Characters / Final Fantasy V

Many key events and revelations aren't hidden by spoiler tags here, including the aliases and true identities of several characters. Read this page at your own risk.

Light Warriors

Bartz Klauser

Voiced by: Soichiro Hoshi (Japanese) and Jason Spisak (English) (Dissidia and World of Final Fantasy)

Bartz is a wanderer from the town of Lix, accompanied by his chocobo Boko. His mother Stella died when he was a child, and his father Dorgann died three years before the beginning of the story. He has a fear of heights resulting from falling off a rooftop during a hide-and-seek mishap. He was chosen by the Wind Crystal, symbolizing passion. It turns out that his father Dorgann was one of the Warriors of Dawn, further linking his destiny to saving the world. Bartz also appears as a playable character in the Dissidia Final Fantasy and Theatrhythm Final Fantasy spinoff series.

---

• Adaptation Dye-Job: His hair in his artwork is white, like most of the other handsome protagonists that Yoshitaka Amano designed, but his hair in-game is brown. Interestingly, Dissidia Final Fantasy keeps his hair brown.
• Badass Adorable: Bartz is a handsome, friendly, easygoing, and endearingly adorable young man, and is a formidable fighter.
• Big Brother Instinct: Towards Krile when she joins the party after Galuf's death.
• Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: With Ghido.
• Childhood Friend Romance: A female NPC in Lix pines after him.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Bartz has no attachment to his hometown thanks to his parents' separate deaths. ^note Lenna and Faris are eventually orphaned and Krile starts as one, and that ties into the theme of legacy more than a convenient way to get into the plot.
• Drives Like Crazy: Does this late into the game. He does have somewhat of an understandable excuse for doing so, however; see Heroic BSoD.
• The Hero: Bartz is the default main hero, and will frequently speak on behalf of the party even when he's not the overworld leader.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Played with. Given the mechanics of the Job System, Bartz doesn't need to use swords, but he does start out with a Broadsword equipped. He also uses the Brave Blade in Dissidia.
• Heroic BSoD: When Exdeath pulls his hometown into the Void. Bartz nearly destroys the airship in rage-filled agony before Faris and Lenna snap him out of it.
• Horseback Heroism: Plays a variant with his personal Chocobo.
• Horse of a Different Color: Boko, a Chocobo whom Bartz rides around.
• Idiot Hero: Every so often. It's exaggerated in Dissidia. It should be noted that he was made fun off when he was conveniently, with Ghido, or some other genius character, Bartz was an average guy with some sense of snark, but not a moron like he was in Dissidia.
• Inconsistent Spelling: He was referred to as "Batz" in the English dub of Legend of the Crystals.
• Irony: The bearer of the Wind essence is afraid of heights.
• It's Personal: When Bartz witnesses Exdeath chuck his hometown into the Void towards the end of the game, he goes nuts, temporarily forgetting his fear of flying and blasting the airship around the planet at high speeds until the rest of the party calms him down. Cue last leg of quests to open the Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
• Mighty Glacier: He has the second-highest stamina and the highest strength, but low agility, making him good at dealing and taking damage but usually acting after Faris and Lenna.
• Nice Guy: Despite his reluctance to get involved with the quest, he's never anything but a man who does the right thing, and he is amazingly easygoing.
• The One Guy: After Galuf is replaced by Krile, Bartz is the only male Light Warrior.
• Only Sane Man: Occasionally, thanks to the eccentricities of the other Light Warriors.
• Parental Abandonment: His mother died when he was a child and his dad died when he was in his late teens.
• Parrot Exposition: Again, with Ghido.
  Ghido: [You'll need] the twelve legendary weapons used to defeat the warlock Enuo a thousand years ago.
  Bartz: The twelve legendary weapons?
  Ghido: Sometimes I wonder if you say things like that to spite me... Yes, the twelve legendary weapons. They are weapons. They are legendary. There are even twelve of them.
• Resigned to the Call: Bartz makes more than one attempt to leave Lenna and Galuf behind and keep journeying with his chocobo, Boko. Boko, however, has some strong moral objections to leaving a girl and an amnesiac old man to get through meteorite-ravaged, goblin-infested territory alone. Which he expresses by throwing Bartz and delivering some eloquent kwehs until Bartz agrees to go back and help.
• Ridiculously Average Guy: Possibly the most normal-looking major character in the series. And this is Final Fantasy we're talking about here...
• Secret Legacy: Everyone else in the party are Royals Who Actually Do Something except Bartz, the hobo on a chocobo. Until he finds out that his father was one of the four Warriors of Dawn who fought Exdeath thirty years ago.
• Simpleminded Wisdom: Sometimes on display—he has a very straightforward view to the quest. When the party is faced with Drakenvale, from where no one has ever returned, he declares "Guess that means we'll be the first who do!" as the rest of the party mopes.
• Unknown Rival: Later games would make him this to Gilgamesh.
• Walking the Earth: Before the game, he's a traveler who travels for its own sake. He's content with it and goes back to doing so at the end.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Bartz has suffered from a variant with acrophobia ever since a childhood incident in his home town where, in a game of hide-and-seek, he somehow managed to get stuck on the roof of a house. Not that this ever seems to stop him from climbing mountains, ascending towers, flying airships... though it compromised with his first time riding a wind drake. He hesitates long enough for Galuf to be ticked, and proceeds to throw the poor boy onto Hiryu's back. He also takes a while to jump off of Castle Bal's drawbridge.

