by ersatz_cats
Happy Pride Month, everyone! June is always a fun time, but for me, it’s fun for a different reason – It’s the start of the yearly Final Fantasy 5 “Four Job Fiesta”!!
What is the “Four Job Fiesta”? I’m glad you asked! It is both a tremendously fun self-imposed challenge on a classic SNES-era RPG, and an event when gamers get together to play this challenge for a good cause. Today, we’ll go over all the Fiesta basics, and cover a selection of more advanced strategies. Obviously, there will be spoilers ahead, but surely you’ve already played FF5, right? We’ll also take an in depth look at the game’s final boss, who isn’t nearly as boring as you were led to believe on your casual playthrough, and we’ll conclude with a list of my favorite “Fiesta” tricks.
AN OVERLOOKED GEM
Let’s start at the beginning. In 1992, Final Fantasy 5 was released exclusively in Japan for the Super Famicom. In many ways, FF5 is a standard classic JRPG (“Japanese Role-Playing Game”). However, most of us old-timers are less familiar with FF5 than its Super Nintendo siblings. That’s because, at the time, FF5 was deemed too complicated for American audiences, who instead received FF4 (renumbered to “Final Fantasy 2”) and FF6 (renumbered to “Final Fantasy 3”). While the characters and abilities in FF4 and FF6 are mostly straight-forward, FF5 is deeply customizable, owing to its “Job” system:
In the original game, you’re given access to twenty-one fantasy classes, referred to as “jobs”. (That’s setting aside “Freelancer”, which is when a character lacks an assigned job.) A lot of it is basic stuff – White Mages, Thieves, Ninjas, etc. But what’s really cool is, you can mix and match these jobs and learned abilities pretty much how you want. You can have a Knight who casts black magic. You can have a Bard who equips giant axes. You can have a Samurai who’s into experimental chemistry.
There was just one problem: The game was utterly banana-tacularly broken.
By “broken” here, I mean super-easy. Once you have any idea what you’re doing, your party becomes so hilariously overpowered that little will ever stand in your way. Don’t get me wrong, the basic game’s super-fun for a single playthrough – and I still recommend folks start their FF5 journey with a casual, vanilla run. But the basic game was just too easy to have meaningful replayability beyond that…
However, someone eventually realized the game becomes much more replayable when you limit yourself to only four of those twenty jobs. And the interesting thing is, it can be any of those four, selected more-or-less at random. You don’t need any of the high-powered jobs, either. You can beat the game with a modest party of Monk, Red Mage, Geomancer, and Dragoon, along with only those jobs’ secondary abilities. You could even beat the game with four Freelancers with no abilities whatsoever. (Heck, you can even beat the game with four uncontrollable Berserkers, and I have done so, but nobody will ask you to do that.) While certain items are locked behind job-specific abilities, at no point does the game require you to suit up a specific job to proceed, making FF5 perfect for an open-ended variety challenge like this.
That explains the “How”, but more importantly is the “Why”: It’s super-fun!!! Let’s set aside the momentary excitement of unlocking your new jobs and discovering what you’ll get to play. Each combination you get is like a whole new game. A Blue Mage will have a different journey than a Time Mage, or a Beastmaster, or a Dancer. And many jobs combo well with each other! The bluntly overpowered nature of the vanilla game also causes players to overlook other fantastically juiced abilities, like Chemist’s !Mix command and Bard’s late-game songs. In “Four Job Fiesta”, you’ll often find yourself relying on every ability you have available – even those weird ones you never paid attention to. The boss fights also become very interesting. A given boss can either be a free pass or a serious obstacle, depending on which party you’re running. And the party that breezes by that boss will struggle elsewhere. This results in a deeply dynamic challenge that’s fun to play over, and over, and over again – or at least, once or twice each annual Fiesta season. Plus, hey, it’s also fun to share what party you and your friends rolled, so both of you can be jealous of how easy each other has it.
SO HOW EXACTLY DOES “FOUR JOB FIESTA” WORK?
Okay, okay, you’re sold, and you wanna give this a spin. But there’s one… or really two questions still on your tongue: How do you play Four Job Fiesta, and how do you participate in the official event?
The registration stuff is the boring part, so let’s get that out of the way first. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from playing FF5 Fiesta-style any time you want by making your own randomized job selections. But the official Four Job Fiesta event runs from mid-June to the end of August each year. The event is administered by Eric Koziol, also known as “revenantkioku”, or “RK” for short. (Despite the near-identical name, RK should not be confused with Eric Koziel, the “Omnigamer” of Dragster notoriety. Although it would be hilarious if they were secretly the same person.) RK runs the official Four Job Fiesta website, which you can find here:
Prior to the big Twitter buyout, the event was facilitated through the use of Twitter hashtags. But starting in 2023, it was reconfigured to run exclusively through the Fiesta website, using Google accounts for authentication. Once you’ve logged in with a Google account, you’ll see a page similar to this:
https://www.fourjobfiesta.com/account.php
We’ll touch on all those little options in a moment, but it really is that easy! While it’s possible to pre-register early, you can still sign up for a new run any time until the official Fiesta concludes at the end of August. I recommend a “Regular Run” with “All Jobs” and “No Restrictions” if you’re starting out. When you get to the required moments in the game, you return to the website and (assuming you’re logged in) click a little button that says “Gimme my dang next job” or whatever.
And that brings us to the game itself! While many gaming challenges on revived classics involve mods such as randomizers, “Four Job Fiesta” is a self-imposed challenge, running on any vanilla version of the game, original console or emulation. That includes original Super Famicom (and translations), Game Boy Advance, the deprecated 2010s mobile remake, all the way up to the sparkly new Pixel Remaster. Heck, you can even play that Playstation 1 version with the load delays and awful translation, although if you do, you may find yourself again on your own.
