class up, but it's not actually a bad class, it's just not a great class much like the Red Mage. For every strength it has, there is a drawback or another class that can do it better. It has a great melee stat spread but Bows limit the class to very few options and knives force you to give up their back row advantage and deal with their bad defensive options, at which point you might as well settle for using a Thief or Dancer. They can make good back up mages, but why bother using the class if the player can just make them into mages with better stats to do the job? It's kind of the issue here. They're a pretty strong class in the early game to mid game, but their weaknesses start to appear as you approach the second half of the game. My advice is to master them quickly for Rapid Fire and then never look back.

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Bards are Final Fantasy's traditional Lethal Joke class...
Attachment 75902
Stats
Strength: -8
Agility: +8
Stamina: -9
Magic: +11
Ability: Sing
Innate: None
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Knives and Harps
Armor: Hats Robes, and Armlets

Oiy, Bards. Man where to begin with this class? This class has a lot in common with the Ranger class. The exception being that the stat spread is not ideal. They're better mages than Red Mages but not by much, they have the second worst stamina penalty behind Dancer, awful equipment options that don't compensate for such low Stamina, and Harps are honestly the worst weapon in this game. With that said, I would argue that Sing is next to Time Magic as one of the best support skills you can give a class.

Build wise, you'll want to make use of that magic stat. They make decent secondary mages but as stated before, their magic bonus isn't stellar among the mage classes and unlike the rest of those classes including Red Mage themselves, they can't equip Rods or Staves to boost their magic potential leaving them potentially worse off than the other classes. Their mage equipment options and ridiculously low stamina rating makes them also fragile as all hell so you'll likely either need to compensate with a sub ability, have a tanky class guard them, or simply pray the enemy doesn't attack them and if you're using a party of them against anything that isn't undead, well don't be stingy with your Phoenix Downs and Life spells.

Harps as I've mentioned are pretty much the worst weapons in this game with one exception. Harps have the advantage of being able to always do full damage despite the row the character is in or enemy. The issue is that most harps don't scale with anything, instead they do a percentile based damage based on the target's current health. The Silver Harp does 1/16th damage, Dream Harp does 2/16ths and inflicts Sleep, while the Lamia Harp does 3/16ths and inflicts confusion. Did I mention that if the enemy is a Heavy type, like most bosses and large enemies, then the attack fails? Yeah, you're seeing the picture here on how worthless this weapon is. The lone exception is the Sealed Weapon Apollo Harp which is actually pretty fantastic as it scales with the users magic and calculates the enemies Magic Defense for damage, in addition to it's other secondary abilities but I'll get to that later on in the Let's Play.

To be quite frank, as traditional of the series, the class is pretty awful as a packaged deal and only a really eccentric party build would bother using one outside of situational advantages. There's the rub though, the class has some moments where it truly shines in this game, or more correctly, their signature ability Sing is an underrated and pretty awesome skill. Granted Equip Harp and Hide are both worthless but Sing actually makes up for a lot of these issues.

Sing has a wide variety of uses and it's actually worth hunting down most of the songs. The best part about Sing is that the ability has no mp cost, which is one major advantage they have over their mage brethren. There are three types of Songs: Support, Offensive Support, and Offense. Offensive Support songs mainly deal with inflicting status spells on the enemy such as Confusion and Stop. You would be surprised how many enemies are affected by these versions of the status affliction so don't be afraid to experiment.

The defensive support magic makes up the bulk of the spell list. The Mighty March spell casts Regen on the party which can be useful for a team of beefy melee fighters since Regen works off the Stamina stat. The others are a bit different. They raise a particular stat for every round the Bard continues to sing up to a maximum of 99, though the increase is over once the battle is over. These songs can raise Strength, Speed, Magic, or even the party levels if you finish the piano side quest. The singer will continue to sing until they are damaged or silenced so keep the proper gear on them and give them beefy class to take point. Now granted, most battles wouldn't require you to leave a bard to stat boost the party that far, but even a few stat increases can make a difference especially with weapon scaling. Likewise, there is a bug in the game that makes it so that if the singer is turned into a Zombie, they will actually continue to sing even when struck so there are some fun ways around the issues.

The final spell is their lone offensive spell and frankly this spell kind of makes up for a lot of the short comings of the class. Requiem is a free ability that does ridiculous amounts of damage to the undead. I mean stupidly high damage to them. There are entire dungeons filled with nothing but undead and a team of Bards can own the place with this skill in hand. Hell there are bosses that are undead as well this ability is super effective against. Starting in Galuf's world, it's not a bad idea to do a few dungeon runs with a Bard team if you're only dealing with undead. Considering the classes low ABP cost to master, you can likely master the class in no time flat and then throw Sing onto a sturdier class. It might not be worth using the class at all outside of the very few situations where they are viable and have low risk, but thankfully mastering them is pretty easy.

Overall, Bard is kind of crappy but their main skill Sing is easily one of the best support abilities in the game, and Requiem owns the undead.

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With these two out of the way all we have left for Class Overviews are the Earth Crystal and the Mime and Freelancer classes. While I am playing the Super Famicom version, if there is an interest, I can also do an overview of the Advance editions four new classes as well. :wcanoe:

Ooh, finally another update! I’ll sink my teeth in this once I have a bit more time

Update time!

Since I didn't get any takers on what to do for classes, I opted to make Butz and Faris deal with the new classes. I only have two available Bard songs but Charm and a group Regen ability are not bad starts. I have a better selection of Bows so Hunter wasn't a big deal to get started on. I did head back to the library top pick up the Moon Flute Blue magic, but that won't be useful until later.

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Before I tackle the desert, I need to get a few things out of the way that slipped my mind. I head back to the Jachol Region to visit the town for one of the piano's and to pick up an upgrade sword for any Knights on my team. The rest of the gear in town is mostly what I found in Crescent so I'm good on that front. There is a hilarious fourth wall breaking dance sequence by the piano, and I'm sad the dancer tradition ended in FFV. Most of the town folks talk about the ruins and mention the connection the town, ruins, and Crescent island have with each other. Man, you've got to love the ancient civilizations the permeate this series. I mean seriously, I don't think there is a single entry in the series that doesn't have a minor or major subplot deal with an ancient civilization who is magically more advanced than modern society. FFII might come the closest if you want to ignore the Ultima spell quest.

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Anyway, I dive back into my farming cave to pick up a few things. If you spoke with the townspeople or simply grinded long enough to notice, you'll find there is a simple trick to the switch puzzle in here. If you simply wait long enough, the fake switches all disappear temporarily to reveal the one true switch.

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There is not a whole lot going on in this dungeon which is likely why I ignored it my first time through. The area has the early makings of what will become the Phoenix Cave in VI with all the switch puzzles and the empty treasure boxes. There are three treasures to be found in the deepest part of the cave, assuming you didn't let Lone Wolf the Pickpocket out of his prison cell. One is a minor item, another is a free shuriken which is nice since they are not cheap in this game, and the last is the Blitz Whip which is a pretty snazzy weapon for the Trainer/Beastmaster class.

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Once this is all done, it's time to flee before I get a party wipe from a Skull Eater

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Now it's time to progress the story and tackle the Desert of Shifting Sands. If I'm going to be honest here, I hate this place. Largely because its filler. There are no treasures, all of the enemies only carry basic consumable items, no blue magics, and there is a gimmicky sliding floor puzzle which you can largely ignore until you have to come back here in the third act. Not to mention you can still have random encounters while the sand has you uncontrollably shifting to your destination.

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When you enter you can't make head way thanks to the shifting sands. Mid and Cid arrive to explain that the solution is a simple matter of summoning the infamous Sandworm in the region and murdering it to use it's corpse as a bridge. Have we discussed how metal Cid and Mid are in this game? Course that's easy for them to say, the Sandworm is generally the first boss in the game that gives players a tough time assuming they didn't try to tackle Shiva as soon as she's available.

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The Sandworm is the first battle that will teach you how much of a bad idea putting the ATB speed to its highest setting is. As I mentioned before, the battle speed only affects how often enemies get their turns, not how fast your own battle bar moves like in VII and VIII. Sandworm has a ton of health and appears with three holes. He'll pop his head out and only then can you actually damage him. So this is basically virtual whack-a-mole, but with the speed cranked up, he will start switching holes really quickly which will likely mean you'll miss him quite a lot. If you fail to hit him, or heaven help you, you try to cheese him with black magic/summons, he'll counter with Demi. His other attack is Quicksand which inflicts Sap. Not a good combo for party health. He hits pretty hard as well so trying to play this as an endurance match like it's meant to be is a fool's errand. There are two really easy ways to deal with him. If you bothered to pick up some Water Scrolls on your journey and happen to have a Ninja on the team, two of these should be enough to finish this boss off. The other easy win is to simply remember how I made it a point to learn Aqua Rake earlier in the game? Well this attack will OHKO this guy. This is because Aqua Rake has a funny algorithm where it gets to do additional damage to any enemy that falls into the Desert classification, which this guy does as well as everything else in this area.