Lenna Charlotte Tycoon

Voiced by: Ayako Kawasumi (Japanese, Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia onward)

Princess and heir to the throne of Tycoon, Lenna is a caring young woman, to the point of putting the life of others before hers. This made the Water Crystal choose her, as its essence was that of devotion.

---

• Adaptation Dye-Job: Given short pink hair in-game, but has longer blonde hair in her artwork (except for one early artwork◊). Like with Bartz, Dissidia Opera Omnia takes a middle ground to her design. While she's wearing her artwork outfit, her entire color scheme is taken straight from her sprite. Her hairstyle is a middle ground between her artwork and sprite, as is its color, pinkish blonde.
• Badass Adorable: Lenna is a sweet, gentle, and beautiful princess, and can fight quite well on her own accord.
• Demonic Possession: Exdeath arranged for her to be possessed by a demon after sucking Tycoon in the Void and shortly before her wind drake helped her escape.
• Disney Death: When Tycoon is apparently destroyed by the Void, she's gone right along with it, leaving the party to assume the worst.
• Distress Ball: Lenna is subject to a couple of attempted kidnappings, a demon possession, and a poison arrow. Then there's the stuff that she does to herself in the cause of saving dragons.
• Family Eye Resemblance: Her green eyes are a visual clue to her and Faris's relation.
• Feed by Example: She encourages Krile's wind drake to eat a formerly monstrous piece of dragon grass by taking a bite herself. Never mind that it's deadly poison to humans.
• Friend to All Living Things: Oh so much. She'll put her life on the line to save wind drakes, and that's just a part of it. Her mother was gravely ill and the only cure was a wind drake's tongue, so Lenna took a knife to retrieve one. The player can choose whether to do it or not after hearing that Hiryu was her mother's beloved pet and that it's the last wind drake of that particular world. If the player does choose to perform the task, it ends with Lenna mulling whether doing it was worth it. Either way King Tycoon and her teacher would stop/comfort her after she went with her decision. She learns that every life is precious and no more disposable than others. In exchange for sparing its life, Hiryu has an Undying Loyalty to Lenna to the point of sacrificing itself to snap Lenna out of her Demonic Possession and so it could continue to be useful as the Phoenix summon.
• Heroic BSoD: A small one after her father's death.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Initially translated as "Reina".
• Lady of Black Magic: A graceful, feminine princess who qualifies if classed as a Black Mage or Summoner. It helps that she has the highest raw Magic stat in the party.
• Lady of War: A plucky, kind-hearted princess who can wield any weapon thanks to the job class system. She is made to look feminine in all of them and is portrayed as much more graceful and feminine than her more tomboyish sister Faris. Yoshitaka Amano and the CGs from Anthology also depict her with a sword.
• Leitmotif: Lenna's Theme. She's the only one besides Exdeath to have one named after her.
• Meaningful Name: In the PlayStation release, her name was mistranslated as "Reina", which is Spanish for "queen". Though she is only a princess, the royalty theme still applies.
• Minidress of Power: Her in-game Freelancer outfit. (Concept art did depict her with a Leotard of Power).