Final Fantasy 5 starts with a long, unskippable intro scene, which proceeds without your input. So it’s best to fire it up a few minutes before you actually want to start playing. A Four Job Fiesta run is no different than a vanilla run up until the end of the Wind Shrine, just after your fight with Wing Raptor.
Once you collect the shards of the shattered Wind Crystal, now each of your characters must use your assigned “Wind” job. Let’s say you were given Black Mage. Sadly, you have to pack away those Broadswords, but now you have fun spells that go boom!
Your mono-job fun will eventually bring you to Walse Tower, future-former home of the Water Crystal. After the Crystal shatters, you now have to play your assigned “Water” job as well. Let’s say you got a big strong Berserker – probably not as sweet as your Black Mage, but there are going to be times you’d prefer to hit things with big sticks. You can have three of one, or three of the other, or two-and-two, as long as both jobs are represented.
Same thing happens when you get your “Fire” job, which could happen immediately after Karnak, or a bit later at the Chocobo Forest. (If you’ve played the game, you know what I mean.) Now you must have, whatever, let’s say a Geomancer in your party. And finally, when the Earth Crystal shatters, you get your final job of Samurai:
And from that point on, you always keep each of your four assigned jobs active among your four characters. You can swap them out all you want, any time you want, as long as you return to a legal formation before proceeding. (Don’t forget to move your new mages to your back row and your new fighters to the front row!) Meanwhile, as you accumulate ABPs, and each character learns abilities, you’re free to assign and reassign the secondary abilities you learn as you wish. Above, you see our Black Mage crushing the opposition with Geomancer’s !Gaia command. And that Geomancer would love to wield either !Black magic or Samurai’s !Zeninage. The uncontrollable Berserker doesn’t get much use out of battle commands, but he’s a great candidate for Samurai’s “Shirahadori” ability, which lets him dodge attacks.
And while there are restrictions requiring you to keep your assigned jobs active at all times, there are no restrictions in how you deploy your secondary abilities – provided of course that you’re only learning abilities from your designated jobs. For instance, let’s say you rolled White Mage to start. Although there are enough healing items in FF5 to get by without healing magic, the white magic ability is highly useful, so you may choose to assign !White to all three of your other characters at once. Go for it! (Note that there are Fiesta variations where you get temporary access to additional jobs. In that case, you may be restricted from using some secondary abilities.) There are also a few items and equipment that emulate (har har) abilities from other jobs, such as Thief Knife and Dancing Dagger. Use those, too!
Of course, the website also has a help page, which also spells out these rules, and which should always be deferred to in the event of a clarifying question:
https://www.fourjobfiesta.com/help.php
That page addresses how to proceed during story sequences where your party is split up or otherwise under-numbered. It also explains all those little bonus options you saw earlier. While the basic version of Four Job Fiesta grants you one job from each crystal, you can register for “Chaos” variations, where anything goes – You can get a “Fire” job as your “Wind” job, and a “Water” job as your “Earth” job. Again, the help page explains it all. There’s a fun variant called “Upgrade” where, instead of having four different jobs at once, you upgrade your whole party to a new job three times, while freely using your previously learned abilities. “Natural” is an expert-level mode where each character is given their own job, and must stay only that job forever. (While it is an added challenge, it does take away the fun of mixing and matching different abilities.) There are also options that include randomly assigning Freelancer, Mime (the original game’s hidden 21st job), and three of the Advance remake jobs (Gladiator, Oracle, and Cannoneer). Lastly, there’s something called “BERSERKER RISK”, where you volunteer for an increased chance of being assigned the difficult Berserker based on how much money has been donated.
Oh, did I say “money” “donated”? That’s right, this is all for charity! The exact charity sometimes changes from year to year, so if you’re reading this in the future, you should click “Donate” on the site to find the current details.
https://www.fourjobfiesta.com/jobfair.php
One of the donation incentives (linked above) is for something called “Job Fair” – If you don’t like the jobs you’ve been given, you can donate money to a good cause to have that job reassigned. This can be great for getting out of a tough spot, or for avoiding playing a run too similar to one you did recently. My preferred way to use it is at the end of Fiesta season, for one final run where I pick up any fun jobs I wasn’t randomly assigned that year.
To officially complete your run, upload a photo or screenshot of Neo Exdeath’s dissolving fade-out to a public social account or other hosting. (It’s okay if some of your characters are dead and their jobs aren’t visible.) After you clicked for your “Earth” job on the website, there will be an option to link your Neo Exdeath upload, confirming your victory. For bonus credit, there will also be options to link stills demonstrating your triumph over the game’s two super-bosses, Shinryu and Omega. (Yes, both can be killed using Fiesta parties at reasonable levels, but not every party configuration can do this.)
https://www.fourjobfiesta.com/players.php
Once the event goes live, you can find your jobs, along with everyone else’s, on the players page. This will also give you stats on the number of different runs people have signed up for, and totals on how many players have defeated Exdeath, Shinryu, and Omega. Plus, you get to see your own victory badges, and we all know how important badges are.
https://www.fourjobfiesta.com/therun.php
I guess the last detail to cover is something called “The Run”, which kicks off every Fiesta season in June. This is where a varying number of expert players stream a run using a predetermined Fiesta-style party, typically in a speedrun race format. It’s fun to watch, and will give you many ideas you can implement in your own Fiesta runs. (Plus, you can donate more money to that aforementioned good cause to compel the runners to hit extra requirements along the way.) Soon after “The Run” is concluded, RK unlocks everyone’s “Wind” job, at which point two-and-a-half months of Fiesta fun is officially underway!