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Sadly this boss only gives us a measly 5 ABP and has no items to drop or steal. Kind of a rip off for a boss that usually gives newbies their first ass whooping. If you head straight south, you'll find the exit to reach the lost city of Gohn. If you bother to head west/left like I did, you'll wander over to the Pyramid, which is a dungeon in the third act and is locked currently. The enemies in this area are annoying, give little in the way of XP/Gil, and ABP so it's not worth spending any more time here than you really need to.

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In my next playthrough, we'll explore Gohn and see if we can't find a missing daddy and maybe rediscover some ancient lost tech that might be useful like say an airship... Any suggestions on which classes I should pick next should be?

Get ready, this will be a bigger update than before.

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When we last left off, the party had cleared the awful and boring desert to finally reach the Ronkan Ruins. Here they encountered a ghostly figure that resembled King Tycoon. Chasing him around the ruins, the party falls into an underground industrial area that doesn't feel far off from Metal Man's stage in MM2; and one of my favorite tracks playing Musica Machina. The party finds a teleporter that sends them back to Crescent Island where they find the Fire Ship, and Cid and Mid who also clumsily stumbled upon the place. In addition to all of this, the team discover an airship docked here as well, so I finally have full access to the world map.

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I should be heading back to the Ronkan Ruins, but we need to make a few stops first. With the airship I can finally reach Istory, the town next to Istory Falls. Here, I can acquire a few really neat things. If you talk to the little girl near the inn, she mentions running around the flower bed to receive something good. Doing so wakes up a sleeping frog who leaves behind the Toad spell for my Black Mages. In the area with the sheep, one sheep turns out to be a girl playing pretend, but another sheep gives Butz some attitude and kicks him over the fence to speak with a Bard who teaches Romeo's Ballad, which is a song that casts Stop on all enemies. The other thing to do hear is talking to an old woman by the river gives you the information about a strange old man wandering the woods to the east that likes to fling lightning at everyone. Changing Butz into a Summoner with Blue magic as a sub-ability, I head into the woods.

Attachment 76299

After a few encounters, I finally encounter Ramuh. He's not terribly difficult compared to his brethren but he also doesn't have any particular weaknesses either to any element available to me. It's also not wise to let this battle drag on because he can weakne your party pretty badly and there is one enemy in this area you need to watch, so some bad RNG can make this a quick trip to the title screen. The easiest way to take out Ramuh is to use Death Claw (told you it was useful) to knock him down to single digits. Afterwards, summon Ifrit to finish him off and Ramuh and Ifirt will engage in a bit of friendly banter which is poorly translated in this fan version I'm playing. Afterwards, Ramuh drops his summon item which you'll need to use from the item menu screen to learn his summon. I now only have one summon left to learn in Butz's world.

Attachment 76300

The other two things for those who like to power level is to point out two specific enemies. In these same woods as Ramuh, there is an enemy called the Mini Dragon that appears in groups of five to attack you. These guys are a pain in the ass to kill because they have ridiculously high evasion and defense, but hitting them with Ice, Water, and Lightning damage like summons, black magic, or blue magic will allow you to kill them in three rounds or so. These guys drop the highest amount of EXP in the first world, so they are worth fighting for that, even if they are one of the most dangerous creatures in the world. As a note, I also flew back to Walse Castle and explored the basement to acquire both the Drag/Speed spell and a second Elven Cape accessory. The basement is filled with an enemy called Jackernapes that have high stats, always back attack, and outside of the Moonflute Blue spell, nothing else worth fighting them for because their EXP/Gil/ABP drops are insultingly bad for the amount of effort it takes to kill them.

Attachment 76301

If you fly to the islands southwest from Crescent Island, you'll encounter an Omega looking enemy called Prototype. He has ridiculously high stats that make it nearly impossible to hurt him without power-leveling or using the Dark Spark blue spell to halve his level a few times. Or... you can just use Control to make him use Exploder/Self-Destruct on himself. This guy also teaches two other Blue Mage spells: Emissions, which is a single target fire spell; and Missile/Rocket Punch, which does gravity style percentile damage and occasionally causes the enemy to be confused. This guy also drops a pretty decent amount of Gil, EXP, and ABP so he's not a bad farming target, but more importantly, he always drops Dark Matter with 100% success. Dark Matter is an incredibly useful and powerful Chemist item that is not easy to come by, so farm a couple from him because it's one of the most important ingredients for the class.

Attachment 76302

With the sideshow over, we head to the Ronkan Ruins where we witness a pretty cool sequence where the Mana Fort...er the Ronkan Capital rises from the desert and moves high enough in the atmosphere that the airship can't reach it. With nowhere else to go, the team heads back to see Cid and Mid, who discover through the Catapult Ruins a bunch of convenient information about the Ronkan Empire and their technology. We need Adamantium to give the airship a power boost, but they have no idea where to get some. Conveniently, Galuf remembers he had some on his Meteor. So the team heads back to Tycoon Castle to check out Galuf's meteor and sure enough, the Adamantium is there, so is an Adamantoise boss. This guy is a push over that's weak to ice elemental damage. Course, if you're feeling particularly lazy like I am, you can also just cast Lv. 5 Death and be done with it.

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With the Adamantium in hand, Cid and Mid make adjustments to the airship. Now if we press the A button, we have the option to fly higher and reach the ruins, in additon, if you press down, the airship converts to a boat. Cid and Mid warn we have to be careful about the Ronkan Ruins cannons, but the party assures them it won't be a problem. These sequence is pretty cool looking and you actually get to control your airship to guide the party to attack the guns. I would also like to point out how stellar the background animations in the fight screens are. If you look in the background, you can see that the fortress has monorails on the outside as well as seeing the party's airship docked on the fortress in the background. Pretty neat details. You're going to want to make use of that new Ramuh spell here and equip a summoner with a Thunder Rod to pull off 1500 damage on the gun parts. Be careful as these guys are pretty fast with a high battle speed set and the Missile/Rocket Punch move also casts Old on the party which will make them practically useless after a few rounds with the status effect.

Attachment 76305

Once all four guns are taken out, the fortress pulls out the big Soul Cannon to take out the airship. This is the first boss fight I actually died to, and the one that teaches the player how Battle Speed actually works. There is three parts to this boss, with two Launcher enemies attached that like to use Missile to make your party have a bad day. Using Lv. Death will get rid of both of them, and thankfully the boss doesn't revive them. The actual Soul Cannon works like Bahamut in FFIV. He does a type of countdown that's presented as arming preparations, so it rakes it a few rounds before it launches it's powerful Pulse Laser attack that hits the whole party for high damage. At battle speed 1, which I'll remind you only effects how often enemies get there turns, he can fire this cannon sometime between your party's second set of turns. So it was a pretty nasty wipe when it took me out around round four. Now, understanding how this guy is just moving too fast, I could easily just adjust the battle speed in the menu to make this fight manageable, but the point of this Let's Play is to show off the brilliance of the battle system. Instead, I go back to my last save, beat up the four cannons and before engaging the Soul Cannon, I give Lenna Time Magic. Earlier in the game, I acquired the Speed/Drag spell. It's description is pretty awful, and if you didn't bother adjusting the Battle speed to a higher setting, it's completely useless. What this spell does is pretty neat, it will change the battle speed to 5 (slow) for the duration of the battle. Not useful for casual players, but if you're playing on higher difficulty settings or doing a challenge run, this spell is invaluable for bosses like Soul Cannon and Atmos, or against enemies that Slow won't work on. As expected, the spell slows the enemy turns to a crawl and lets me wallop him pretty badly. With that we enter the Ronkan Fortress.

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This is honestly one of the coolest looking dungeons with some cool Mode 7 layer effects and the moving gears, not to mention Musica Machina is still the theme music of the place. I switch my party around to get Learning back on as a sub-ability, control for Blue spells., and I turn Lenna into a Bard because they are actually quite useful in this dungeon. There are quite a few enemies in this area you'll want to keep an eye on. The Enchanted Fan can be both Controlled or Charmed and he teaches both Aera and more importantly, the White Wind blue mage spells. He's pretty common too, and if you're lucky like I was, one of them may drop a Dark Bow for your Hunter. Ronkan Knights are brutes that carry Hi-Potions and Power Potions that can be stolen. They also occasionally drop Mythril Shields. Lamia is an enemy that you need to control, she has two really important things. First, she has a really good helmet called Lamia's Tiara that is a rare steal from her. Secondly, she has the Blowfish/1000 Needles Blue spell. It is imperative to learn this from her cause it's going to make the next boss less of a headache. Ra Mages have Bard's Coats to steal for easy money.

