Final Fantasy VII with Jobs Part I
Oct. 17th, 2023 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingIn January 2022, RevenantKioku of the Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta ran another spin-off event, which in this case was Final Fantasy VII with jobs. The nature of the run and a breakdown of the jobs available were (and are, as of now - this is because the same event ran again in 2023) all listed at www.fourjobfiesta.com/ff7/ . I happened to see it and start playing on January 16, 2022 - immediately after Final Fantasy with the Voweless Knights - with a set of randomized jobs, as follows:
| Cloud | White Mage |
| Barret | Ranger |
| Tifa | Knight |
| Aeris | Freelancer |
| Red XIII | Mime |
| Cait Sith | Black Mage |
| Cid | Blue Mage |
| Yuffie | Time Mage |
| Vincent | Summoner |
It’s worth a note here that the list of jobs and their materia does seem to have changed over time; it was different between 2022’s version of this challenge and the current (as of this writing) 2023 version. The new version generally offers a few extra options for several jobs, but fewer for Mime. The newer version also removes the Monk job and adds in Red Mage - although neither of these happened to be an option for me, so that doesn't matter very much.
I was playing on my Nintendo Switch. I considered using the Steam version, but it wouldn’t play nice with any of my controllers.
Now… documenting a run of this sort using Final Fantasy VII is a funny thing. In so many of the Final Fantasy games, once the series developed to the point where each game featured a mostly-unique, game-defining development system, one of the first things that happens is people saying, “Well... what if we didn’t?”. Final Fantasy V without jobs, Final Fantasy VI without magicite, Final Fantasy VIII without junctions, Final Fantasy X without the sphere grid… and Final Fantasy VII without materia. Documentation of how these challenges can be done - and variations of them, in many cases - is pretty ubiquitous now, although it wasn’t always the case. Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997 and GameFAQs' first No Materia Guide was published in 2002. Anyway… unless you’re adding a bunch of other constraints, these challenges aren’t particularly novel anymore.
Given that it’s well-known that this game can be beaten without the use of materia, and that the strategies are so well-documented, it’s a bit silly to even consider FF7 with jobs that impose a subset of materia to be a “challenge”, so once again we’ll carefully use the word “variant”. I’ll once again acknowledge that I am doing this for fun and not to prove anything. This also means thoroughly documenting this entire playthrough might be kind of stupid, so I’m going to err on the side of brevity (kinda) and condense things a bit. I originally played in 12 sessions; at least for this first entry, I’m going to discuss the entire Midgar segment of the game, which is the first three play sessions. After all, at the start of the game, with scant few materia, it will probably seem pretty close to vanilla gameplay.
Nothing else interesting was going to happen for quite a while; certainly not until after we had the opportunity to swap materia. Our first team where we had some agency was Cloud the white mage, Barret the ranger, and Tifa the knight. At first and in the near future, Cloud only has access to the Restore materia with an All materia and Barret has nothing. Tifa didn’t have any options either, although she would get Cover reasonably soon. The knight job is one of those cases where there were quite a few differences between the 2022 version of the rules and the 2023 version such that Tifa wouldn’t have access to a Restore materia.
| 2022: | 2023: |
 |  |
Consequently, I didn’t bother purchasing another Restore materia in the Sector 7 slums. I don’t usually buy grenades in this game but I grabbed a few since my offensive options are somewhat lacking.
In the Lower Sector 4 Plate, I decided to put Cloud in the back row because he is a white mage. This may have been a mistake. Even though it’s nice for him to follow the archetype, this game’s battles aren’t dangerous enough to make me want to reduce my offense that much. This decision will be revisited.
In this second play session, while I had the game’s sound recording, I screwed up my audio levels such that the game volume is much, much higher than my own volume. Classic. This is fixed in future recordings in this series.
I am so, so bad at the part with the three switches.
That took like six tries. I’ve probably done worse.
I am so, so bad at the part with the three switches.
That took like six tries. I’ve probably done worse.
Airbuster wasn’t really any harder than a vanilla game. Although we lacked Bolt spells, hitting him in the back is usually the better source of damage anyway. We beat him in under a minute.
The whole segment from meeting Aeristh through meeting Don Corneo isn’t really materia-dependent and thus not worth discussing. The one thing about recruiting Aeris is that she’s considered a “freelancer” in this challenge, and thus is great for holding onto materia for utility purposes or to level them up when a more suitable person isn’t available. I gave her some offensive spells, for example.
