Four Job Fiesta
The Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta is a charity event run each year in the summer months, designed to raise money for the Child's Play Charity. Anyone who is interested in participating sends off a message to the automated Gilgamesh bot, and receives a tweet back with four random job classes, one for each of the wind, water, fire, and earth crystals. The challenge is then to complete FF5 using those four job classes, never knowing until you begin exactly what jobs your party will wind up landing. If you've been reading the content on this website, then you probably already know the versatility of FF5's gameplay. No two parties will ever play out quite the same way depending on what jobs get rolled. This provides near endless replayability for the Four Job Fiesta, and makes for a great charity event each year.
I decided that I would try my hand at the Four Job Fiesta in the Summer of 2014. I decided that I would select two additional restrictions for my party setup, since I know this game inside and out. I would first try the "Natural" restriction, which means that each character is limited to the single job that they get assigned. For a normal fiesta run, if your party would get a job roll such as Knight/Summoner/Ninja/Dancer, then your party would have to contain one of each job class at all points in time. However, you could have Bartz spend some time as a Knight, and some time as a Summoner, and mix and match the abilities of those four classes together. It makes the game notably easier when your Mystic Knight also has Blue magic or White magic as the second assigned ability. The Natural restriction rules that out, your character use whatever job they roll and that's it. Secondly, I also signed up for the "Classic" restriction, which limits the random jobs that your party call roll to the six jobs from the original Final Fantasy game. Those jobs are the Knight (Fighter), Thief, Monk (Black Belt), Red Mage, White Mage, and Black Mage. I did this more for flavor purposes, since I enjoy the original FF game and have spent a lot of time writing about old school character runs. These two restrictions seemed like they would make for some interesting gameplay.
The random roll came back with the following result: Black Mage, Knight, Red Mage, Red Mage. That was a pretty strong party, with good physical and magic damage capabilities. The biggest weakness was the low health total on the mages. The Red Mage class has one of the lowest Vitality stats in the game, and the Black Mage isn't much higher. This would always leave the party vulnerable to getting wiped out by high-damaging spells, especially with no White Mage for Shell status in the lategame. I would have to make due as best I could.
I had the opportunity to play out this full quest on Livestream through six total streaming sessions. I wanted to get a full playthrough of Final Fantasy 5 recorded again, since my previous playthrough on Own3d.tv was erased when that company went out of business at the beginning of 2013. Hopefully Twitch.tv will manage their financials better! In any case, the stream recordings are linked below in sequence:
First Session Part One | Part Two (First half of World 1)
Second Session Part One | Part Two (Second half of World 1)
Third Session Part One | Part Two (First half of World 2)
Fourth Session Part One | Part Two (Second half of World 2)
Fifth Session Part One | Part Two (First half of World 3)
Sixth Session Part One | Part Two | Part Three (Second half of World 3)
It was a great deal of fun playing through this restricted setup and getting back to FF5 after a break of close to a year. Even better was the interaction with the stream viewers, who turned some of the more tedious aspects of the run into entertaining banter back and forth. Your thoughts and suggestions were greatly appreciated. Thanks a ton. 
I don't want to include too many spoilers here in this brief writeup for anyone who wants to watch the run at the Livestream links. Here are links to two endgame pictures - don't click on them if you want to avoid knowing how the run finished!
Thanks to all of the readers and viewers. The Four Job Fiesta was a lot of fun. Maybe again next year, or even in a few months if I have the time.