Attachment 76308

Finally there are two hydra looking dragon enemies to watch out for. The actual Hydra (misspelled in this translation) can easily be charmed by the Bard's song, which is incredibly useful because this guy has some incredibly powerful attack you don't want to deal with including Quake and Poison Breath. Ethers can be stolen from him, and if you're incredibly lucky, he has Dragon Fangs as a rare drop which is the other super useful alchemy item you'll want to farm for. The other enemy is called Ghildra, which is an undead palette swap of Hydra (which is mistranslated as Hydra in this version). This guy is an asshole and if you don't care about a perfect run or power leveling, then I would advise you to avoid fighting him because he's designed to drain your resources. He can't be controlled or charmed, so get ready to be hit by a lot of the spells his living counterpart has. He has really high health as well. The easiest way to kill him is to use a Phoenix Down to instant kill him but since they are actually both expensive and hard to come by in this entry, you may not want to. The other strategy is to use Death Claw on him, but it has low accuracy against this boss. Missile will also land most of the time, but since it's percentile damage, you'll probably have to outlast him at that point. When he dies, he casts Lv. 4 Graviga on your party, which is a pretty useful Blue Mage spell, so you'll want whoever is on your team that's divisible by 4 in levels to have Learning as their sub-ability. Finally, for the completionists out there, this guy also has the excellent Killer Bow as a rare steal. Thankfully, it doesn't carry any other items, so you're guaranteed to get it if the steal is successful, but the probability without the Bandit's Glove is something like 3.9% success rate. After getting thumped a few too many times by this guy, I broke down and used saved states to finally get both this item and keep my party levels down since this guy is also the best enemy to fight for levels in this dungeon.

Attachment 76309

With all that out o the way, I grab all the loot, including a very useful Power Armband, the Ancient Sword, and Gold Armor and Shield. I then approach the last floor where King Tycoon is battling the guardian of the fortress, Archeoaevis. This guy is easily going to be the first boss battle that is going to test the patience of the player, and much like Soul Cannon, you'll need to really know what skills you have to make this obnoxious fight into a cakewalk. So a few interesting tidbits about this boss, he's actually five bosses in one that just all have the same sprite and only the final one has an onscreen transition. He has four normal forms, and then a final undead form just to screw with you. All four living forms have 1600hp a piece, and their stats are all slightly different, with each form having different elemental strengths and weaknesses. The rule of thumb with this fight, if you fight him fairly, is that his early forms have really high physical defense, but low magical defense; and then these stats are inversely changed as you go through the fight. So basically his first form is weak only to magic but strong against physical, while his fourth form is weak to physical but strong against magic. Course this goes out the window as it uses Wall Change to alter it's elemental weakness. This boss also gets some powerful group hitting attacks like Air Wind and Lightning so this is not a fight you'll want to drag out. His final form has 2500hp, is undead, and gets contractual boss immunity to phoenix downs. He also has access to the powerful Maelstrom attack that will instantly knock your whole party to critical health, so yeah, he's and asshole overall and the first boss that really gives players a hard time.

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So what to do? As usual, the Blue Mage comes to the rescue here. 1000 Needles does unblockable damage and ignores all of those pesky stats, and with a competent fighter and mage on the team, you can potentially knock out a form every round with this strategy. When he finally reaches his undead form and casts maelstrom on your team, counter him your own "flashing the bird" move by taking advantage of his zombie form being level 25 and use Lv. 5 Death to instantly kill him. If you really want to be saucy, bring a few monk into your team with counter equipped and use 1000 Needles to knock its first form to 500hp. Then just wait for it to use a physical attack and get countered. If you're lucky, the Monk will do enough damage to kill him and the game bugs out for some reason the boss won't transition to any later forms and you can call it good. Even more interesting is that each form does actually drop it's own alchemy item.

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With the boss defeated, the King of Tycoon rushes ahead to the crystal chamber. The party follows and realizes the king is being controlled by ExDeath. Butz and Galuf prepare to knock some sense into him but the daughters won't have any of it. Instead it takes the untimely arrival of Krile er I mean Cara to crash her meteor into the ruins and casting Thunder on the King to snap him back to his senses. Talk about a dramatic entrance. The girls have a tearful reunion with their father, Galuf hilariously regains his lost memories thanks to Cara and smacking his question mark bubble off screen, and Butz sits there all teary eyed by all these emotional family reunions until it hits him that he's an orphan and will never experience anything like this. Of course with all these teary eyed reunions, no bothers to check on the Earth Crystal which is powering up this whole fortress and before anyone knows it, it shatters and the thing we've spent all of the first third of the game trying to do has been for naught. ExDeath makes his grand entrance, corrupts the shards of the earth crystal to keep the party trapped there while he uses his magic to return to Galuf's world to wreck havoc on everything. King Tycoon then makes a heroic sacrifice to purify the crystals at the cost his own life. The party obtains the last four non-game breaking jobs, and with the crystal gone, the fortress decides to go back to being an earth bound city instead. The party escapes and we watch the fortress crash back to the planet. The sisters mourn their father's passing and Galuf tells Butz a very short version of why ExDeath was sealed on their world to begin with. With his own world in danger, Galuf and Cara choose to return home, but don't wish to drag Butz, Lenna, and Faris into their drama anymore, you know despite the fact that their world is totally screwed now without the four crystals, and most of the major world governments are in shambles. After the duo leave, the other three converse and decide to follow after Galuf even if it means leaving behind their smurfed up dying world forever.

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We'll do the quest to reach Galuf's world and I'll probably play up until they escape ExDeath's castle for the next segment. I now have the last four classes of Samurai, Dragoon, Dancer, and Chemist so I'll likely do the second to last Job Class write up for the next entry. I'll take suggestions for the next classes to play as, though I'm down to three people at the moment.

It's time to review the Earth Crystal Job Classes. I must say, next to the fire Crystal, this might be my favorite set of new classes in the game. Let's start with the oldest standby...
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Dragoons

The sneaky Dragon Knight returns

Stats
Strength: +18
Agility: +5
Stamina: +15
Magic: -12
Ability: Jump
Innate: None
Class Type: Take*
Weapons: Spears and Knives
Armor: Shields, Heavy armor and Helmets, Gauntlets, and Clothes.

Short Version: Dragoons are boring but really practical jobs to use. :wcanoe:

Okay, here's the long version. Overall, the class is really solid, it has a pretty strong stat spread with a small but decent boost to agility over some other melee focused classes on this list. Jump is a really awesome move. It removes a character for a round in order to do unblockable damage that ignores row. If the character is equipped with a Spear, Man-Eater dagger, Twin Lance, Judgement Staff, or Staff of Light, they will do double damage instead. Rod weapons will still miss, and any weapon that doesn't do normal physical damage... like harps and the healing wand will always miss. Jump also ignores the sub-ability of a weapon so magic effects and such will never activate except for the Lilith Rod for some reason. Of course the big thing to point out here is that only Dragoons and the Freelancer class have the ability to use spears naturally. So Jump loses a bit of it's oomph from FFIV. It also lost it's "throw damage" status from FFIV so the weapon type doesn't get to do extra damage to enemies with the Flying status like Kain could. So in some ways, the class is a bit inferior to it's FFIV incarnation but still gets some benefits like not activating counters. Spears scale with strength so obviously you'll want use strength boosting gear and sub abilities. Dragoons are one of the rare melee focus classes where Rapidfire isn't really worth using with. Spears are pretty nifty weapons but their strength really comes with being used with Jump. And there my friend is the rub, like Monk and Ranger, Dragoons are a bit of an insular class.

The overall build is pretty perfect, and so they don't get as much from the sub-job system like other melee classes, likewise, their build really only works best when used together, so other jobs don't get as much of a benefit from their skills like other classes can. Lance is the exception, it's a pretty snazzy ability to give to a dedicated mage character you don't wish to sub a secondary mage job to. Great for long term dungeons so White Mages get some serious mileage from it. Sadly, Equip Spears is not really worth it without Jump, and while Jump has several advantages, its less optimal in most situations without spears. The best skills to give a Dragoon are either skills to maximize their damage potential or ones that take advantage of the classes survival skills. Doublehand and Dual-Wield are pretty good skills to give the class for better damage output. Though the class take a hit to magic, a high enough White Magic level can offset this issue and they make good healers. Time Magic and Blue Magic is also a nice choice since both don't bother with the magic stat much and skills like White Wind and Return can save a battle that's gone south. Another option is to give them the Chemist's Revive skill which makes the dragoon's habit of being the last man standing super useful. The class has options but you'll likely spend most of your time using the base class and not much else. So to reiterate the short version: Boring but practical.

