As I've mentioned before, Final Fantasy V is probably the last Final Fantasy game that I well and truly geeked out over, even going so far as to put together a FAQ. Having memorized all the ins and outs of the game, I was planning ahead for one crucial moment in the Game Boy Advance version.
About halfway through the adventure, you come across Bal Castle. It's a friendly place, but some tough monsters lurk in its dungeon. With a little advance knowledge (or thorough preparation), you can use these monsters to raise your levels really high. And with the GBA version's added speed and portability, you can really game the system. Check out what I accomplished in just five hours...
For the uninitiated, in Final Fantasy V you build up not only your standard experience levels but also job levels, that give you new abilities tied to character classes. Once you master these classes, if you switch back to the standard Freelancer class, every stat boost from those mastered classes stays with you. What ends up happening is that at the end of the game, you have a bunch of ultra-powered characters.
In general, the job-leveling process is a slow one, because you need ABP (ability points), which are doled out in tiny amounts as you defeat enemies. Killing boss monsters will sometimes give you as many as 9 ABP -- and to master a class, you need literally thousands of them. So it's slow going. There are a few ways to game the system, though. At the end of the game -- literally at the final save point two steps away from the final boss -- enemies called Movers give you 199 ABP. But at that point, you're usually ready to go and beat the final boss having only mastered a couple classes.
But well in advance of that are the monsters in the basement of Bal Castle. They're living stone knight statues; called RockStatue in the PlayStation version and Objet D'Art in the new, snazzier GBA translation. They're the only enemy that shows up in the little basement room. In groups of two they give you 4 ABP, in groups of five they give you a whopping 8.
There's a catch, of course. They're really hard to defeat. They're vulnerable to lightning, but using Thundera (the most powerful lightning spell in your arsenal at this point) only does about 750 damage -- and they've got 3300 hit points each. Meanwhile, while you're poking away at them, they hit you for huge damage, and sometimes they just cast Break on you, which turns you to stone.
You can use Golden Needle items, which usually cure Break, to instantly kill them. But that's time-consuming, not to mention expensive. The way to really cheat your ass off is to use the highly optional spell Level 5 Death, which eliminates all enemies whose level is a multiple of 5 (the Objets D'Art are level 45).
If you managed to get this spell in the Ancient Library earlier in the game (it's not easy unless you know exactly what you're looking for), you're golden -- you can cast it at the beginning of the battle and kill the whole group without being scratched. Spend an hour in there blowing through the battles (restoring your health in the Inn just outside the basement) and you can get your job levels up quickly.
That's what I'd usually do the last two times I played the game. But in the GBA version, the battles are much faster. And you can run around faster, which cuts down on downtime in between. And it's portable, which means you can just zone out and level up while you're doing other things -- watching the Friar's Club roast of William Shatner or The Da Vinci Code, just to name two entirely hypothetical examples.
(For my money, the joke of the night was "Speaking of Shatner, Betty White just shat'n'er pants.")
So -- and also being slightly sick with a cold and wanting just to veg out -- I ended up spending a lot of time in the Bal Castle basement. Like, five hours. By the end of it, this is what my list of mastered jobs looked like:
Bartz: Knight, Monk, Ninja, Samurai, Ranger, Mystic Knight
Lenna: Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, Summoner, Blue Mage, Red Mage
Galuf: Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, Time Mage, Blue Mage, Red Mage
Faris: Monk, Thief, Red Mage, Beastmaster, Chemist, Geomancer, Bard, Dancer
Note the different strategies in play here. Everyone's mastered Monk, because of the HP stat boosts (you get +10%, +20%, and +30% HP as you raise its level). That's also why both my magic-using characters have mastered White and Black. Mastering Red Mage gets you the command "Dualcast", which lets you cast two spells at once of the ones you know from other classes.
You might wonder why Faris mastered Red Mage; I don't really know. Basically he'd already finished up mastering all the hippy-dippy jobs that are useless except in certain situations (example: the Geomancer sucks except when he can detect traps in dungeons, and the Bard can kill the shit out of undead enemies with his "Requiem" song), and I needed to give him something else.
Similarly, Bartz is the powerhouse offensive fighter -- the Samurai's and Ninja's abilities let him deflect, catch, and otherwise totally avoid enemy attacks, plus help get the jump on enemies before battle even starts. And there's something else great there, too. Mastering Ninja, Hunter, and Mystic Knight is totally awesome, because it lets you do this:
- The Ninja can dual-wield weapons -- the Freelancer can equip anything, but they can't do that unassisted
- The Mystic Knight can enchant weapons with magic
- The Hunter can attack with his weapons four times in one turn
So basically, you master all these classes, then you can attack with magic eight times (four attacks times two weapons) in one turn. It's pretty sick. And I can't wait to try it out, because I've put everybody back into Freelancer mode, where they'll likely stay until the game ends. If anything crazy happens I'll write more; for now just assume that I'm ripping through the rest of the game with authority.