A “FIESTA” PRIMER FOR NEO EXDEATH
Okay, that takes care of the basics. Now for the fun advanced stuff! I’ve linked a few more Four Job Fiesta resources at the end of today’s write-up, and we’ll still get to a list of my favorite tricks. However, I occasionally like to drop in on folks streaming their Fiesta runs on Twitch, and when I do, there’s one part of the game I’ve seen less-initiated folks struggle with more than any other. And that would be the game’s final boss, Neo Exdeath:
Neo Exdeath, or “NED” for short, appears after you defeat final Exdeath’s “tree form” in the Void. All the other boss fights throughout the game, you can more-or-less power through with the randomly assigned abilities you have without too much inside knowledge. But this guy can wreck you every time, if you don’t know what you’re doing. The game never really identifies what you’re supposed to do against him. And when you play FF5 vanilla-style, you get comfortable using all the most easily broken abilities, and so you’re never forced to learn. Why bother figuring out what’s going on when you can spam Bahamut and Curaga until the game tells you you won?
However, there’s actually a lot of interesting stuff going on under the hood of this final boss battle. And in order to conquer it with limited access to abilities, it’s important to understand some of it. First, Neo Exdeath consists of four sections, each with their own HP totals and move sets:
I refer to these four sections as the Front (where you see the head), the Rear (the portion way in the back), the Arch (the red lion thing, which I see as the arch of NED’s spine), and the Gut (in the bottom right). The front has 50,000 HP, the back has 60,000 HP, while the other two each have 55,000 HP. As you’ll see in a moment, these totals can be important.
(As a quick aside, in this fight and a few others, there are phantom targets the game uses to do game-codey stuff. Those phantom targets don’t take damage, and they don’t come into play unless your characters attack targets at random, such as when they are Berserkers.)
The biggest immediate threat is the Gut, because it casts a powerful spell called Almagest (or “UltraGust” in an earlier translation). Almagest will hit all your party members for high damage, which cannot be reflected. To make matters worse, Almagest also inflicts “sap” status, slowly draining your HP, just in case the initial damage output wasn’t quite enough. The only warning given prior to Almagest is, the NED sprite will begin shaking vigorously when it’s preparing to cast it, which begins not long after NED first appears. Whatever NED strategy you employ, you must be prepared to survive Almagest first and foremost.
If all else fails, you should be able to survive Almagest if you grind levels to your mid-40s. But there are many other options, employing a wide array of job abilities:
- You can boost your HP to better survive Almagest. The Monk’s HP-boosting abilities are probably the most straight-forward way. You can also use Goliath Tonics with the Chemist’s !Drink command to double your HP. That same effect can be targeted onto other members using Chemist’s !Mix command, when mixing an Elixir with a Dragon Fang. Remember that you may be able to prevail when only one or two characters can survive Almagest, as long as you can recover the rest of your party in a timely manner.
- You can increase your magic defense to better survive Almagest at standard HP. The easiest way to do that is by using Blue Mage’s “Mighty Guard” spell, which can be learned from the rare Stingray enemies encountered on the World 3 ocean. Mighty Guard grants protect and shell status on each party member, so repeated castings can be very helpful. If you don’t have a Blue Mage, your White Mage can cast Shell on allies one at a time. Beastmaster can also !Catch and !Release a Crystelle enemy for a one-time casting of Mighty Guard, but doing that is… complicated. (It involves that “Excalipoor” sword you always threw away.)
- Some jobs can temporarily evade Almagest altogether. If you time it right, Bard’s !Hide ability can protect some of your party members, as can Dragoon’s !Jump ability. Also, as with many attacks, Aegis Shield will sometimes randomly block it.
- You can weaken NED’s ability to cast Almagest. While most of NED’s sections are invulnerable to most status effects, the Gut happens to be vulnerable to aging. Aging status lowers enemies’ levels over time, making them attack less frequently and for less damage. Time Mage can attempt the “Old” spell with low odds of success, but if someone in your party can equip a basic sword, your best bet is to attack Gut with the Ancient Sword. Note that even if you successfully land aging status, Gut will still likely fire off one Almagest at nearly full power, so you may still have to survive once. But as seen above, combining this with the other aforementioned techniques can reduce the threat of Almagest considerably.
- You can kill the Almagest section before it can cast the spell. It’s fairly difficult to do this the traditional way before the spell is cast, although potentially high-powered attacks like Ninja’s Fuma Shuriken and Chemist- or Bard-boosted !Zeninage can do the trick. But the most hilarious way to do this is to exploit Gut’s other status vulnerability: petrification. Black Mage has the “Break” spell, and Summoner has “Catoblepas”, both of which offer a low but nonzero chance of stoning your Almagest threat. Beastmaster can release a Mover for a single attempt of “Delta Attack”. The Magic Lamp can also summon Catoblepas once, giving any non-Berserker job another free shot. Also, any rod-using job can equip Wonder Wand, which can be set up to attempt a single casting of “Break” on a single target. If you’re really desperate, you can choose to outfit your party with Reflect Rings, leading to a potentially hilarious outcome where NED’s own “Delta Attack” is reflected and kills the Gut for you. But the best job for this mission is Mystic Knight – attacking NED’s Gut with “Break” Spellblade petrifies it a satisfying 100% of the time.
Note that NED’s graphic does not change when one of its sections dies. If you pay attention to the audio, you will hear a short death rattle when it happens. Also, the flashing background may hiccup in an obvious way, or the sprite-shaking heralding another Almagest may suddenly cease. Otherwise, the only way to know that a portion of NED is dead is to attempt to target it.
Once you have the Gut either destroyed or otherwise neutralized, your next most immediate threat is the Arch, which does a highly disruptive action called Grand Cross. As with Almagest, this move is foreshadowed, this time with the message “The laws of the universe mean nothing” (or a similar translation). Grand Cross will inflict random status ailments on your party, including zombie, aging, berserk, HP-leak, and near-death. Note that, with statuses like aging, some parties may have no option for healing the affected member outside of killing them and reviving them. No matter how well you’ve done up to this point, a terrible roll on Grand Cross can force a dispirited reset.