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Dancer
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Defeat enemies with the mysterious powers of THE DANCE!


Stats
Strength: +5
Agility: +5
Stamina: -10
Magic: -5
Ability: Dance
Innate: Equip Ribbon*
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Knives
Armor: Clothes, armlets, robes, Ribbon*

I may have spoken too soon when I said the Ninja was the melee classes glass cannon, in truth, Dancers kind of have them beat. Yes, this is a melee class at heart, though their low magic penalty and access to certain elemental boosting gear can make them pretty decent mages if you want. Still the heart of their skill and equipment set is based around doing physical damage to enemies. Like Bard's before, this class has several weaknesses compared to other melee classes. They equip light cloth armor instead of any real defensive gear, they are the only melee class to have a penalty to their stamina, and even worse, said penalty is the biggest of all the available classes, so Dancers tend to have lower hp and defense than even some mage classes. Even their strength boost is pretty pathetic for a melee job. So you might be wondering why this class can even be worth using if I told you earlier that Bard's were a class you level up until you learn Sing and then never look back. Well truth be told, Dancers are the same way, this is a class whose skill sets are better served with other classes. But much like Dragoons and Rangers, there are certain perks to using the class by itself since many of their skills really work best with their build. It's imperative if you plan on using this class to give them gear and accessories that increase evasion. You don't want them taking hits so the Main Gauche and Elven Cloak are the best friend for this class.

Flirt is the vendor trash skill this class first teaches. It has a 50% chance of inflicting Charm but unlike the Bard song that does the same thing, it only affects one target and it can't work on any enemy with the Heavy status, which is basically the thing you want to charm in battle. On the flip side, most of the dancer exclusive equipment do increase the skills success rate, which is a perk, but something only a Dancer can utilize best and you would still have to waste their secondary slot on Flirt. It's final skill is Equip Ribbon which is a misnomer. Yes, this skill let's you equip Ribbons, which only Dancers and Freelancers can equip, and its one of the most useful helmets in the game; but what it doesn't tell you is that it also let's you equip any of the Dancer exclusive items such as the Rainbow Dress, Man-Eater, and Red Slippers. Ribbons are far more useful, but the Dancer exclusive gear are actually some of the best items statistically of their classes. The Rainbow Dress is the best cloth armor in the game that's not cursed, and the Man-Eater is the second best knife weapon in the game only behind the Chicken Knife and does double damage with the Jump command. Not to mention their stat boosts are nothing to scoff at.

Course the real reason to bother with this class is their main skill, Dance. Dance activates one of four skills when used. Tempting Tango casts Charm/Confusion on one opponent and doesn't have the restrictions that Flirt does. Mystery Waltz will drain one opponent of their MP. Jitterbug drains a percentage of HP from an opponent. And finally, Sword Dance causes 4x physical damage against an opponent. Yes, you read that right, 4x the classes normal damage. Dancers are average fighters but in the hands of something like a monk or knight... yeah you get the picture. Granted, there are some issues here. Tempting Tango doesn't always work and if you're up against undead, the drain/osmose skills do damage to the Dance user instead; and FFV has a lot of dungeons with undead in them. Another big issue is that Dance does not ignore Row, so if you want to really see the hurt this skill can do, you're going to need to put the user in the front row or suffer a penalty to all their moves by playing it safe in the back row. On the other hand, if you equip the Rainbow Dress, Red Slippers, and Lamia Tiara on a Dancer, the Dance skill drops Tempting Tango for a second Sword Dance, effectively doubling your chance to perform their best move. If you give the class Barehanded or Equip Sword with a strong weapon, you'll see why this is classified as a melee class. Dance is a pretty snazzy skill. The drain skill can be useful for mages though I would stick to the better Lance skill. Yet a class like Mystic Knight or Red Mage can really get some mileage from this skill set as they have pretty good strength boosts, can equip better weapons, and can always benefit from having some extra HP/MP. Overall, master the class for the skills, but if you like funky builds and don't mind living a little dangerously this class is the one for you. Fun fact, this is Sakaguchi's favorite class.

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Samurai

Eastern warriors who try to end conflict with a single blow.

Strength: +19
Agility: +2
Stamina: +19
Magic: -12
Ability: Zeninage (Gil Toss)
Innate: Shirahadori (Blade Grasp)
Class Type: Give and Take
Weapons: Katanas and Knives
Armor: Shields, Heavy Armor, Heavy Helmets, Clothes, and Gauntlets.

Meet one of my other favorite classes in this game. I often feel like Samurai get overlooked too often by the fans in this game. I get it that knights, dragoons, and Ninja are kind of idiot proof, but honestly the samurai is a deceptively good class with several advantages over their melee contemporaries. Their stats are slightly higher than most other melee classes, but they do fall short to Monks and Knights, but make up for it with either slightly better agility and a lower magic penalty. This is despite the fact they get to wear all the same stuff as knights. Still, their average at best among melee classes. What really sets this class apart from the others are three factors:

First, they can use katanas. Katanas are on par statistically with most sword and knight swords with certain exceptions, but they lose out on being incompatible with spellblade abilities which is why they don't get as much love in the end game. Instead, katanas are the only set of weapons in the game besides unarmed to be able to perform critical hits. Even better, they have the highest crit rate factor over unarmed and only specialty weapons like the Rune Axe or Rune Bell have abetter rate and they need mp to work. So even though samurai have lower strength and katanas can't utilize spellblade magic for better damage, katanas are on par thanks to their higher output of critical hits. There are also a few really cool katanas like the Wind Slash katana that trades it critical hit rate for randomly casting a group hitting Wind Slash skill and the Masemune which gives the bearer first strike as an innate ability and casts haste when used as an item.

Second, the class has the shirahadori skill as an innate ability, this skill gives the class an extra 25% chance to evade all physical attacks that come there way, this is in addition to being able to wear heavy armor, meaning this class has a pretty good survival rate. This skill is also a learn-able ability and transfers to freelance and Mime when learned, which alone makes this class worth using for a little while.

Third, and finally, the class's main skill in Zeninage or Gil Toss to people familiar with the older translations. This skill allows Samurai to be the only melee class besides Ninja to have a group hitting attack without relying on specific weapons (which this class also has) and this version is pretty much the most bulltrout version of it in the series. Gil Toss does damage based on the character level, which also raises the amount of gil used. Getting money in this game is actually not terribly difficult but even better, there is a fun cheat if you want to abuse this skill in a low level run. See the damage formula is a bit weird and calculates the gil used by the current level of the user, the damage formula on the other hand is based on the current level. If you use either the Hero Rime Bard song or the Chemist's Drink command to consume Hero Drink's to artificially and temporarily raise the user's level, the skill will consume a lower level characters amount of gil, but do damage based on a character of a much higher level.

The rest of the class skills are not so great. Mineuchi is bugged and doesn't actually do what it's suppose to do which was paralyze an opponent they hit. Oddly enough though, the attack doesn't count as an actual hit so it won;t remove the charm or confused status when used on someone afflicted with either status. Ianuki is a good skill on paper. It has an 85% chance of killing all opponents on the field, but there are some minor details you need to know first. First, it calculates magic levels in its hit formula instead of physical so sometimes it misses when it feels like it shouldn't. It also will not work on enemies with the Heavy status such as bosses and a large portion of end game enemies making this skill only useful for trash mobs at best. Considering it's the final skill of the class and the absurd amount of ABP needed to master the class, it just doesn't feel like it's worth the effort.

Gil Toss and Shirahadori are great skills to pass onto other classes and even the equip katana isn't a bad skill to hand out if you want to take advantage of those crit rates. As for skills to give to them, the standard melee three are not bad choices so Double Hand for when you first get the class, duel wield once that's gained, but more than other melee classes except maybe Mystic Knight, Samurai get the best advantage with Rapidfire since it will raise the probability of critical hits. Their survival skills also makes them useful for healing magic and the Revive skill. It's a shame this class always gets changed around between entries, but FFV might have one of my favorite incarnations of the class.

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Chemist

Proving that science is the best weapon.

