Final Fantasy II with Jobs 2025 Part I
Mar. 3rd, 2025 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingOn February 28th, I happened to get a notification from the Four Job Fiesta Discord server. It was about a new event for March 2025: Playing Dragon Quest III (specifically, the recent HD-2D release) with randomized jobs. That sounded interesting! I haven't really played that game much, but I'd like to. Then I read a few messages in the Discord server about people's experiences getting through the game and realized really quickly that Dragon Quest III can be a fairly time-consuming game, at least when you're trying to experience it with some level of thoroughness. I decided quickly that I was not going to play Dragon Quest III anytime soon.
I wasn't super hungry for a new game to play at the time. I had done session 6 of my Valkyrie Profile playthrough almost a month ago and had trouble getting back on board for several reasons: there were some significant gameplay issues I was encountering, some substantial family issues, and then a non-trivial bout of illness (culminating in pneumonia) that recently wrecked me for about two weeks. Honestly, I was really considering going back to my Gloomhaven game for a little bit just to carry on with something else that I wasn't streaming.
Alas, while peeking around the Four Job Fiesta Discord server that day, I found that there was an active event called "For Some Reason We Added Jobs to Final Fantasy II"... live from February 16th to March 16th. I had somehow missed any notifications about that one! Maybe because of the factors noted above. Well, the idea of playing this idly, perhaps on my Miyoo Mini, sounded pretty good. Two weeks was tight, but having had pneumonia, etc. recently I wasn't going to be streaming anytime soon. Let's give it a shot.
Here's how the jobs are set up for this event (at least this year):
Interestingly, a year and a half ago I had played Final Fantasy II with my "classic jobs" arrangement, but it was supported by a script. This setup's restrictions are actually in reasonable alignment with what I did! Sort of. There's no knight or thief, but there's a paladin and a ninja. My knight was considerably more restricted than this paladin, and my thief was considerably more restricted than this ninja... but the nature of the script I was using probably mostly invalidates any strict comparison.
I signed up and did my draw:
For some reason they put spoiler notation on the jobs. I don't really know what they think they are protecting anyone from. Regardless, my jobs are Red Mage, Dragoon, White Mage, and Freelancer. I'll just stick to that exact order, too... so...
Firion will be known as Red, the red mage. I don't like the idea of a red mage using a bow, so he will be restricted to a knife and a shield, in addition to a variety of spells.
Maria will be known as Draggy the dragoon. Supposing I've got the choice, I don't want a Final Fantasy-esque dragoon to be using a sword, so she will only ever use a spear and a shield. Dragoons also have a small selection of spells including Fire.
Guy will be known as White because I thought "Whitey" might sound weird. He is a white mage. Again, I dislike the idea of a white mage using a bow (which has only ever happened once in the Final Fantasy series; more than it has with red mages!) so White will only wield staves.
Finally, Leon will be named Freel, where freelancers have zero restrictions on equipment, but can't use any spells. Honestly, this is just great since it means getting him caught up will be easier and nicer when he eventually joins.
I just ran away from the first fight to ensure nobody would gain experience with illegal equipment:
I got the first three characters set up pretty quickly before a brief early-game grind.
While I wouldn't call the early-game battles interesting by any stretch, it is funny that Maria/Draggy is usually spec'd out as the spellcaster of the group and Guy/White is normally the tanky, heavy fighter. It took a while for Draggy to become useful physically and for White to become a useful caster.
Here's a white mage dealing a devastating blow to a Hornet:
After a little bit of grinding, I got bored and went up to Gatrea. Check out these HP totals:
It's weird to say I really wanted the dragoon to be the tanky one and the white mage to be the frail defensive caster and it took a really long time for that to happen. I decided to start wailing on Draggy to help this along - as one does. Before I actually wandered up to Fynn, our stats were like this:
I guess this kind of points out the value of the script I used before, huh? Oh well. This is kind of funny.
Soon, we were visiting Scott, or at least stealing his stuff, and then recruiting Minwu.
For the uninitiated (it's weird that anyone uninitiated is here), Minwu is a pretty classic white mage, joining with a ton of white magic spells. Now, the official rule of this FF2 with Jobs event is any temporary party members are restricted to whatever equipment and spells they happen to start with. That's great, but I think I might like to play the Soul of Rebirth side story when I beat this game (since it didn't go amazingly well last time). Consequently, I'm going to also force Minwu to be a strict white mage, Josef to be a strict monk, and Ricard to be a strict dragoon.
Among his other spells, Minwu starts with Sap, Silence and Fear, which are not officially usable by white mages... so I forced him to forget all of these.
On a sidenote, I find it really weird that this set of restrictions has a handful of spells that are usable by nobody, ever. This happens to include the Silence spell.
I had also been filling out the spell lists for my main team. The red mage's spell selection is a bit frontloaded, since he can use Cure and all of the basic elemental spells.
I decided it would be nice to travel through Paloom, Poft, Bafsk and Salamand to see what they could offer my team, too. I didn't have a ton of money for all of the spells by the time I got to Salamand, but we now had lots of options.
I was grateful for the Blink spell and started levelling it (on both White and Minwu) since the combo of Osmose + Blink broke the endgame so effectively for me last time.
We also got Esuna and Basuna in Bafsk, but as I said we couldn't afford more tomes when we first arrived in Salamand.
We did a little bit of grinding on the very slightly harder enemies both for the sake of stats and money. We bought one Life tome and our stats looked like this before we went to Semitt Falls.
I didn't manage to finish Semitt Falls on the outing I'm on right now before my Miyoo Mini battery ran out. I got right to the bottom though.
I grabbed this Fire Tome, but my characters who can cast Fire already have it. That said, there's a rule in this event that if you pick up a tome that you haven't purchased, you can use it from the item menu, so it may still be useful.