If you have Dancer (or Freelancer), you lucked out here, as Ribbons will protect you from most of Grand Cross’ deleterious effects. And there are other pieces of equipment that protect against certain statuses, like Aegis Shield and the Genji gear. Also, your response time can be improved by having the item menu open while the Grand Cross animation is completing, giving you the quickest chance to use a healing item on an ally once you identify their ailment (assuming of course the active character doesn’t become berserked or zombified).
Of course, if you’re really lucky, you got Chemist or Bard, the two most broken jobs in the game. Bard’s song “Hero’s Rime” increases your characters’ levels the longer its cast, and Chemist can !Mix a Dragon’s Fang and a Potion to increase one character’s level by 20 each time. These effects are cumulative, which means you can elevate your levels so high that Grand Cross doesn’t even land:
Aside from those options, there is unfortunately no easy quick kill gimmick for the Arch, so your best bet is to focus single-target attacks there. Arch happens to be “dragon” type, and Bard’s Apollo Harp and Dragoon’s Dragon Lance both deal heavy damage against Dragons. (And of course, as we discussed with Almagest, both those jobs have abilities that can evade Grand Cross altogether, if they’re timed correctly.) Once you have Almagest figured out, this will be the hardest test of your NED battle.
That leaves the other two: the Front, which does physical attacks, and the Rear, which casts various magic spells. Hilariously, the Front can be blinded by things like Ranger’s Dark Bow, and in this game blind status actually works correctly, more-or-less neutralizing Front as a threat. Also, the Rear is vulnerable to various instant-death abilities. The most class-agnostic of these is an item called the Magic Lamp, which you can find by taking a chocobo to the back end of the Istory waterfall on the overworld. When used in battle, the Lamp casts summon spells in a pre-determined order. When it casts Odin as its third spell, the Lamp always does Odin’s “Zantetsuken” instant death maneuver, whereas a Summoner casting Odin against NED will instead get his alternative “Gungnir” damage ability.
However, NED does pose one more significant danger, which I call “rampage mode”: If only one portion of Neo Exdeath is remaining, it will begin using all its high-powered attacks, twice per turn. This includes Meteor, Vacuum Wave, and Almagest (yes, even if the Almagest section is not the one remaining). NED’s rampage mode will wreck your face, and should be avoided at all cost, with any party.
What this means is, unless your combination of jobs allows you to safely spam frequent high-damage attacks on all targets, you will want to whittle NED down to two targets, and then kill them both promptly in succession. The easiest way to do this is to save the Magic Lamp trick for last – In other words, once you eliminate Almagest and Grand Cross, beat up on the Front until you hear it die, then immediately fire off an Odin-primed Magic Lamp for the win. Some however, like the top players featured in “The Run”, like to play a more dangerous game. It is possible to use the Magic Lamp trick first, eliminating the Rear and its magic arsenal right away. But the only way to safely destroy NED after that is to count the remaining sections’ HP, so that you can eliminate the last two in close succession. Since each section has approximately the same HP, this can be done by counting damage and making sure the final two sections are losing HP at a somewhat even rate, but you can also refer to their actual HP totals if you prefer to be more exact.
The last thing to consider is what equipment you want to bring into your NED fight. The Aegis Shield’s petrification-prevention is very useful, especially against Exdeath’s “tree form”. More importantly, you have a big decision in what accessories to wear. I highly recommend Hermes Sandals, available for 50,000 gil each at Phantom Village. The Sandals grant permanent haste status, allowing for fast damage and for quick recovery from Almagest and Grand Cross. Another option is Reflect Rings, especially if you’re attempting any aforementioned reflect strats. Note that while Blue Mage’s “White Wind” will heal you through reflect, her “Mighty Guard” spell will bounce off you, making Reflect Rings a poor combination with blue magic.
MY FAVORITE FOUR JOB FIESTA TRICKS
And now we arrive at my big list of the coolest Four Job Fiesta tricks, at least in my personal opinion. I’ve chosen not to include general-purpose tricks any job class can access, such as using Phoenix Down to kill Tyrannosaur or Magic Lamp to kill the three piggies. What follows are techniques you may or may not be able to use, depending on what Fiesta party you randomly roll. For Fiesta veterans, many of these tricks will be old hat, but for newcomers, some of them will blow your mind. To be clear, most of these I gleaned from other players and various guides over the years – and I will link a few of those guides at the end. This list is also definitely not comprehensive – After years of playing Fiesta, I still learn new tricks every season. Nor is it an attempt to represent and rank all the most powerful abilities. These are just my favorite strats, which I hope will open you up to some of the possibilities this game has to offer.
Honorable mention: The Kiss of Blessing – Once you start to explore Chemist’s !Mix ability, you realize it breaks the game in half. One thing you can do is mix a Maiden’s Kiss with a Holy Water, targeting an enemy, and inflicting berserk status. This cannot be prevented, and even bypasses boss immunity lmaooo! This can be very handy with pre-empting battle scripts you don’t much care for. The reason I labeled this one as “Honorable mention” is because its most famous implementation is actually banned under “Four Job Fiesta” rules. When used against final Exdeath’s “tree form”, it makes him unable to execute his dying script, which transitions into the fight against Neo Exdeath. Exdeath will instead just die like any other encounter when his HP runs out. However, under official Fiesta rules, you must complete the fight against NED specifically. That said, RK does occasionally host one-off FF5 events outside of the normal Fiesta schedule, and those have allowed glitches the main Fiesta event does not.
