Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta, Run 2-01

Final Fantasy V is a very interesting game, with the job system giving every class its own way out of every situation while also allowing endless customization.  The Four Job Fiesta is an annual event run by revenantkioku that exemplifies this philosophy perfectly- you get one job per crystal.  You are only allowed to use those jobs to beat the game, and if you're skilled and lucky enough, Omega and Shinryu, and you MUST have at least one of those classes in the party at all times.  My first run this year had a very good team consisting of White Mage, Mystic Knight, Ranger and Dragoon.  I streamed the entire run (aside from 2 hours of grinding the Chicken Knife) on my stream, defeating Omega, Shinryu and Neo Exdeath with very little difficulty due to access to White Magic and the broken combo of Spellblade and X-Fight/Rapidfire.  Before I got X-Fight, however...I had some memorable fights, especially this one with Exdeath in World 2 which I unfortunately lost in the end.  It was a lot of fun, put since my team was so overpowered I knew I wanted to do a second run.  Rather than stream it off my PS1 (I own the Anthologies version) I decided I wanted to do the run on the SNES version due to its faster speed of loading menus and scene changes.  Additionally, it will make the single class challenge runs I want to do with every class that much easier to accomplish-simply inputting an all jobs code gives me access to all of them as soon as I want, including Mimic in the beginning of World 1!  Anyways, enough intro, on to the report!

I named the main character Bartz, since it seems like a better name than Butz. and I didn't feel like naming him something else.  I'll leave the witty names for those single class runs ;) .  The goblin battles at the beginning of the game are simple and you have to try to lose them.  After Reina (Lenna in this version, but I'm used to seeing Reina and will refer to her as such throughout) joined the party, I grabbed the Phoenix Down in the hidden chest off the lower right of the clearing.  A few more plot triggers later, and I had reached the Wind Shrine, which has cool music but is, as expected from an early dungeon, trivially easy.  I didn't have to do any healing while climbing the tower, and equipped with 2 Broad Swords, a Dagger and the Knife, took on WingRaptor.

What else did you expect?  It died before it could close its wings, and all it did was cast Breath Wing twice (interestingly enough, looking at the Algorithms Guide shows that this fight had a 44% chance of going down this way, and that it would have closed its wings if Bartz hadn't killed it).  Since Breath Wing deals 1/4 max HP, I knew Galuf would survive it with 2 HP and was in no danger of dying.  I have my party arranged in action order, which has the nice side effect of putting Faris in the leader position, so I get to walk around as my favorite character from this game, heh.  I had forgotten that WingRaptor has a guaranteed drop of a Phoenix Down, and was surprised to see this.  Pleasantly surprised however, as I already knew what my first job class would be: Thief.

Since I only have one class available right now, everyone must be a Thief until I get a second class.  Ummm...beating Galura with this team could be a bit of a pain!  Ah well, I did it with 4 White Mages while forgetting I had the Flail, I can do it with 4 Thieves.  Since I'll be using exclusively Thieves for a bit, I'll explain what they can do.  On the pro side, they have the highest Agility stat in the game and an ability (Footwork, on the PS1 version, Artful Dodger on the GBA version and Agility Up on the translation I have) that can pass this on to any other class.  Imagine a Berserker moving more than twice as fast as it originally did-getting a Berserker doesn't sound too bad now!  They can steal items, and even do it at the same time as an attack with !Mug.  They can never be back-attacked, and can speed up field map movement with Dash.  Finally, all secret passages are revealed to them and they have an auto-escape ability.

Find Passages in action.  The grate
type thing is only visible to a Thief.

So what's the downside?  Well, Vitality is low for a front row melee class, Strength is also very low-hardly better than a Freelancer, and unlike the Freelancer they can only equip daggers! (and those throwing weapons-I'll explain those a bit later though, when they arise)  Finally, they can only equip light armor!  The thief definitely falls into a support class, one that the developers probably expected you to have one of, not a full party!  This game has been beaten by a solo Thief before though, so it's far from impossible to succeeded with Thieves.  The only answer for some things, though, is grinding...which I intend to do very little of.

Aero HURT my Thief-that was almost a KO!

  Returning back to the Wind Shrine to obtain a few Elixirs from Mold Wind enemies (1/16 drop) yielded 2 within a few minutes.  I managed to grab a screenshot of a Mold Wind mid-attack, the negative image looks pretty cool.  I was alarmed to find out that they can cast Aero though, and high-tailed it out of there once I found that out.  That's as far as I went tonight, next time will probably take me through the Ship Graveyard and maybe farther.