Strength: +2
Agility: +3
Stamina: +6
Magic: -3
Ability: Drink
Innate: Pharmacology
Class Type: Give
Weapons: Knives and Staffs
Armor: Hats, clothes, armlets, and robes

Next to Blue Mage, this is the other class that separates the casuals players with the really bored and calculating ones. How you view this class and its worth really tells what kind of a player you are. On the other hand, unlike Blue Mage, this class actually has something for every player despite skill level. To get the bad out of the way, this class has ho-hum stat upgrades so they don't really excel in any direction like other classes. Their equipment pool is mostly bad though they do get access to a few elemental enhancing items for magic builds and they have exclusive access to the Angel Robes which are not nearly as cool in this entry as they are in other FFs, but still neat. Yet their gear is on the light weight side, so don't expect this class to do or take much physical damage without some sub job to take up the slack. Drink is also not their best move, and it kind of sucks that its the classes default move. On the other hand, this skill actually can change a lot of what I just said about the negatives above if used right. There is one other negative, but we'll ouch on that one later...

So onto the positives, this class may be the only non-mage class where every skill learned is actually a really good skill when used properly. Pharmacology is the simplest to understand, it doubles the effects of healing items and this class gets it as an innate skill as well so double bonus. This skill will also become an innate skill for Mimes and Freelancers once the class is mastered as well.

Drink is a bit of an odd skill. as many players will notice, lots of monsters drop special items like Strength or Speed potions that show up in your inventory but can never be used. Drink is the command that lets you use them, and as you can gather by the item titles, these items raise stats for the duration of the battle they are used in. With a few potions popped, a Chemist can actually do some reasonable damage despite their stats. Yet the skill is even better when used by a specialist class to raise their damage output. So this skill has some good potential uses. The issue with the Chemist having it as a default id that the class doesn't excel anywhere so it may take a few rounds before you see some serviceable results.

Recover, for those who remember this skill in FFVIII works about the same. Its a group hitting Esuna spell that costs no MP to use. Yes, you read that right, it affects the whole team and costs nothing to use but a sub slot. Pretty useful when dealing with certain status flinging bosses or if you don;t want to deal with acquiring the Ribbons for the whole team.

Revive, again like FFVIII, is a group hitting, no mp cost Raise spell. I don;t feel I need to explain why this one is cool, and why I kept mentioning it for Dragoon and Samurai builds.

Finally, we have Mix, which is the classes best and most frustrating skill that is at the heart of why some players hate this class and others praise it. As seen in future installments, Mix allows a chemist to take two consumable items or alchemical items from the party inventory and combine them to get a specific result. Mixing normal healing status removal items can net you effects that do both healing and status removal. Hell, using an Ether and a Hi-Potion together will actually restore a characters full MP so you can really see how this ability can strethc your healing items. Some combinations can also raise a character's level temporarily by a dramatic amount, others can significantly raise magic power to game breaking levels. Three alchemical items are very noteworthy and the key to some of the game's best moves. Turtle Shells, Dragon Fangs, and Dsrk Matter. Dark Matter is especially important because most of the classes offensive abilities like Shadowflare and Dragon Breath are linked to this item, so acquiring it is important. there are roughly 57 different item effects and even more combinations for some of them. This now brings me to the other issue and why this class is kind of controversial. In additon to being a resource heavy class, you will verly likely need to use a guide for all the recipes to get the most out of this class. This class is easily one of the most time intensive classes in the game, maybe even more so than the Blue Mage in order to really get out their full potential. Most causal players will not want to put in that effort and while some of their recipes are truly interesting and game breaking, they really only get their full milage from challenge runs as the game have enough options that optimal focused players can largely ignore this class. If want some real fun, a Job locked or low level challenge will allow you to really appreciate what this class has to offer. In amny ways, this class was a precursor to a similar issue with Gau in FFVI. It's not a surprise this class doesn't show up much, especially since they tend to be game breakers when they do.

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Not counting the GBA exclusive classes, I only have two more classes to review, but I'll wait until we acquire Mime to discuss both of them. So what classes shall I use for the next section of the game?

I'm all for a full team of Earth Crystal jobs.

Nice writeup. For me the Dance skill was ultimately my choice of offense in the final parts of the game as it does consistent max damage (well as consistent as a 50% chance is) without having to fool around with Spellblade or other buffs or even particularly good weapons. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure its targeting is not random, but entirely up to you to choose. Maybe that's a GBA exclusive feature. Also, Sword Dance never misses which is a great boon against enemies with high dodge chances.

Samurai was a pretty rocking class as well and mastering it for the free 25% dodge on your Freelancer is a pretty good lategame investment.

Something I'm wondering about regarding Jump now is if it works with the Excalipoor. I know Goblin Punch supposedly does, but your post made me wonder if Jump does as well given its habit of ignoring weapon sub-abilities.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Karifean

I'm all for a full team of Earth Crystal jobs.

Nice writeup. For me the Dance skill was ultimately my choice of offense in the final parts of the game as it does consistent max damage (well as consistent as a 50% chance is) without having to fool around with Spellblade or other buffs or even particularly good weapons. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure its targeting is not random, but entirely up to you to choose. Maybe that's a GBA exclusive feature. Also, Sword Dance never misses which is a great boon against enemies with high dodge chances.

Samurai was a pretty rocking class as well and mastering it for the free 25% dodge on your Freelancer is a pretty good late game investment.

Something I'm wondering about regarding Jump now is if it works with the Excalipoor. I know Goblin Punch supposedly does, but your post made me wonder if Jump does as well given its habit of ignoring weapon sub-abilities.

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I think you are correct about Dance not being random targeting. I didn't actually switch over to verify but that sounds correct. I'll fix that in the write up.

As for Excalipoor and Jump, I'm afraid it doesn't work. For the most part, sub abilities refers to weapons that cast spells randomly when used like the Apollo Harp, Gaia Hammer, or Wind Slash katana. So it would still use the algorithm for the 1hp. Jump's damage formula still puts in account the Weapon damage formula as well, whereas Goblin Punch uses its own formula but inputs the base damage of the equipped weapon for the formula. Rapidfire also puts in account the weapon formula but ignores special abilities. So it won't randomly have the character cast additional spells when used, but it would also mean that Excalipoor would still do four hits of 1hp, while katanas would still have critical hit chances because neither of those properties count as sub abilities. I'll experiment a bit when I obtain the weapon just to confirm though.

I feel I'll definitely play with the Earth Jobs for the next playthrough.

So when we last left off, Galuf returned to his home-world with his granddaughter Krile, and Butz and the girls decided to follow him, but unfortunately, they don't know how. We head over to see Cid and Mid who figure they can tune the remaining power of the meteors to open a path for the team, so the two groups head off to revisit the meteors starting with the one in Walse. Of course, if we remembered the last time we checked out these meteors it was inhabited by monsters and well... its boss rush mode folks. Before we begin, I switch up my team's jobs. I give Butz the Dancer class because why not and have him sub Bard Song. Lenna gets to be a Chemist so I can try to get access to all those useful abilities and I sub white mage for the boss rush. Faris gets Samurai with double hand for better damage.

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The first boss in the queue is Poruborus, which are an obnoxious group of Bomb type enemies who love to cast Arise/Life 2 on each other when they are killed and try to outlast the team. This fight sounds tougher than it really is as there are quite a few methods to beat these guys. The simplest strategy is to simply find a means to kill them all at once so none of them can cast Arise. A team of Black Mages or Summoners using Blizzard and Shiva can do this nicely. I could also spam Aqualung from a Blue Mage as well. Ninja's can also use Water Scrolls to end this quickly if I had the spare cash to buy more.

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You can also simply have a white mage systematically cast silence on each of them or use a Mage Masher and hope the status effect lands to prevent them from using magic. Another trick which I use for my strategy is to use the Bard Song Romeo's Ballad to cast stop on the group and keep them from having turns. Funny enough, they are susceptible to Control as well and can use Self-Destruct on each other which somehow screws with their A.I. as they are less likely to revive an ally who uses this move. I opt to just use Gil Toss which pretty much crushes the group of them, though it does take a huge hit to me Gil.