#25: In Rod, we trust! Rods, rods, rods. You will become very acquainted with elemental Rods in Four Job Fiesta. While they are super-powerful and belong on this list, I ranked them low because they aren’t very creative. Byblos? Crack two Fire Rods. Adamantoise? Crack two Ice Rods. Soul Cannon? Okay, that thing’s big, so use like six. It’s like taking candy from a baby. They’re available for purchase for 750 gil each in Karnak, and will be extremely useful throughout the game, provided you have one of the few classes who can use them. (That would be Black Mage, Blue Mage, Red Mage, Time Mage, Summoner, and Freelancer.) However, the rods also boost your elemental damage output when equipped, so if you have a Red or Black Mage, you may want to keep those rods intact and just cast the relevant spells instead.
#24: Blatant bribery – Samurai’s !Zeninage (coin toss) is another powerful attack that I’ve chosen to rank low, only because it’s a default ability that takes very little creativity to use. Want bad guys to go away? Just throw money at them! Granted, it’s not free, and you will deplete your funds quickly if you use it willy-nilly. While it’s not especially brain-taxing on its own, it does come in clutch in a few key spots. The Purobolos enemies at the end of World 1 are annoying, because each one can revive all of their fallen comrades. !Zeninage avoids this by killing all six at once. The coin toss ability also benefits from boosted levels, which can be granted by Chemist’s !Mix command (mixing a Dragon Fang and Potion) or, later in the game, by Bard’s song “Hero’s Rime”.
#23: “If you want to sing out, sing out” – Oh, did I mention Bard? Yeah, it turns out the stat-boosting songs in FF5 are preposterously broken. You never notice it when playing vanilla, because you’re not encouraged to protect a character as they sit and chant something with no immediately observable effect on the game. But if you don’t believe me, try sitting and protecting a Bard as they continue singing Swift Song for a few minutes. Eventually, your characters will get so fast, they’ll take all the turns before the enemies can even move. You get similar gains from Sinewy Etude (raises your characters’ strength), Mana’s Paean (raises their magic power), and Hero’s Rime (raises their levels). If you have Bard and you’re struggling against a late-game boss, you aren’t anymore.
#22: Magic-boosted Ninja scrolls – No, that’s not the title of the newest Power Rangers spin-off. Ninjas like throwing pointy things at bad guys, which is a strong physical attack. But for variety, the game also offers magic scrolls, which do elemental magic attacks when used. These are strong enough on their own, but giving your Ninja a secondary ability from a mage class boosts their magic stat considerably. As a result, the damage from these scrolls goes through the roof. Try it, you’ll see.
#21: Bearaga – Beastmaster’s !Catch ability is another often-overlooked tool in your FF5 arsenal. Someone assembled a helpful list of !Release options for each boss fight, but the most well known option is Sand Bear, found in the shifting desert in World 1. It just does a physical attack, but it’s very strong for the early portion of the game. In addition to clearing out many World 1 bosses, it can be useful to bring one more “Bearaga” in your pocket for the World 2 fight against Gilgamesh on the Big Bridge.
#20: “So you have chosen death” – With some bosses, it’s fun to deal unreasonable amounts of damage. But others, if they lack “heavy” status, you can literally just kill them outright! We already discussed how Mystic Knight can one-shot a portion of the final boss. Byblos, Manticore, Dragon Pod, and Twintania are also just begging to be offed this easily, too. Over the course of the game, you gain so many instant-death abilities and weapons, including but not limited to Samurai’s !Iainuki, Black Mage’s “Death” spell, Time Mage’s “Banish” spell, the widely-equippable Assassin’s Dagger, Ranger’s Killer Bow, or Berserker’s Death Sickle. (If you are playing Berserker, you absolutely should acquire a Death Sickle before leaving World 1. They can be found as a drop from Harvester enemies encountered on the southern islands.) And even if a full instant-death maneuver isn’t available, some other options against non-“heavy” enemies are just as good. Your Blue Mage can learn the spell “Death Claw” relatively early in the game, during the Karnak escape. It reduces a non-“heavy” enemy to single digits and paralyzes them to boot!
#19: Chicken Knife shenanigans – The answer to “Should I get the Brave Blade or the Chicken Knife?” is always “Chicken Knife” – unless you’re weird like me, and like an occasional added challenge. Chicken Knife does high damage, boosted by how many times you’ve fled encounters throughout the game, although it does have this sometimes-drawback of causing you to flee when you attempt to attack. But that’s where your job abilities come in! Thief’s !Mug ability ignores this proc, allowing you to consistently take advantage of that high attack power. Ninja’s dual-wield ability is also useful; some weapons like Twin Lance will cause your second weapon to never proc, making it a perfect pair with Chicken Knife. Of course, the highest damage comes from Dancer’s Sword Dance, but even with a Rainbow Dress increasing those odds, that’s a little less consistent.
#18: Air Syldra – There are several elemental weapons which, while they provide little in the way of melee attack power, boost your character’s spells of that element. Among these are the elemental rods, the Sage’s Staff which boosts holy magic, and the late-game Magus Rod, which enhances spells of all elements except water and holy. As a result of this mechanic, the most powerful Summoner spell in the game surprisingly isn’t Bahamut or Leviathan – It’s Syldra! Yes, despite the name and graphics implying thunder and lightning, Syldra is actually an air-elemental attack. If you call upon Faris’ old friend with a character bearing an Air Knife or Magus Rod, she will wreck bad guys unlike any other spell in your arsenal.
#17: I will protect you! – The Knight job inherently has a party-protection ability, as seen in other FF games. If another party member’s HP is low, and the Knight’s is not, the Knight will step in to take physical attacks. This combos hilariously with the Knight’s !Guard ability, which is like a super-parry that negates physical damage. Unfortunately for some bosses, physical damage is all they do! Garula’s a perfect opportunity to use this technique. Have your one healthy Knight, in the back row, do nothing but !Guard, while the other three go to town. (It helps to throw an Elven Mantle on as well, just in case Garula attacks while your !Guard is down.)
