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. FF5-WhiteMage.png
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last edited by Wolf Kanno; 06-18-2018 at 10:00 AM.
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