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With that out of the way we head to the Karnak Meteor. This time the monster is inside the Meteor and scares off Cid and Mid who need us to go in and fight it. This boss is Titan and he can be a real handful for an unprepared party. One major trick you can use that I learned after the fact is that there is an enemy on the North Mountain called Galicat that when Controlled or Captured, uses Float as their move which is the only way to get the Float status in Butz's world since the spell is available in Galuf's. Titan hits really hard and will use a move called Earth Shaker that does a lot of damage. You'll want high health throughout the fight because he uses this move as his HP dwindles and as a final attack. I switch my team around. Butz is changed to a berserker and given the Death Scythe with doublehand as a move. This gives me more than enough attack power to cleave anywhere from a third to a half of his health per hit. Lenna stays the same and I make a very risky gamble by changing Faris into a Dancer for Sword Dance despite the hit to her HP. In truth, I probably should have made her another Berserker or kept her class the same but she needs the ABP so whatever. Titan goes down pretty easily though I did make this fight a bit harder on myself than I needed to. I am also a annoyed because I forgot until a I was rechecking things on the Wiki that Titan actually has the second best Hammer weapon in the game as a rare steal. You won;t be able to get this weapon until the third world and it has the sub ability of occasionally casting Quake when used which would make a Berserker a truly fearsome mob killing machine. I missed out on it, but I would have very likely needed to use save states to get it as he actually has a potion as a common steal. The nice thing about beating Titan is that you gain him as a summon afterwards.

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Finally we move to the Gohn Meteor that Krile/Cara left. This time Cid and Mid start to take a little too long getting the meteor set up, so Butz and the group go in to investigate only to discover the two have been captured by the resident boss monster. Manticore/Chimera Brain is basically a boss version of the Chimera enemy that we gain Aqualung from, and this boss happens to use it as well. Manticore is the final boss of Butz's world and is frankly one of the tougher bosses in this boss rush. He has high HP, no elemental weaknesses, and his two main moves are devastating group attacks like Blaze and Aqualung so you'll need a dedicated healer for this fight if you're going to brute force it. Titan is a great summon to use for this fight if you want to build a team of summoners, but their low HP will also mean that if they are not strong enough to kill him quickly, he can end this fight in about two rounds. Luckily, lime many bosses that feel a bit cheap and are designed to make brute forcing it a challenge, Manticore has a serious weaksause weakness to exploit. I change my team again. Butz is a Dancer with steal, Lenna is a chemist with Time Magic, and Faris is back to being a samurai with doublehand. Manticore is surprisingly susceptible to the Stop spell, which completely trivializes this fight as Butz and Faris shave its health off with Sword Dance and Critical hits. This boss also carries Dragon Fangs but I actually get extremely lucky and net the rare steal instead which is a Wind Spear. Granted, it's not as cool as the Earth Hammer and will be available in the first two in Galuf's world, but I'm not going to turn down a free weapon.

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With the meteors set up, a strange portal opens up on the world map and the team has one final discussion about how this is a one way trip. After everyone resolves themselves to go, we get a neat graphical effect as the team dives into the swirling vortex and get launched to Galuf's world. At this point, I'm still trying to make sense of where Galuf's world is, and how all of these people are traveling there by meteors and vortexes.

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Of course, following the fact this team never thinks things completely through, the party winds up on a a solitary island on Galuf's world with no means to leave. The enemies on this island don't really offer much in the way of APB, gil, or items but they do all drop Tents, which is the game's subtle way of telling you to use one. If that doesn't get the message clear, after a few battles, you''ll get a cutscene where Lenna says the group should camp for the night. Once you camp, you get a scene where Faris asks Lenna about why she risked her life to save the Wind Drake on North Mountain. Lenna talks about their mother and how she thinks of her when she sees the Wind Drake but before she can explain further, the camp is attacked by monsters. Butz finally wakes up only to see Faris and Lenna taken before he has to face an Abductor.

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This guy is not terribly tough when you have a full team but as a single character this can be a real challenge since he uses Hurricane which will drop your health into single digits. The ideal set up here is a Dragoon whose Jump command will avoid most of this bosses attacks. I on the other hand prefer Butz in his Dancer job which is a terrible class for this fight as winning turns into a matter of luck. I last pretty long thanks to getting Jitterbug a few rounds but I keep getting Mystery Waltz and never did Sword Dance. This is not a big deal, this is one of the few boss battles you can lose and frankly you're suppose to. Beating this guy nets you 1 ABP and an ether which is frankly not worth the effort. You do get a hilarious scene where the boss drops a treasure after defeat and Butz opens it only to be struck with knockout gas though.

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When the team awakens, they learn they are the prisoners of ExDaeth and we meet Gilgamesh for the first time. Butz and company have terrible timing as Galuf and his forces were trying to lay siege to the Big Bridge that leads to ExDeath's castle. Revealing through a magical hologram his prisoners, Galuf is forced to end the siege and instead try to sneak into the castle alone to save his friends.

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This dungeon is pretty straightforward as you don't have access to much but it does thankfully have a save point and HP/MP restore pools and the only treasure chest you'll find simply contains all of groups gear. You'll definitely want to switch Galuf into a class with either high defense or speed, but focus mostly on attack power. I normally go monk, but Galuf was a Ninja before he left and I figured this would be a pretty decent class to got through the dungeon with. I kept Steal as his sub ability and kept his gear intact which is built for dodging. There are only two enemy types in the dungeon sections of the game, Tarantulas and the Shell Bears. Both are pretty weak and easy to deal with though neither has much to offer in the long run. Tarantulas always drop potions when defeated, so it's really easy to amass a lot of them here. The Shell Bear is a bit more interesting. They will rarely drop Hi-Potions which are always appreciated but they have a very unique item for a rare steal. If you are a completionist this is important, but if you don;t care about getting at least one of every item, then just skip to the next paragraph. Shell Bears possess the Spear weapon as a rare steal. Why this is important is because this is the only time you'll really have a chance to get one as they are never sold and no other enemy has them. Why you can skip over this if you don't care about a completionist run is that the Spear is the weakest spear in the game and it's only decent property is it adds a +1 to speed which is hardly worth it.

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Once Galuf amkes it to the basement floor he has to deal with everyone's favorite bumbling blowhard, Gilgamesh. Fun fact here, Gilgamesh has more health in this fight than his first two real encounters later. Around 11,500 health which gives him more health than anything faced before this point. Thankfully, his A.I. script has him run away after he loses a tenth of hsi health, so despite the huge health pool, he really only has 1500hp for this battle. This fight is a gimme for the most part and you can technically beat him with any cast given enough time as he only uses weak physical attack. Unlike later encounters, he doesn't have anything to steal though, but beating him nets you an elixir so that's neat. With the blowhard out of the way, the team is rescued and we can finally try to make a break for it.

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Nothing really changes with the dungeon so its a pretty straight shot out of the place. I didn't notice this the first time through but there is a floor where some monsters look like they are behind bars, but it turns out they are guards and if you try to walk out in the open where they can spot you, Butz will dive to the floor and mention they can't be seen at which point you can control their faced down sprite to move slowly out of sight and back to run normally. Its not terribly important but its a neat feature I'm sure some players forget about.

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Once outside, our party needs to head to the bridge. The enemies outside of the castle are not terribly worth to bother with. The lizard looking devilfish use Pep Up/Transfusion which is one of the divisive blue mage skills. It works like a megalixier for the party at the cost of the user being permanently removed for the rest of the battle. So its usefulness is questionable. The other two enemies use Dark Spark/Dischord, and Death Claw, so if you haven't acquired these skills yet, then now is you chance. The Treant enemy also has Hi-Potions to steal and we're definitely reaching the point where regular potions are no longer going to cut it, so steal a couple before leaving. I keep everyone in their previous classes though in hindsight, I probably should have done a few change ups...

Now its time for the moment you've all been waiting for. The Battle on the Big Bridge. This whole sequence involves scripted battles with various enemies. Thankfully, the devs didn't complicate this with anyone with good items or Blue Spells, so I quickly just decimate my way through the enemies. When you reach the second tower, you'll run into Gilgamesh for the infamous battle we all remember.

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The second battle with Gilgamesh is significantly more difficult than the first battle. He comes packing a few Blue Mage spells like Goblin Punch and Aera. He also has use of Shock and Wind Slash which makes group healing really useful. Sadly, I forgot to give anyone White Magic so this went brutal pretty quickly. Gilgamesh still doesn't have any of the legendary Genji gear on him yet, but you can steal a Hero Drink from him or in rare cases, a Trident. Once his health drops below 2500hp (his maximum is around 6500hp) he feigns defeat before coming back and casting Protect, Shell, and Haste on himself and will start using Jump to avoid damage. If you were lucky, which I wasn't, a character with a Mage Masher could have silenced him before this point and avoided it. He's a real pain at this point to deal with and thankfully the Giant Potions I gave Lenna raised her defense so drastically she was tanking serious damage from him. Another strategy I could have used was have a character become a Knight with the Ancient Sword equipped. Gilgamesh is susceptible to Old status and that would have completely neutralized this fight for me. I get banged up but still get a good victory out of it. Afterwards the party cross the second half of the bridge with a few more scripted battles against useless enemies.