#16: Mr. Self-Destruct – This one’s funny. On the path to final Exdeath, there’s an optional boss named Azulmagia guarding a save point. He’s supposed to be a master at blue magic. He’s so good at it, he can actually learn any Blue Mage spells you use on him… including Self-Destruct. Yes, you can sacrifice one character, and ol’ A.Z. will happily follow suit himself.
#15: Only a blockhead – Some enemies, including Titan and Catastrophe, do powerful Earth Shaker attacks. But lucky for you, they will never hit characters with float status. Sadly, your Time Mage won’t learn the Float spell until after the Titan fight, but you can entice Gaelicat enemies on North Mountain to cast Float on you, using White or Red Mage’s Confuse spell, or Bard’s Alluring Air, or Dancer’s Tempting Tango dance. Beastmasters can also draw Float out of them through !Control or !Catch. And of course, Chemist can !Mix an Antidote and Maiden’s Kiss for the same effect. Your float status will carry over from a previous fight, as long as you remember not to do a full party heal in-between. The Catastrophe fight is a little more involved, because he uses a maneuver to dispel float status, but this can be prevented by giving your floater a Reflect Ring. Even better, Catastrophe will hilariously keep trying to dispel your levitation, all in vain.
#14: GOBLIN… PUNCH!!! – Blue Mage is hardly in need of extra early game heroics, but this is a fun one to try. The Blue magic spell Goblin Punch can be learned from Goblin encounters around the first town, Tule. It basically does a normal hit, unless you have the same level as the target, in which case it does eight times normal damage. They knowingly kept early boss encounters at low levels, with Karlaboss being level 5, Garula being level 3, and both forms of Siren being a paltry level 2. But if you don’t mind dedicating a single character to their low-level craft, it can be a fun way to dispose of some early baddies.
#13: Where did you get all those Elixirs? – During the timed Karnak escape, there are lots of treasure chests with Gigas enemies. The thing is, you can steal sweet Elixirs from each Gigas! These can be especially handy to stockpile, if you don’t have healing magic. At this point in the game, only Thieves can steal, and their chance of success is boosted by the Thief’s Gloves you acquired in the Fire-Powered Ship. But Thieves also have another highly useful ability. If you !Flee a treasure encounter after stealing an Elixir, the treasure chest will remain closed, and you can open it again to reinitiate the same Gigas encounter. !Steal and !Flee, !Steal and !Flee. You can rack up as many Elixirs as the clock allows. But definitely make sure you leave enough time on that clock to escape when you’re done.
#12: Quick Leak – There are many dramatic ways to kill Omega. And then there’s “Quick Leak”. First, have your Time Mage cast Quick, granting them two new turns in succession. Then, for your first turn, crack a Poison Rod to cast Bio. Note that since Omega has innate reflect, you have to target one of your own characters to reflect it onto him. In addition to doing some light damage, this will inflict “sap” status on the final target, slowly draining their HP. After that… go outside and enjoy a nice lunch. I mean it. Normally Omega’s “heavy” status means things like HP sap go away after like a millisecond, but as long as your Time Mage sits there in between her two bonus Quick turns, that millisecond never expires, even though the HP sap effect continues. Depending on the version, this can take around two hours to kill Omega, as demonstrated here by Fiesta veteran Active_ate. When you return from your lunch, you’ll see your characters dancing a jig over their Omega victory.
#11: How to piss off an elder dragon – This one’s an oldie-but-goodie. Normally, super-boss Shinryu slaughters you with insanely high-powered melee attacks and magic. However, he happens to be susceptible to berserk status, which when inflicted relegates his offense to a lot of blind punching. White Mage can cast Berserk directly, while Chemist can stir up a Holy Water and a Turtle Shell to the same effect. Beastmaster can also help, by releasing a Mammon enemy found in the Rift castle area; note that this option will cast Berserk on an ally, meaning you may have to luck out and have it target an ally with a Reflect Ring (or have a Summoner cast Carbuncle). Wonder Wand can also be primed to cast Berserk, and failing that, a Power Staff (a rare enemy drop from World 2) will do the trick as well. Don’t forget that in order to land berserk before Shinryu wipes you out in a tidal wave, you need at least one Hermes Sandals on your designated berserkifier. And then of course, even if you succeed, you still need to survive Shinryu’s Tyson-style haymakers. The Knight’s Guard maneuver from earlier will do the trick – and if you do have Knight, you should have access to the parrying blade Defender as well. If you have White Mage or Summoner, a couple hasty mages can keep up casting Blink or Golem. It helps to equip Elven Mantles and Main Gauches (“Mains Gauche”?) to evade attacks. Samurai’s “Shirahadori” ability also comes up big in dodging melee attacks. On some versions of FF5, you can refresh the “blink” status provided by Mirage Vest by adjusting your character’s weapon or shield in the item menu. Lastly, while I rhetorically referred to Shinryu “blind punching”, you can also literally blind him to increase your survivability. Ranger can do this with Dark Bow, and Chemist can mix an Eyedrop with a Dragon Fang. Lastly, when your Beastmaster caught a Mammon, you can also !Catch a Galajelly enemy from the same fight, which will perform the blinding Rainbow Wind when released.
#10: It’s getting hot in here – As I’ve been suggesting, Chemist’s !Mix ability is laughably broken. Here’s another example. You know those unnamed Crystal bosses you encounter at the end of World 2? They each represent a different element, and they each have their own “rampage mode”, where they spam high damage spells as their HP gets low. If you were able to buy a Flame Ring in World 1, you can drop the Fire Crystal (that would be the top one) below that HP threshold, then let its Firaga attacks heal you while you deal with the other three – and hopefully, the timing works out. But Chemist has an ever better way. By mixing an Ether and an Eyedrop, you can make a single ally absorb fire damage permanently (until the end of the fight). So all four of your characters can get in on the fire-healing action! Even better, you can mix a Turtle Shell and an Eyedrop for a “Hasty-ade” to grant haste status. You can always do this on each of your characters, but you might as well drop a bonus one on ol’ Fire Crystal to make sure it’s always healing you with Firaga faster than the other three can damage you.
