Four Job Fiesta 2015
When the summer of 2015 rolled around, it was time for another run of the Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta. This is a charity event held each year designed to raise money for the Child's Play Charity. As I mentioned last year, 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. With the possibility for each character to be assigned one of the 22 different jobs in the game, there are hundreds of thousands of potential party configurations. You can run dozens of these things without running into repetitive setups.
Last year, I decided to use the "Natural" and "Classic" restrictions for my Fiesta group. The Natural category prevents your characters from switching jobs - no mixing and matching abilities! Whatever each character gets assigned is what they'll be using for the whole game. Since that's exactly how I play the game anyway with my solo characters, I intended to continue using the Natural variant this year as well. The Classic restriction from last year assigns your party only the six jobs from the original Final Fantasy game. I'd gotten a Fighter (Knight), a Black Mage, and two Red Mages back in 2014. That was a magic-heavy group, and therefore I decided to pick a different option for 2015 which would highlight the physical classes instead.
I chose to play under the "Team No 750" setup, which rules out almost all of the magic casting jobs. The "No 750" is a reference to the cost of Fire/Ice/Lightning rods in this game, which sell for 750 gold and can be broken to cast Fire/Ice/Bolt 3. (Apparently a lot of the people who do these Fiesta runs are into speedrunning, and they tend to abuse rod breaking frequently.) This would strictly limit which classes my party would be assigned. Bartz would get one of the three physical jobs from the Wind Crystal: Knight, Monk, or Thief. Lenna would get either Berserker or Mystic Knight from the Water Crystal - umm, one of those is a *LOT* better than the other! Faris would get Beastmaster, Ninja, or Ranger from the Fire Crystal, and then Galuf would land either Dragoon or Samurai from the Earth Crystal. I wouldn't know which job each character would receive until reaching that each respective crystal, and the characters who hadn't picked up a job yet were forced to remain in the Bare/Freelancer class. That was fine with me - I think the Bare class is quite good! Most of the Fiesta participants seem to disagree and hate the Bare job. Maybe they find it boring to play, I dunno.
The Wind Crystal handed out the best of the three options when it produced the Knight class (via a Tweet from Gilgamesh Bot). That immediately meant that this would be a Brave Blade game, no running allowed. I crossed my fingers to avoid the dreaded Berserker class, and happily found the Water Crystal handing out the Mystic Knight after Worus Tower. Those two classes alone were more than enough to complete the game, but Gilgamesh Bot wasn't done yet, and told Faris to become a Ninja at the end of Karnak Castle. Knight, Mystic Knight, Ninja - are you kidding me? Power party indeed! Could we land Samurai for the most ridiculous physical job setup possible? Apparently not, as the Earth Crystal instead assigned the Dragoon job for the last slot. Oh well. I certainly was in no position to complain. Just think if this had rolled Thief / Berserker / Beastmaster / Dragoon instead!
I played the run to completion on Livestream over the course of three weeks. The lack of healing magic and the inability to run away were some of the biggest challenges for this particular group. We went through a whole bunch of Potions and Hi Potions, which meant that gold was constantly in short supply. This group was broke for most of the game, and I had to skip purchasing armor on a number of occasions for lack of money. On the other hand, the offensive output of the Knight / Mystic Knight / Ninja trio carried my group past virtually everything with brute force. Poor Galuf and Cara simply couldn't keep up with the more balanced Dragoon class. I had a modest number of game overs for this setup, and the ones that I did get were mostly due to sloppiness on my part. Almost all of them could have been avoided with better play. This group's inability to get party-wide healing was the biggest problem, and most of the party wipes came from area of effect spells or abilities of some kind. What I wouldn't have given for one White Mage...
The Twitch stream recordings are linked below, with the whole game completed in four lengthy streaming sessions. I also put some of the best highlights up on YouTube, so feel free to check them out if you don't want to watch 15 hours of gameplay. Thanks for watching, see you again next year! 
First Session (Beginning to Byblos)
Second Session (Crescent to the Big Bridge)
Third Session (Rugor to Exdeath's Castle)
Fourth Session (All of World 3)