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Just before we reach the end, ExDeath activates a magic barrier to protect his domain from further invasions and the force of the shield sends the party flying off the map to Cara's surprise. When the group regains consciousness they find themselves in the Gloceana region which according to Galuf is kind of a wild west frontier like region of the world. I've always found it interesting how subtle the differences are between Galuf and Butz's worlds are, with Butz's world being more technologically advanced with machines and the ancient ruins of the Ronka empire, whereas Galuf's world feels more devoted to magic with more of the mystical forbidden regions and untamed lands. Just a thought I noticed in this playthrough.

Most the enemies in the area can be dangerous if you're unprepared so keep HP up. The most damning enemy is the silly Flying Pig enemies. These guys are fairly weak, but if a character dies, they can revive them as a zombie, which introduces us to this obnoxious status effect. On the flipside, the enemy actually has Holy Waters as an easy time to steal from then, and if you cast cure on them, they counter by casting Cure3/Curaga on the party. We battle our way to the frontier town of Regole and I'll stop here for now.

Which classes should I pick for the next outing?

Phew finally caught up. I did the Puroboros with a bunch of dancers using Mystery Waltz to reduce all their MP to 0 (it doesn't regenerate when they cast Arise).

Gilgamesh <3 he's such a goofy dork in this game you can't help but smile every time he shows up. Could hardly ask for a better recurring series joke character. His first two fights are pretty cool already and I love how he (maybe even unintentionally) makes a direct commentary on the ridiculousness of some boss encounters when he so proudly proclaims how he's been hiding behind the door all this time.

I remember burning out a little on the exploration around this point, somehow going from airship-flying over an entire map to walking across a whole new world just didn't do it from me. Worked better in FFVI at least. Though the third world later in this cool gets by on its awesome gimmick alone.

For jobs, how about returning to the basics a bit and using some of the older jobs, like the Black/White/Red Mage, the Knight, the Monk, the Thief, stuff like that? Also always nice to see a Mystic Knight if you prefer that ^^

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I totally forgot to check back here and ended up doing this whole part with my current classes, sorry Karifean.^^;

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Regola is a nice little pick me up town. It doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of sweeping narrative, but it has new magic, weapons, and gear to spend all that Gil we've been accumulating. The most important items to grab here is the Time Magic. Slowga, Return, and Comet all awesome spells compared to the weaksause White Magic and the situational Black Magic here. The town talks about all the awful monsters around their village, but at least they serve the best alcohol in all the land. There is a hidden path within the Bar that leads to a secret Piano, we're almost finished with this quest so that's cool. If you walk onto the Dance Stage, you'll be forced to dance, which is a cute sequence and you get 100 gil for your trouble. Since Butz is currently a Dancer, I couldn't resist.

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If you go to the Inn, the innkeeper is so surprised to see travelers he lets you spend the night for free, which sounds like a terrible business venture considering he lives in a remote village in the ass-crack side of the planet. You haven't seen travelers in ages so you're going to let them have the first night free? You should have charged us double, we're obviously either not smart traveling all this way here, or we're obviously alcoholics here to do some wine tasting. Speaking of, in the middle of the night Galuf slips off to have himself a bit of a nip of that wine. Butz follows him to the Pub and we have a heartfelt exchange where Butz apologizes for the party getting captured and ruining his army's chance to take down ExDeath. Galuf comments that ExDeath would have wiped out more of his people with the Barrier if his forces had charged in. He then asks Butz why he came to his world knowing he could never go back and Butz tells him the party never second guessed themselves. They have a bro hug and then we skip to the following morning and some hangovers.

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Traveling south, we reach an eerie castle. You can totally skip this place as it's the castle that houses the 12 Legendary Weapons that defeated Enuo a thousand years ago. It's also home to some of the nastiest enemies in the game. At the moment, it's only occupant is the Shell Dragon, it has 20,000 hp, permanent Reflect, Shell, and Protect status. Has a normal attack that causes confusion, and a Flame attack that will one shot the whole party until almost the near end of the game. It is also the best leveling spot in the Second World as he drops 2500 XP. This is basically a Boss in Mook clothing if you've ever seen one. Thankfully, it can be completely cheeses if your fast enough. Using the Beastmaster's Control skill, I can have the monster use its own Blaze attack on itself for a few rounds to kill itself. Since the attack is magic, it won't actually knock it out of controlled status. Makes killing these critters super easy. I give my whole team one level here, but quickly leave before I get too grind happy.

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Heading further south and around the bend to the northeast, we come across some woods in a mountain pass and encounter a Moogle. The critters don;t talk in this entry like they did in FFIII, and they are skittish critters on top of that. The poor thing falls through a hole into an underground cavern. The party decided to head after it because Lenna adopts anything fuzzy and incapable of taking care of itself, like Butz. This sequence is short but it's also a pain in the ass in terms of just having some obnoxious enemies. Most of them are incredibly tanky, the pudding enemies use Vampire, and the Lesser Lopos have Breath Wing which still hurts a lot. To make it worst, nothing here has anything worthwhile. No goof ABP, no good items, and even the XP and gil gains are on the sad side. There are two treasure chests in here, one giving a Phoenix Down and the other has 4000gil, so its not a total loss, but the party will get there real reward a little later.

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When they find the moogle, it's being stared down by an undead beast. The party intervenes and we get to tackle the Tyrannosaur. This thing is a nasty piece of work s it will counter melee attacks with its own melee moves and will counter offensive magic with Poison Breath which does a ton of damage and poisons the team. Since I'm running a low HP team, magic is not going to work and I'm sadly a few locations away from getting the Bard's awesome Requiem Song to deal with undead. Now I could cheese this boss by using the Phoenix Down I just picked up to instant kill it, but that just feels like a waste since those items are still pricey and rare finds in this game. Besides, this is why we have a Blue Mage. Guess who is also susceptible to Death Claw? See I told you this spell is studiedly overpowered in this game. It won;t paralyze the boss but even Lenna as a chemist in the back row using a knife can easily finish this boss off. It does carry a Gold Shield or Elixir, but neither item is worth the hassle at this point so I finish it off.

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Though it takes some kind words from Lenna to get the moogle to calm down, it leaves but not before somehow telegraphing how to find is village in the next forest over. At this point, you should probably save, especially if you want to keep the Brave Blade as awesome as possible. This desert area has a very nasty and very common enemy you can encounter that can easily party wipe you. The Sandcrawler has around 15,000 HP and has access to Maelstrom of which if you just shuddered when I said that spell name, I know you played FFIV and know what that means. It's Death Claw except it can hit the whole team. You also can't use it if you Control the beast. Even worse, the enemies don't have good loot or XP gains so killing them is a waste of time, and it's really easy to get a party wipe trying to cross this desert without running from enemy encounters. Save often and stick to the forest sections.

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Once we reach the Moogle Forest, the little critter run for their lives and lock themselves inside their tree houses. Some will scamper about as you try to explore the are. In the far right, we find the moogle we saved and it invites us into its house where it feels like sharing its treasure with us. I don't really understand how a forest creature has any need for all this gil and items but I'll gladly take it off their hands. The real treasure of the bunch besides 10,000 gil, is the Dancing Dagger, which will randomly make the user use on of the Dance skills instead of a normal attack. With the right class, this weapon can potentially be a game changer. With that done with, the party can explore the village. Not much to talk to as all the Moogles just say Kupo. There is a moogle in a house with a locked treasure chest. In another, the poarty discovers a moogle suit, which seems really creepy if you ask me. They throw it on and seduce the lonely moogle and get an Elven Cape for their trouble which is damn good item and worth breaking his little moogle heart for. Checking back with the Moogle you saved, they contact the moogle hanging out with Cara and tell her where the team is. The Wind Drake is still injured from the barrier attack but agrees to go rescue the party. We get a cute little sequence where we discover the Moogle Forest actually looks like a Moogle when seen from orbit.

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With the team rescued, we have finally reached Bal Castle, Galuf's kingdom. Galuf gets some grim news about his forces caualty numbers, but Butz spends the entire scene trying to grasp the fact that a pervy scatterbrained old man like Galuf is actually a king. Once we get back control of the team, we're suppose to go speak to Krile.Cara, but let's explore the castle a bit. There is a not so hidden chest in the throne room that contaisn the Exit spell. If we wander into the moat area, we can find a hidden sword in the northeast corner of the moat. Taking the secret stares hidden behidn the tower leads us to the backroom of the shops, where we pick up an Angel Robe for our Chemist. What some might not know is that if you press around on the bottom of this room, you'll open up a door leading to the shopkeeper stall where Butz will pretend to be a shop keeper to the annoyance of the two already there. They kick him out, but one bribes him with a Lamia Harp so he never comes back. The shops themselves have nothing we didn't already pick up in Regola. Now it's time to head into the basement.