We fought the Sergeant with no real issue. Red and Draggy both used spells to penetrate his defense.
It was actually during the Land Turtle monster-in-a-box fight after grabbing the Teleport Tome here that my battery died, so I'll pick up after this.
Index | Next >
I wasn't super hungry for a new game to play at the time. I had done session 6 of my Valkyrie Profile playthrough almost a month ago and had trouble getting back on board for several reasons: there were some significant gameplay issues I was encountering, some substantial family issues, and then a non-trivial bout of illness (culminating in pneumonia) that recently wrecked me for about two weeks. Honestly, I was really considering going back to my Gloomhaven game for a little bit just to carry on with something else that I wasn't streaming.
Alas, while peeking around the Four Job Fiesta Discord server that day, I found that there was an active event called "For Some Reason We Added Jobs to Final Fantasy II"... live from February 16th to March 16th. I had somehow missed any notifications about that one! Maybe because of the factors noted above. Well, the idea of playing this idly, perhaps on my Miyoo Mini, sounded pretty good. Two weeks was tight, but having had pneumonia, etc. recently I wasn't going to be streaming anytime soon. Let's give it a shot.
Here's how the jobs are set up for this event (at least this year):
Interestingly, a year and a half ago I had played Final Fantasy II with my "classic jobs" arrangement, but it was supported by a script. This setup's restrictions are actually in reasonable alignment with what I did! Sort of. There's no knight or thief, but there's a paladin and a ninja. My knight was considerably more restricted than this paladin, and my thief was considerably more restricted than this ninja... but the nature of the script I was using probably mostly invalidates any strict comparison.
I signed up and did my draw:
For some reason they put spoiler notation on the jobs. I don't really know what they think they are protecting anyone from. Regardless, my jobs are Red Mage, Dragoon, White Mage, and Freelancer. I'll just stick to that exact order, too... so...
Firion will be known as Red, the red mage. I don't like the idea of a red mage using a bow, so he will be restricted to a knife and a shield, in addition to a variety of spells.
Maria will be known as Draggy the dragoon. Supposing I've got the choice, I don't want a Final Fantasy-esque dragoon to be using a sword, so she will only ever use a spear and a shield. Dragoons also have a small selection of spells including Fire.
Guy will be known as White because I thought "Whitey" might sound weird. He is a white mage. Again, I dislike the idea of a white mage using a bow (which has only ever happened once in the Final Fantasy series; more than it has with red mages!) so White will only wield staves.
Finally, Leon will be named Freel, where freelancers have zero restrictions on equipment, but can't use any spells. Honestly, this is just great since it means getting him caught up will be easier and nicer when he eventually joins.
I just ran away from the first fight to ensure nobody would gain experience with illegal equipment:
I got the first three characters set up pretty quickly before a brief early-game grind.
While I wouldn't call the early-game battles interesting by any stretch, it is funny that Maria/Draggy is usually spec'd out as the spellcaster of the group and Guy/White is normally the tanky, heavy fighter. It took a while for Draggy to become useful physically and for White to become a useful caster.
Here's a white mage dealing a devastating blow to a Hornet:
After a little bit of grinding, I got bored and went up to Gatrea. Check out these HP totals:
It's weird to say I really wanted the dragoon to be the tanky one and the white mage to be the frail defensive caster and it took a really long time for that to happen. I decided to start wailing on Draggy to help this along - as one does. Before I actually wandered up to Fynn, our stats were like this:
I guess this kind of points out the value of the script I used before, huh? Oh well. This is kind of funny.
Soon, we were visiting Scott, or at least stealing his stuff, and then recruiting Minwu.
For the uninitiated (it's weird that anyone uninitiated is here), Minwu is a pretty classic white mage, joining with a ton of white magic spells. Now, the official rule of this FF2 with Jobs event is any temporary party members are restricted to whatever equipment and spells they happen to start with. That's great, but I think I might like to play the Soul of Rebirth side story when I beat this game (since it didn't go amazingly well last time). Consequently, I'm going to also force Minwu to be a strict white mage, Josef to be a strict monk, and Ricard to be a strict dragoon.
Among his other spells, Minwu starts with Sap, Silence and Fear, which are not officially usable by white mages... so I forced him to forget all of these.
On a sidenote, I find it really weird that this set of restrictions has a handful of spells that are usable by nobody, ever. This happens to include the Silence spell.
I had also been filling out the spell lists for my main team. The red mage's spell selection is a bit frontloaded, since he can use Cure and all of the basic elemental spells.
I decided it would be nice to travel through Paloom, Poft, Bafsk and Salamand to see what they could offer my team, too. I didn't have a ton of money for all of the spells by the time I got to Salamand, but we now had lots of options.
I was grateful for the Blink spell and started levelling it (on both White and Minwu) since the combo of Osmose + Blink broke the endgame so effectively for me last time.
We also got Esuna and Basuna in Bafsk, but as I said we couldn't afford more tomes when we first arrived in Salamand.
We did a little bit of grinding on the very slightly harder enemies both for the sake of stats and money. We bought one Life tome and our stats looked like this before we went to Semitt Falls.
I didn't manage to finish Semitt Falls on the outing I'm on right now before my Miyoo Mini battery ran out. I got right to the bottom though.
I grabbed this Fire Tome, but my characters who can cast Fire already have it. That said, there's a rule in this event that if you pick up a tome that you haven't purchased, you can use it from the item menu, so it may still be useful.
We fought the Sergeant with no real issue. Red and Draggy both used spells to penetrate his defense.
It was actually during the Land Turtle monster-in-a-box fight after grabbing the Teleport Tome here that my battery died, so I'll pick up after this.
Index | Next >
