2021 FFV Four Job Fiesta Runs

Run #1

• 6/13 — first job is Mystic Knight, LET'S GO. Good melee trivialized the start of the game up through Magisa and Forza, which was hilarious because Forza can just be sleep-locked by Mystic Knights.
• 6/14 — oh god Garula just destroyed me. the spellswords did nothing!
• 6/14 — …but a couple levels and bothering to buy iron armor and I just muscled through it
• 6/14 — and there's the preordained berserker
• 6/16 — killed Liquid Flame, but I totally forgot to buy Ice2 so it took longer than it should have and actually cost me potions and phoenix downs!
• 6/16 — Dancer! why do I feel like I always get Dancer!?
• 6/16 — oh, it's because 3 out of my last 4 completed runs have had Dancer
• 6/16 — 3 out of last 5, I guess, if you count ESUNAFORCORONA
• 6/18 — Managed to proc two fire 2 sword dances in a row against Byblos, who crumpled immediately
• 6/20 — took some resets and burning elixirs and stuff to get through both Sol Cannon and Archaeoavis, but I have my earth job and it's… White Mage! Definitely into this party, though I haven't yet figured out if it's a triple crown candidate
• 7/3 — it took so long to proc Death from Doom Axe on the Seal Guardians that I thought my patches made them Heavy, and I started trying alternative strats until it finally procced and then I had to go back to plan A, tanking/healing while waiting for Death
• 7/4 – 7/6 — Oh god Exdeath is wrecking me. I should have maybe gotten more hi-potions and reflect rings, or I don't know what. I'm grinding now, hoping to just at least get a bit more survivability and DPS, and then maybe I can just tank him with tons of heals.
• 7/10 — It took two people basically dedicated to !White, lots of stealing MP, some lucky hits, a lot of Wall, and in the end, of all things, my White Mage proccing a Sword Dance and doing 1,700 damage, but I topped Exdeath!
• 8/5 — Back from Mexico, let's finish up this run
• 8/5 — Mute Swording Omniscient is hilarious
• 8/9 — I FINALLY TOOK DOWN OMEGA, see below for writeup
• 8/30 — Back at at, trying to finish before the deadline tomorrow, Shinryu has been toppled. Nothing special, Berserk + Blink + !Dance.
• 8/30 — Aaaaaaaaaaaand done. Got a bit dicey at the end, just because the Meteo-casting piece was the hardest to take down, but we got it first time.

Omega

This was the most arduous Omega victory I've gotten to date. I've done Bard lockdown a couple times, Chemist mixes at least twice, and maybe another victory or two I'm not remembering at the moment, but this one, this was the real madness.

It took a lot of setup, with help from the handbook, of course, and also the FF5FJF Discord. It also, interestingly, was basically a solo fight, for reasons I'll get into below. The setup and battle routine:

Mystic Knight is the only job that could damage it, thanks to Bolt 3/Thundaga Sword. Omega absorbs all other elements, so other swords are out, and Omega is heavy (of course), so no fun tricks, and it can only be slowed/stopped (which I don't have access to). Its physical defense is sky high, making it essentially immune to physical attacks.

Thundaga Sword only works, actually, because it instant kills non-heavy enemies weak to lightning, and does 4x normal damage to heavy enemies weak to lightning. Omega is heavy, so 4x damage it is. Except…

Omega also has an evade through the roof, 95, so the only thing that has a chance of hitting it is a dagger, which halves enemy evasion. So I need a dagger with enough strength to get through Omega's crazy defense, which even with the 4x multiplier, only leaves one dagger: the Chicken Knife.

The Chicken Knife has a 25% chance to make the party (attempt to) flee. Thankfully in this situation, you can't run from Omega, meaning 1 in 4 attacks just do nothing instead. Combined with the evade, I had a roughly 75% chance of an attack being wasted (via pointless flee or just plain old missing), and I needed six hits (at 9999 damage) to kill Omega.

Omega's speed is insane, also, so I needed Running Shoes to get Haste on the Mystic Knight, just so I could have a chance at doing this before getting obliterated. And, all of this just proved that my party could kill Omega, not that it would, because Omega also has Super Bullshit 64 attacks that my party would need to survive.

Bullshit attacks include: Atomic Ray (enough fire damage to kill any party member, to the whole party), Surge Beam (hits each party member for half of their max HP, and inflicts HP leak), Circle (just straight up removes a character from the fight), Maelstrom (takes each party member to <10 HP, which with HP leak kills them in a couple ticks after it hits), Quake (hits the whole party for enough damage to kill anyone not floating), and a couple other attacks that "only" deal some damage and inflict status effects. So…

• Status effects: give the Mystic Knight Equip Ribbon, and wear a ribbon. Solved.
• Fire attacks: give the Mystic Knight a Flame Shield, get healed by the fire attacks. Easy peasy.
• Quake: backtrack, Charm a Gaelic Cat in North Mountain to get it to cast Float on the Mystic Knight. Tedious but it'll happen.
• Circle: Uh oh… Circle?

Circle only procs on a counterhit, because of course Omega has counterhits (yes, two) every time it takes damage. Just don't attack Omega! Wait a minute…

Here's where things get wild. Omega has a Targeting ability that it uses in a particular step in its AI routine, where whoever gets targeted will be the lone target of its upcoming attack and also any counterattacks until that attack! Also, Targeting can be reflected.

You can reflect it onto Omega, making it target itself for one attack and more importantly the counterattacks. This is the only point in the fight where it's safe to attack Omega, because of how bullshit Circle is. (It can't be blocked and removes the character from the fight, so they can't even be revived. They're just gone.)

Great. So the Mystic Knight just needs Reflect, which it can get from a Wall Ring, except I need those dang Running Shoes for Haste, so… give the Mystic Knight the !White skill so it can cast Reflect at the right step in the routine.

Except… I need the Equip Ribbons skill, as above, but thankfully there's a glitch in FFV where the status immunities from the previous fight carry over to the next one, so I can use Equip Ribbons, equip a ribbon, get in a non-Omega fight, get the status immunities loaded, run away, and then switch to the !White skill and still have status immunities for the Omega fight.

So now, to recap, Mystic Knight, with one and only one ability option, forced to use the Chicken Knife if I don't want this to take forever, with a particular shield and relic just to have a chance, and some trickery to have the skills to make this possible. Where's the rest of the party in this?

Dead weight. There's no point in wasting time keeping the party alive, if they can be nuked to oblivion at a moment's notice, and it's better for the Mystic Knight anyway if we can guarantee that it gets targeted for Targeting, so that we can have Reflect up on the right party member to bounce it onto Omega. (In my successful attempt, the other party members got some pointless buffs on the Mystic Knight before getting annihilated.)

So with all of this, there's a plan, still highly dependent on chance, but I have a routine I can run, by looking up Omega's AI script, plotting things out, and praying. Here are my notes:

STEP 0 (obvious): cast Thundaga Sword on the Mystic Knight, then loop:

All of this with cued up menu prompts, because at my speed and Omega's speed, if I dilly-dallied too long while combat ticked, I would usually not be ready to cast something important, either the Reflect, or (more likely), the Cure 3 to survive Maelstrom.

Oh, and if you're wondering how I was Cure 3ing myself immediately after casting Reflect, well, Omega has prema-Reflect itself, so I could just bounce those off of Omega's reflect. Another reason why I needed only the Mystic Knight alive.

After about ten cycles, and roughly 100 previous attempts where I screwed up my routine or was still learning the exact strategy or just had bad luck, I finally brought him down.

Fuck.