Ow, My Thumb

I hurt my thumb and I’m trying not to type much. I spent a lot of today not typing in order to not aggravate my thumb. Thankfully, I have a nice controller for my PC that has little flappy paddle buttons on the back. That made it fairly easy to play some of the Final Fantasy 5 Pixel Remaster for most of the day.

Final Fantasy 5 features the “Job System”, where characters can choose from a list of different jobs with different abilities. Many of these are familiar roles from previous games - White Mage, Thief, and so on - but some, like Beastmaster and Blue Mage, are a little more off the wall. Jobs can be changed any time you access the menu (i.e. out of combat) and as you level your jobs up, you get access to new abilities. You can equip one job and one additional ability at a time, so you might have a character play a Black Mage and add on the ability to cast Time Magic learned from the Time Mage job.

The current party. Faris’s Beastmaster sprite is amazing. Look at the earmuffs!

I haven’t played FF5 in a while, but since I have played it before, I chose to do a “Four Job Fiesta”, where I get randomly assigned four jobs and can only use those. You don’t get access to all the jobs at the beginning of the game - instead, you get a few added at four specific points in the story, so the Fiesta assigns you one job from each of those four points. I started with Monk, which made for a brainless and easy early game, and the addition of Red Mage as my second job was crucial to beating some of the bosses that came around that time. My third job, Beastmaster, allows me to catch an enemy and store it for later use as a powerful ability. I don’t yet know what my fourth job will be, so right now I’m trying to make sure all of my characters can equip the Red Magic Level 3 ability as their secondary command just for combat flexibility. I’m trying to avoid grinding too much at this stage, so I’m encountering some difficult battles, and the healing is a big help.

I don’t want to type too much more, since I’ll have to type some for work tomorrow and I want to rehab my tenosynovitis as best I can, so I’ll sign off for now. See you tomorrow with something equally or more pithy.