• Ms. Exposition: For the first part of the game. Lenna explains the significance of the crystals, the consequences of losing them, and some of the political matters that the party encounters.
• Ms. Fanservice: The most typically feminine of the party, Lenna's outfits for several of her jobs (most notably Berserker, Mystic Knight, Dancer, and the GBA exclusive Necromancer) tend to be more revealing than Faris' wardrobe, let alone Krile's.
• Naïve Newcomer: She's clearly not used to traveling as an ordinary when the game begins and seriously suggests asking pirates for a ride, then tries to do it by making an official request as the princess. It's lucky for her that the captain happened to be her long-lost sister. Not that Galuf's plan to steal the ship worked any better; she only revealed her identity when they got caught red-handed.
• Nice Girl: She is a very kind, selfless, and sweet person who is willing to help others out as possible and deeply cares for her friends and family and is devoted to her people as well.
• Pretty Princess Powerhouse: A Princess Classic but is capable of kicking ass as much as the other party members.
• Prim and Proper Bun: Her hair is worn in this style in her official artwork.
• Princess Classic: Kind, diplomatic, and a Friend to All Living Things. She comforts both Faris and Galuf after they have some hard times and is deeply affected by events herself.
• Rebellious Princess: She disobeys her father right at the beginning of the game. She readily takes up arms and job classes to protect the Crystals (and on one occasion, a moogle).
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Like most of the party. Lenna is already well-traveled when the game starts, remarking on the geographical changes from the meteor strike and being acquainted with several NPCs who help the party keep going. She takes the lead when talking to monarchs and is often the first person to jump into something.
• Rose-Haired Sweetie: Lenna is shown as a kindhearted and caring princess with pink hair shown her in-game sprites even though her Amano artwork is depicted as blonde.
• Ship Tease: Her initial dialogue with Bartz (especially the PSX translation) and the Amano art of them embracing in moonlight. Doesn't really happen in-game.
• Silk Hiding Steel: She's very kind, sweet, well-spoken, and lady-like, but she doesn't hesitate to take up arms to defend the crystals. And when she meets Cid for the first time, she immediately calls him out for inventing the amplifying machines that threaten the crystals (although she quickly apologizes when she sees he already knows).
• Squishy Wizard: She starts with the highest magic stat out of anyone, but the second-lowest stamina.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Girly Girl to Faris's Tomboy.
• Water Is Womanly: Lenna's innate element is water and she's a diplomatic Princess Classic — feminine and graceful in contrast to her tomboy sister Faris whose innate element is fire.
• White Magician Girl: An exceptionally compassionate Proper Lady, Lenna is given this role in Record Keeper. (Less so in Opera Omnia, but one of her abilities does grant Regen.)

Galuf Halm Baldesion

Voiced by: Hiroshi Naka (Japanese, Dissidia Opera Omnia onward)

Galuf is an amnesiac old man, who was found near a meteor. It seems that his mission is to protect the crystals, and he takes along Lenna (and eventually Bartz) along for the ride. The Earth Crystal chooses him, symbolizing hope.

