It’s that time again.

The Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta is an annual fundraising event that I covered in some detail last year. FF5 is one of my favorite games ever, so I’ve participated every year since 2010.In my attempts to get other people interested, I’ve had a few people ask me how the whole thing works. It is explained on the site, but it’s not exactly easy to find. With that in mind, here’s a guide for getting started.

Four Jobs

The major restriction placed on your party is that instead of having full access to all 20 jobs handed out through the story in FF5, you have access to 4 jobs which will be randomly determined by Gilgabot. These are handed out in a manner corresponding with plot elements in the first part of the game, namely visiting the elemental crystals. When you reach the Wind Crystal, which is normally where you get access to jobs in a normal run through of the game, you will have access to one job. Once you reach this point, you must have all of your characters in one of the jobs assigned to you and all of the jobs assigned to you represented in your party. At the start, this means that everyone will be in whatever job you got assigned, which is kind of a pain if you got White Mage.

Each new Crystal will mean a new job for you. When you have 2 jobs, you can split them among your party in whatever way you like (3+1 or 2+2) , but you must use both of them. 3 jobs means that you get to choose which one is represented twice. By the time you have 4, you must have one of each job in the party at all times. That doesn’t mean that you have to always have a particular character as a particular job, but you can’t leave one out (unless you’re in one of the situations when your party is reduced to 3 people). A large part of the power of the job system in FF5 is giving abilities learned in one class to others, so switching classes around your party is highly encouraged.

#reg

It’s perfectly fine if you’re never played FF5 before to participate in the Fiesta. However, if it is your first time, I strongly suggest registering for a Normal run with no restrictions. This will give you one class picked from each set, where each set comes from one of the elemental crystals. I’m relatively certain that every possible party handed out with this method can beat the game, although they certainly aren’t all created equal.

If you’re a bit more adventurous, #reg750 will get you a team composed of mostly casters. #regNo750 will get you a team with no casters. Both of these are references to the price of elemental rods, useful weapons that boost the damage of their corresponding element in battle, but can be broken to cast a third-tier elemental spell (but only if your class can equip rods). #regRandom picks jobs slightly differently: instead of getting a new one from each set, every time you’re assigned a job one is chosen from the entire list you have available to you. This does mean you’re more likely to get classes from the beginning of the game. New this year is #regChaos, and deatils for how this works are scarce. It seems to be a selection of any of the 20 available jobs 4 times, handed out to you in whatever order Gilgabot thinks is most appropriate.

While a major part of this even is the fundraiser, don’t feel like you have to give something to participate. Plenty of people give based on the number of victors, so even playing through helps out. Like Bel mentioned, this is kind of a thing for me each year, so look for more in the very near future.