Four Job Fiesta 2020: The Rejects
It had been a few years since I last took part in the Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta. This is a charity event for the Child's Play group that raises thousands of dollars each year by challenging players to complete all sorts of different job setups for Final Fantasy 5. I was looking for another game to run as the intro portion of the Livestream before moving on to the main Civilization content, and it had been long enough since I streamed FF5 that it seemed like a good fit. My goal was not to follow the typical procedure and roll a random party for the Fiesta. That would most likely result in an uninteresting mix of jobs in which one or two power options would dominate the other classes. Instead, I opted to pick four jobs ahead of time by ditching the whole concept of randomness altogether. I ended up choosing the Beastmaster, Geomancer, Bard, and Dancer jobs which I collectively dubbed as "The Rejects."
The idea behind this group was to focus on various oddball jobs that have to work their way through the gameplay with weird or unorthodox solutions. This was not an attempt to create the weakest setup possible as some viewers thought, and in fact all four of these choices can be powerful in the right situations. But jobs like the Geomancer and the Beastmaster do require a lot more creativity than, say, the Samurai or the Ninja. I had thought about the path of this group ahead of time and I was confident that they had some kind of a solution to every obstacle along the way, even if it required some zany stuff with Capture or Sing or Dance. I thought that this would make for a good Livestreaming setup and would let me feature some of the less explored aspects of FF5's gameplay. Many of the solo challenges required lots and lots of tedious repetition which would make for a poor viewing experience, and I didn't want to include any Berserkers for the same reason: they're a boring class and not particularly Livestream-friendly.
Fortunately I was able to make it through the whole party's run without ever getting stuck on a roadblock boss or needing to grind out levels. The first world was mostly handled by the Geomancer, of all classes, as the various Terrain attacks were surprisingly powerful against the early opponents. The Beastmaster came in handy with some clutch uses of the Catch and Release monster cannon, especially by using a Page 128 enemy for the one-shot kill against Byblos thanks to a suggestion from the Livestream chat. Sol Cannon was the toughest battle in the first world and quite possibly the whole game, with the Geomancer's wind-based Terrain moves useless and none of the other classes dealing much in the way of direct damage. It took about 20 minutes of the Bard dodging Sol Cannon beams with Hide and repeatedly reviving the Dancer before I could grind out a win. The Bard started to come online in the second world as Requiem and the Speed Song unlocked, and the class was enormously helpful in every random encounter by spamming the Charm Song. Few random monsters are immune to being Charmed and the party was able to minimize damage by applying this status over and over again.
The greatest problem for the group was its low overall health along with a total lack of any healing abilities. The Dancer has the worst Vitality in the game and the Bard has the second-worst in that category; the Beastmaster looked like a veritable tank with Bartz's 35 Vitality. That's not much! This nearly wiped out the whole group against Exdeath due to his Earth Shaker and Zombie Breath abilities that hit everyone for as much as 800 damage apiece. Somehow the group managed to recover with only Faris still alive and find their way to a victory in a thrilling battle. The Bard's use of the Speed Song was the only thing that made the Exdeath fight at the close of the second world possible. The third world unlocked the Chicken Knife and the remaining Bard songs, and at this point the Dancer took over as the group's offensive mainstay. Faris could Sword Dance for 9999 damage at 50% odds on each round of combat and I knew from experience that this would be sufficient to get the job done. The endgame Bard songs could turn the whole party into unstoppable death machines, if given enough time for buffing up stats, and that's exactly how the final Neo Exdeath encounter played out. The Beastmaster was the only character with enough health to survive a casting of Almagest and it didn't end up mattering because Neo Exdeath never managed to get off a single Almagest *OR* a single Grand Cross. I guess maxing out everyone's Agility with the Speed Song and stacking permanent Haste status on top of that made a bit of a difference.
There's nothing too crazy in these Livestream recordings but it was definitely a fun journey and a great way to explore the gameplay of these four underutilized jobs. Thanks again to the viewers for making this such a great experience. 
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five
Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine | Part Ten