---

• Adaptation Dye-Job: His in-game sprite makes him look younger - his hair is a light brown, and he gets a beard at that. His hair is white in his artwork, and he lacks the beard.
• Amnesiac Hero: He remembers his first name and the fact that he's supposed to be protecting the Crystals, nothing else. Not even any ideas he might have had about stealing pirate ships.
• Came from the Sky: Arrives via meteorite.
• Cool Old Guy: He gets through amnesia, is gutsy enough to try stealing a ship from pirates, and rescues the others single-handedly twice.
• Deader than Dead: Fights against Exdeath at 0 HP, and because of that none of the healing spells or items that the other team members try to use on him work.
• Determinator: He can fight at 0 HP. It's to the point that Exdeath actually begins to freak out over it.
• Disability Immunity: An early boss tries to trap the party using illusions of their loved ones; since Galuf is suffering from amnesia at the time, however, her illusions have no effect on him.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": He insists that his friends call him "just Galuf" when they find out he's a King. Bartz does make the obvious joke.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Going one-on-one against Exdeath and is still standing even with 0 HP.
• Easy Amnesia: Initially, he can't remember anything save his name because he hit his head when his meteor landed in the beginning of the game. He tries to use it to get off blame when his "steal Faris' ship" plan goes south.
  Galuf: ...Ohh, my aching head! I can't remember a thing!
  Bartz: And your amnesia oh-so-conveniently returns.
• Eccentric Mentor: He gets more serious when the conversation turns to Exdeath, but he's happy to be an old coot the rest of the time.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The party tries to use all their healing abilities, but they don't work because he fought at 0 HP.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: After returning to his homeworld, rescuing his friends from a Hostage Situation, and getting flung to a distant continent by Exdeath's barrier, Galuf hits the bar.
• The Lancer: Galuf contrasts with Bartz in his drive to protect the Crystals and with Lenna in his (mildly) greater sense of self-preservation in doing so.
• Large Ham: Especially when he gets together with his Dawn Warrior pals.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Galuf is an irreverent, smart-mouthed, amnesiac old coot. Expect that to change the second the party's life is in his hands or Exdeath arrives.
• Mighty Glacier: He has the highest Stamina and the second-highest Strength (the inverse of Bartz's numbers in those stats), so he makes a great tank. However, his Agility is the lowest out of everyone's, so he's likely to have the last turn.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: Versus Exdeath in the Guardian Tree. Unfortunately, he dies afterwards.
• Old Soldier: After his memories return, he becomes much more serious thanks to knowing exactly who Exdeath is and why it's so important to stop him. Especially his last living words. They're not a heartfelt farewell, but telling his friends to end Exdeath once and for all. (He has kinder words for Krile afterwards).
• Papa Wolf: Towards Krile. Exdeath's brutal beat down on her is what prompted Galuf to fight against him at 0 HP in the first place!
• The Power of Love: Implied to be what spurs him on in his Heroic Sacrifice.
• Pungeon Master:
  Galuf: ...Don't push it, kid. Here in Bal, bad jokes like that will get you PUNished...
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: As the king of Bal. Compared to the kings on the first world, Galuf's job is really more that of a general than a monarch.
• The Reveal: His true identity is Galuf Halm Baldesion, and he is a king from another world sent to Bartz's world to prevent Ex-Death from freeing himself from his prison.
• Say My Name: Just before his heroic sacrifice.
  Galuf: "EXDEATH!!!"
• Spirit Advisor: Towards Krile. His spirit pushing at her is what prompts her and Bartz to leave Tycoon before it gets struck with the Void.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Faris.
• What You Are in the Dark: Near the beginning of the game, the Siren offers him the chance to flee if he lets her devour everyone else's souls. It's really not much of a question to him.
• When I Was Your Age...: When confronted with the Desert of Shifting Sands.
  "We crossed burning sand every day and liked it!"

Faris Scherwiz

Voiced by: Rie Tanaka (Japanese) and Emily O'Brien (English) [World of Final Fantasy]

Faris is the leader of a band of pirates, who catches the party trying to steal their ship. Faris eventually lets the party use their ship, which can move without wind due to Faris' sea creature friend, Syldra, moving it. Faris is chosen by the Fire Crystal, symbolizing courage. It is revealed quickly that Faris is in fact a girl, with a mysterious past somehow connected to Lenna. She appears in Theatrhythm Final Fantasy as a playable sub-character.