#9: White Wind early – While the game is certainly beatable without healing magic, such magic is at a premium. And Blue Mage gets possibly the best healing spell… if you can acquire it. The problem here is, your Blue Mage only learns spells that are used on her, which is fine for all those attack spells you want to know, but which means enemies must be manipulated into using spells that benefit your allies. The first opportunity to learn White Wind using only your Blue Mage is in Exdeath’s Castle all the way at the end of World 2, where you can use Dancing Dagger to befuddle a Hellraiser enemy. However, some other jobs’ abilities can help you learn the incredibly useful White Wind as early as World 1, from Enchanted Fan encounters in the Ronka Ruins. Your White or Red Mage can help by casting the spell Confuse – as if your White Mage party needed more healing options. Bard can also confuse Enchanted Fan by singing Alluring Air, which you can learn at Bartz’ hometown of Lix. (Apparently, those options won’t help you do this on the PC version of Pixel Remaster.) Lastly, a Beastmaster can force Enchanted Fan to cast White Wind by using !Control; the spell is definitely worth the short ABP grind for that.
#8: Don’t skip rod day – Most of these tricks are about gaining sweet advantages, but this one is about avoiding a terrible mistake. On Fiesta’s chaos variations, you can be assigned later jobs in early slots, sometimes resulting in extended Freelancer sessions, or single-job parties deep into World 1. The most infamous such situation is when you have to play four Berserkers versus Sandworm; sadly, that matchup will require a lengthy grind until about level 40 (or a trip to the “Job Fair”). Quad-Bard will also have a tough time against Archeoaevis, however the tedious grind can be prevented if you act early enough. North of Crescent Island is a small isle, where the only encounters consist of 5x Black Flame. These parties can be killed by cracking a single Thunder Rod, and when defeated, they will reward you with more gil than the Rod cost. This is actually a great grinding spot for any party with an area-of-effect magic attack, including those Ninja scrolls. Most importantly, if Quad-Bard is in your future, you can only take advantage of this easy grind spot before visiting Crescent Island, at which point by rule your former Freelancers will be locked into being non-Rod wielding songsters. Your future Bards should be okay at about level 34.
#7: The final word – Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind! There aren’t many special tricks you can do with Monk, but there is a cool way to use her counter-attack ability. When some enemies reach 0 HP, they counter-attack with a script – key word, counter-attack. If you empty their life total with a counter of your own, they do not counter the counter. In some cases, this will merely skip dying dialogue, as with Byblos. But this has major uses against Archeoaevis, who is actually coded as five enemies presented in sequence. If you can deal just under 1,600 HP to any of its first four forms, then wait for the Monk to counter-attack for the rest, the fight will just end immediately! Which is good news, cuz you have places to be.
#6: Take ’em to another level Here’s where we start getting into the really wacky stuff. Let’s say you’re fighting some hideously monstrous super-boss, and you have Chemist and Blue Mage. Honestly, you’re already set with those two alone, except that you don’t have a great way to deal lots of damage. Maybe you can cast lots of 1000 Needles to whittle away their HP a grand at a time? The blue spell “Level 3 Flare” is strong and non-elemental, but your target’s level isn’t a multiple of three… unless… (Seymour Skinner voice)… you use Chemist’s !Mix to change that! Mixing a Holy Water and an Antidote will raise anyone’s level by 10, and mixing a Dragon Fang with either a Potion or a Hi-Potion will raise it by 20. While it’s intended to be used on your allies, sometimes it’s fun to get the bad guys in on the action too. And if you don’t have the Internet handy to look up your particular foe’s starting level, Blue Mage’s !Scan ability can identify it for you. Note that boosting the enemy’s level will also increase their damage output a little, but I know you’re already loaded up with Mighty Guard.
#5: You’re my Wonder Wand – Some jobs, like Red Mage and Ranger, have very useful abilities locked behind massive ABP paywalls, which means sometimes, you’re gonna want to grind for those points. There are tedious ways to do this; the Objet d’Art enemies found in the Bal Castle basement give generous ABP, they’re killed in one shot by the common item Gold Needle, and they leave you more gil than you spent on said Gold Needle. But a much quicker way to grind ABP involves the limited Magic Pot fights found in Phoenix Tower. All you have to do is feed each Magic Pot a varying number of Elixirs, and once they decide they’re satisfied, they leave you with 100 ABP. But since they only have a 1/3 chance of deciding to flee, they may exhaust you of many of your valuable Elixirs in the process. (And that’s even if you have Mime’s !Mimic ability to squeeze out a few extra Elixir uses for free.) The game also locks out all magic during these encounters, to prevent any shenanigans. However… there’s this funny weapon called Wonder Wand, which you find in Fork Tower. Its primary purpose is to cycle through all white and black spells, and that’s useful in its own right if you need a single casting of Confuse or Break or whatever. But when you crack it open the way you do with elemental rods, it casts the time spell Return, resetting the battle, and your inventory. Ironically, this also resets the fact that you broke the Wand itself, allowing you to repeat this process as many times as you want. So any time Magic Pot decides to be stingy, break that glass and try again! This way, with minimal backtracking or resetting, you can clear all five Magic Pots at a cost of only five Elixirs total.