Don picked Tifa. Usually, I get him to pick Cloud, but it doesn’t really matter, right? The battle with Aps felt pretty normal, since Aeris is with us casting Bolt spells much as we’d probably normally do. It may have taken a bit longer than usual since I think I still had Cloud in the back row.
I took my time in the train graveyard, which is pretty normal for me. I like to steal the Striking Staff for Aeris from the chariot-drivin’ dudes and I often steal Ethers from the winged dragon guys and Ghost Hands from the ghosts (which can’t be found elsewhere in the game, if I recall correctly). As a freelancer, Aeris was able to equip my recently-found Steal materia and yoink all of these things. Finding the chariot guy took ages. By the time we left both Cloud and Tifa had their second Limit Breaks.
At the Sector 7 Slums tower, Aeris leaves the party leaving us without a thief and an offensive spellcaster. Barret joined us and we fought Reno. I am generally finding the battles feel faster without the ability to cast any offensive spells. Besides taking out the pyramids a couple of times, this was practically a hold-A-to-win battle.
Onward to the golden shiny wire of hope. Does that line stick out to other people as much as it sticks out to me? It seems very memorable.
I did the stairs for the Shinra Building. Usually I do that for the Elixir, and then I wander back down to look at posters and such. As we proceeded up the floors we got a lot of the prizes, like from the coupon and door game and Mayor Domino’s challenge, but most of those items were not going to benefit us at all. At least they had prizes though, unlike the single worst minigame in this dumb building.
After following Hojo on floor 67, we grabbed a Poison materia so that Barret has an option besides attacking. Then it was time to fight Hojo’s creature with Red XIII. I actually renamed Red XIII to Mime Xlll (with three lower-case Ls) for no particular reason. I mean, his name was arbitrary in the first place, right? By targeting the main enemy, the fight was pretty simple.
In the 2022 version of this challenge’s job rules, the mime job was allowed to use Enemy Skill which (eventually) provides a pretty good set of options. It is much more limited in the 2023 version - and who knows how it will compare if there are other versions of this challenge in the future. Anyway, we grabbed the Enemy Skill materia, and I was happy about it even though we weren’t going to be getting any skills for a while yet.
| 2022: | 2023: |
 |  |
I took the opportunity in the brief window between recruiting Red XIII and getting captured to have Aeris steal some Carbon Bangles from those spinning blade robot enemies, and to have her steal a Hardedge for Cloud from some SOLDIER:3rds that we encountered. Although I wanted this to happen it was almost coincidental that it did.
After getting captured and escaping, I saved on the 69th floor, saying something about saving frequently in case I lost and I’d hate to have to repeat some parts. This is interesting because Cloud as a white mage lost to Rufus and Dark Nation. That has never happened to me before.
With that, Aeris, Barret and Red XIII had to fight the Hundred Gunner and Heli Gunner a second time. The worst part of losing was having to re-do a few materia adjustments I had done without saving afterward. The Hundred Gunner/Heli Gunner fight wasn’t very fun; Aeris had access to Bolt and Barret was free to shoot, but Red XIII didn’t have a whole lot of options here. It seems that I mostly forgot about the grenades I bought and earned earlier. I also mis-targetted items a few times in this battle which is at least part of the reason I won with Aeris at 0 HP.
Back to Rufus. We used the first Cross-slash to take out Dark Nation in a single attack, which probably made things quite a bit simpler, then used Cloud’s white mage-y nature to heal up since Rufus attacks pretty quickly. I was a bit more attentive, I guess, and won.
Now it was time to escape Midgar. While this is absolutely a favourite part for me, nothing is different than casual play until we encounter Motor Ball. My team was Cloud, Barret and Aeris, which makes sense since Red XIII has no usable materia and Tifa only has Cover. Using Aeris is borderline cheap here, since the only real offensive asset I have other than Limit Breaks is the Bolt spell. Aeris was also able to put Fire + Elemental on her armor to resist most of its worst attacks. With Aeris using Bolt, keeping the healing up, and attacking, this was all pretty normal.
We left and went to Kalm for our flashback. On the way, we picked up Matra Magic for the Enemy Skill materia. I played partway through the flashback before ending the third play session, and that’ll be where this entry stops.
Index | Next >