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There is a convenient save point just before we go down here. The main door is locked and won;t be accessible until much later, but we're here for a completely different reason. This place is the best job leveling spot in the whole game outside of the final dungeon. The Knight statues in this area have a lot of health but are ridiculously easy to kill. If you use a Soft/Gold Needle on them, it will instantly kill them. Even better, they will occassionally drop them. They come in groups of two or five that drop 4 and 8 ABP respectively and they're the only enemy in the area so you'll make better APB goals over time than trying to hunt Skull Eaters. The best part? They are also susceptible to Lv. 5 Death, making them one of the fastest and most cost effective grinding spots in the whole game. I may even stick around a bit and get the whole team caught up on some skills. You can also steal Hi-Potions and a Twin Lance from them, though the weapon is incredibly rare. The Twin Lance is a weapon that can be used by Thieves, Ninjas, and Mimes. It uses adamage formula similar to Spears (strength) and will attack twice in a row. A Ninja with two of these will do four attacks a round. This is the earliest point you can acquire them as there is only one found in a treasure later in ExDeath's castle and then you can finally buy them in the Phantom Village by which point the weapon is obsolete to some point. I actually managed to luck out and nab one ater my fouth or fifth battle.

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This feels like a good spot to leave off before doing the Dragon Grass quest. I can either stick to Karifean's suggestion and do some classic FFI classes for the next part, or I can take any new suggestions for my party build. I may grind a little here for some Job levels since I can't access all the available magic with my current levels.

A minor update, I'm grinding a few job levels for classes none of the characters have used. I did accidentally master a class for three characters, but I'll try to avoid that from here on out.

I've been thinking about what I'll do for the final boss fight and some fun builds to try. I may give anyone viewing this thread the option of which to do, or if I'm feeling really ambitious and don't get completely lazy by that point, I may try a few of them. So here are the final team option:

Team Warriors of Light
Knight sub White Magic
Black Mage sub Time magic
White Mage - sub Blue Mage
Monk sub Berserk

Team Onion Knights
2 Ninja sub Knightsword
2 Mimes with Black, White, and Summon Magic

Team Lunarian
Dragoon sub doublehand
Summoner sub Black Magic
Ninja sub Image
Either
White mage sub Bows
or
Knight sub White Magic

Suicide Squad
Beastmaster
Chemist
Bard
Dancer

Team Viewer's Choice
People in this thread can choose the final team and sub-jobs.

What do you think?

Suicide Squad. You know you wanna do it.

Yeah gotta second Suicide Squad there. Sounds like fun~

I figured everyone would choose Suicide Squad, so I have been planning out a strategy for that.

I don't think I ever completed this back on the PS1. I might do another playthrough because it turns out there's a patched GBA version that restores the original soundtrack, so I got that running on my 3DS.

Figured I should upload at least the last playthrough I did.

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The party checks up on the Wind Drake and discovers it is sick. Lamenting the fact the Wind Drakes are going extinct, the party opts to travel to the treacherous Drakenvale, but on the way they'll stop off at the Werewolf village of Quelb to meet one of the other Dawn Warriors that Galuf knows.

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Upon leaving the castle, the party is attacked by an Abductor like the one on the island Bartz faced alone. This is a really easy fight with a whole party. The regular enemies on the world map are not much to write home about. If you plan on using Chemist a lot, the Cursed Beings have a rare drop of Hero's Cocktails which raises a character's level for the battle. The other noteworthy enemy is the Kornago Toad enemy. They are not terribly impressive for items, XP, or Gil, but you should catch one before reaching Quelb if you're a completionist. Though the toad won't make it easy because they flee when they are low health, so timing is everything.

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Once the party reaches Quelb, something feels amiss. No one is around. Galuf suggests they visit the main manor where his friend Kelger is said to live. When the party enters, they are surprised attack by Kelger and the rest of the village who mistake them for monsters disguised as humans.

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Though Galuf is able to calm them down, Kelger doesn't trust Bartz and the other and challenges him to a duel. Bartz uses a technique taught by his father to defeat and kind of badly injure poor Kelger. Galuf and Kelger recognize the technique and we discover Bartz's dad is from Galuf's world and was one of the Four Dawn Warriors.

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Galuf and Kelger reveal the truth about their battle with ExDeath in the past, and reveal why Dorgann stayed behind and raised a family in the world.

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With that out of the way, the party is given permission to leave the village to reach Drakenvale as well as use the shops in town. Most of the items in shops are the same as what was available in Bal Castle, but there are few noteworthy items like Elemental Ninja Scrolls, and a new katana. The two real treasures of this town are the Kornago Gourd and the Requiem Song. You can get the Kornago Gourd by trading a Kornago Toad and 10,000 Gil to an old man by the well. The Gourd is an accessory for the Beastmaster class that allows them to capture monsters at 50% less health instead of the normal 12.5%. This makes them significantly easier to use. The Requiem Song can be obtained by talking to the Dancing Werewolves near the gate. This song allows Bard's to inflict massive damage to undead and is easily their most useful song in terms of utility.

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One funny thing I like to point out is that their are three sheep in the village near the end. When you stay at the end, you can use their meal service to have your whole party restored, plus you get 8 potions for dessert and its all free. Course, if you step back outside you'll notice that a sheep is missing... So yeah, you can use this service only free times and witness the circle of life. I always thought it was a funny detail.

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Drakenvale is a mountain region where the Dragon Flower needed to heal the Wind Drake resides. It has a few neat things to look for as well as you explore. The main gimmick of the dungeon is that you'll occasionally encounter a Golem enemy who will run away from you. Once you reach the halfway point, you'll encounter it in a battle with two zombie enemies and if you can kill both of them before they slay the Golem, he will join you and give you one of the best defensive summons in the game. Golem will no-sell physical damage that is based on a formula that uses the casters Level. Pretty nifty.

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Other than that, you can obtain a Gale Bow from the Poison Eagles as a rare steal as well as poet Robe as a rare steal from the Drippy enemies. If you still haven;t acquired Magic Hammer, the Drippy enemy has it. The only other enemy to look for is the Dragon Zombie. If you plan on using a chemist, these enemies are gold mines for the two rarest components. You can steal Dark Matters off of them, though it's a rare steal, but they will always drop Dragon Fang's with a 100% drop rate. If you plan on using the class extensively, then I would suggest sticking around and farming them for awhile.This dungeon also has some interesting loot. The Hypno Crown gives anyone with the Control command a higher success rate. The Wind Slash is a katana that is weaker than the Koutetsu you purchased in Querlb, but if has the ability to randomely cast Wind Slash when used, making it a great group hitting option for Samurai no wanting to part with their hard earned Gil. Finally we have our first piece of Cursed gear in the form of the Bone Mail. This armor sports the highest defense in the game, but wearing it gives the user the properties of a zombie, so healing magic hurts them and they will gain a weakness for fire and holy attacks. Oddly enough the armor does sport some other advantages. It makes the user immune to instant death, old, poison, darkness, confusion, and berserk. It also makes the user take halkf damage from Ice elemental attacks and they will absorb poison elements abilites. So there is some utility here if you're willing to work around it. It should also be noted that Optimize Equipment is now your enemy, as it will always default to this armor since it has the highest defense stat in the game.

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Finally we reach the Dragon Flower and discover the reason why no one comes back from Drakenvale whether you're human or a dragon. The damn thing is a flesh eating monster. On paper, the Dragon Pod and it's six Dragon Flowers sound like a nightmare. The main boss will summon the flowers and each of them has a physical attack that has a high chance of inflicting some awful status effects like Old, Confused, Paralyze, Poison and good ole Darkness. That sounds pretty annoying but this boss has so many weaknesses... All of the flowers do physiocal attacks that inflict the status magic, so using your recently acquired Golem summon will largely negate this whole issue. The Flowers also have low HP so a groups spell or summon can usually take them all down in one go. Finally the Pod itself lacks the Heavy status meaning it is susceptible to Insta-Death abilities like Death Sickle, Death Claw, the Death Spell or the Samurai's Ianuki skill if you were crazy enough to master the class before reaching this point. Suffice to say this is an easy battle.

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Next, we'll be returning to Bal Castle in our next installment and using our newly healed Wind Drake to properly explore Galuf's world. What classes should I use this time?