#4: This machine kills dragons – I’m particularly fond of this maneuver because, while I know others discovered it before me, I figured it out all on my own. To be fair, when you have Chemist and Bard together, you’ve basically already won. But it can still be hard to muster serious offense, especially against the big beasts like Omega. Your best weapon is Apollo’s Harp, which does 8x damage against dragons. If only there were a way to turn enemies into dragons… And this is where Chemist steps in and says “I have a mix for that, too!” If you combine a Maiden’s Kiss and a Dragon Fang, you can give a single target “heavy” and “dragon” types. These don’t affect any game graphics; the mix’s intended use is to grant your allies the same “heavy” status that makes bosses invulnerable to things like instant death. But you can also use it on the bad guys, and WOW does Apollo Harp love doing eight times normal damage against them. The best part is, literally every enemy in the game is vulnerable to this combination.
#3: Miniature assassins – As we discussed earlier, some bosses lack “heavy” status, and are susceptible to instant death. This includes the unnamed Crystal bosses in World 2, with your best insta-kill options at that time being Ranger’s Killer Bow and Berserker’s Death Sickle. However, these baddies pose a tough conundrum, in that dealing too much damage causes them to go into their own “rampage mode” where they spam high-damage magic against you. In other words, you can’t just keep hitting them over and over, hoping to get an instant death proc, without risking them getting to low enough HP that they start murderating you. The funniest way around this is to encounter those Mini Magician enemies in the burnt down forest outside, and wait for them to cast Mini on some of your characters. (Or if you have a White Mage, just have her cast Mini directly.) Give the cool death toys to the affected characters, and drop them in the back row for their own protection. They should only deal 1 damage a pop now, but the instant death proc can trigger just the same. Also, if you happen to have a Knight, they can be useful in keeping your cute miniature killers alive. Who wouldn’t want an adorable team of tiny assassins?
#2: Hide behind the zombie – As if Bard’s !Sing ability wasn’t strong enough, that job also gives you access to the useful !Hide command. This can be used to evade strong attacks from bosses like Titan or Soul Cannon. The ability can also be used to wait out an enemy’s MP, if you’re willing to leave your console running long enough. But once you get deeper into the game, there’s an even more nefarious use. One year, while piloting an especially weak party, I struggled mightily against Exdeath, the big bad boss at the end of World 2. I decided to try getting two of my allies purposely zombified, because that’s the kind of thing you think about when playing Fiesta. It turns out, hiding my Bard and leaving my zombies to their own devices was all I needed to do! One had a Reflect Ring, which helped bounce Exdeath’s own attack magic back at him. And the zombies can’t be killed, because they’re already dead. I can’t speak to whether this technique defeats every boss fight, but it works on many of them. Just be careful that your zombie friend doesn’t kill you when you !Reveal.
#1: Death by math – While Bard is arguably the second-most broken job in the game, Blue Mage won’t give up that title without a fight. As we discussed earlier, Blue Mage has spells that affect enemies of a certain level. But even better, Blue Mage can also directly manipulate those enemies’ levels. The most shocking example once again comes against World 2 Exdeath. Normally, this difficult fight is a major gatekeeper, but Blue Mage can insta-kill him with just two moves. First, since Exdeath starts at level 66, the spell “Level 2 Old” will give him aging status. As you may recall, this causes Exdeath’s level to slowly tick down, all the way to 1. Even better, if you can cast “Level 5 Death” at a moment when Exdeath’s level happens to be a multiple of 5, you don’t have to bother with the rest of the fight at all. (While it’s possible to time the Death spell by counting the ticks in the game’s active-time progression, it’s also doable by having multiple characters blindly attempt the spell at different intervals.) Note that Exdeath is normally immune to both aging and instant death, but for some reason, these particular spells bypass that immunity completely #JustFinalFantasyThings. As if that weren’t enough, Blue Mage also has “Dark Spark”, which halves an enemy’s level, rounded down. A single Dark Spark makes Atomos and the boat encounter of Gilgamesh vulnerable to Level 5 Death, while some other bosses may need an additional Dark Spark or two. In Four Job Fiesta, the calculator is mightier than the sword!
RESOURCES
DO YOU SEE NOW!? Do you see how much fun you could be having? I’m telling you, Four Job Fiesta is a blast. If you love the classic JRPG genre, you need to stop missing out on this!
There are countless resources online available online, both to help you get started, and to assist you if you run into trouble. The one I’ve found most useful is “Enkibot”. Literally just enter your four jobs, and it will provide you a customized list of techniques available to your party, plus hints for how to manage any particular boss fight:
https://enkibot-prime.herokuapp.com
There’s also the FJF Handbook:
And this handy archived list of more specific guides:
The Fandom wiki site is an outstanding resource on general game information, as long as you don’t mind your browser getting overwhelmed by ads (or you’re using an ad-blocker):
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com
There’s also a Fiesta-specific wiki, although as of this writing it is more of a work-in-progress:
https://wiki.fourjobfiesta.com
At this point, I literally do not know how much of my FF5 knowledge I originally learned from these sources, but suffice to say, it was a lot.
Official Fiesta announcements tend to come by way of boisterous declarations from our mayonnaise-loving Gilgabot, who can be found here:
https://twitter.com/FF5ForFutures
https://bsky.app/profile/gilgabot.bsky.social
Any technical issues however should be addressed to RK directly:
https://twitter.com/revenantkioku
Aaaaand, of course there’s a Discord, where you will also find RK:
Lastly, drop in on “The Run”, which (if you’re reading this post when it’s new) is happening this upcoming weekend. That can be found on the RPG Limit Break Twitch channel:
https://www.twitch.tv/rpglimitbreak
Please share your favorite Four Job Fiesta tricks in the comments below. Thanks for reading as always, and Happy Fiesta!
In the original version of this post, I referred to Neo Exdeath as “NXD”, which is the abbreviation I’ve always used. But a friendly reader pointed out that most players refer to him as “NED”, which I just blanked on lol. My penance for forgetting that is I missed out on the easiest Ned Flanders reference ever. Also, per another suggestion, I added links to both the Fandom wiki and the work-in-progress Fiesta wiki.