---

• Adaptation Dye-Job:
  • Much like Lenna, her hair is blonde in her artwork, and it's purple in-game. Unlike her sister, the early artwork's hair color doesn't match the in-game sprite (because the early artwork doesn't have any color whatsoever) despite being long and loose like the in-game version.
  • As with Lenna and Bartz, Dissidia Opera Omnia and Theathrhythm takes a middle ground to her design, that while she has her artwork outfit, her blonde hair has a purplish tint to it. The effect makes it look pinkish, which helps initially hide her true identity yet hints at it.
• Adoptive Name Change: Faris was originally known as Sarisa Scherwil Tycoon (Lenna's long lost elder sister) before she was lost at sea and adopted by pirates. According to one pirate, she couldn't manage the S's in her name when they asked her.
• Anti-Hero: She intends to hold Lenna for ransom early on, and only joins the quest to find out about her past, not because she cares about the crystals or worldwide devastation. This changes, and by the end of the game she's Type II.
• Antiquated Linguistics: The GBA version uses old-fashioned insults like "scofflaw".
• Badass Longcoat: In her official artwork.
• Bifauxnen: Her looks are well in line with many male Final Fantasy characters, especially from the Amano era. Her portrait isn't any more obviously feminine than Bartz, to say nothing of Cecil Harvey from the previous game.
• Big Sister Instinct: She is always protective towards Lenna, even before Faris came to terms with their relation.
• Breakout Character: She's the most popular female character in the game, and is usually the 2nd or 3rd in line to appear in crossovers from V. She even received a Neo Vision base unit with a CG limit break in Brave Exvius, making her the first mainline character that isn't the protagonist or main antagonist of their respective game to receive one.
• Cannot Spit It Out: She refuses to admit that she and Lenna are sisters until they finally find King Alexander.
• Character Development: Starts off as a pirate captain whose main interest is in ransoming Lenna back to Tycoon. By the end of the game, she declares that she won't stand by as more lives are lost to Exdeath.
• Dressed to Plunder: Faris has a Badass Longcoat and a Sailor's Ponytail in the concept art, but her sprite looks different, and her crew look the same as all the others.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Played for laughs in Tule when Bartz and Galuf see a sleeping Faris in "his" room. It's the first bit of Foreshadowing before the reveal that Faris isn't a man.
• Family Eye Resemblance: Green eyes for her in-game sprite. They're the same color as Lenna's. Her artwork gives her brown eyes instead.
• Flowery Insults: The retranslation. Here's a gem from the confrontation with Magissa:
  "Let her go, you addle-pated foul-complexioned scofflaw!"
• Hidden Buxom: Some versions of the game (as well as other Final Fantasy titles) show that Faris is well-endowed, though this may not be consistent. In any event, since she tries to pass herself off as a man, she'd clearly have to hide her bust from others.
• Informed Attractiveness: When Faris in her princess attire takes part in the waltz at Castle Tycoon, all the characters in the throne room talk about how beautiful she is. Additionally, during the reveal of her gender, Galuf and Bartz go ga-ga over her. There isn't any real way to tell, since she's a 16-bit sprite after all.
• Jack of All Stats: Bartz and Galuf have slightly (it won't mean anything after the very early game for the most part) higher physical attack and constitution respectively, Lenna has slightly (though the agility boost will at least decide what order characters with the same set up move in here) higher magic and Krile has slightly higher agility, Faris, meanwhile, is balanced across the board.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Faris gradually becomes less selfish as the game progresses, but is still fully capable of acting like an ass—her first reaction to Lenna trying to talk about being long-lost sisters is to laugh at her and then run away. Even when expressing genuine concern for her friends, Faris usually tries to feign aloofness or pepper in some teasing.
• The Lancer: Somewhat. She's more on the ball than Bartz is, in general.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Faris is Lenna's sister, which makes King Tycoon her father.
• Meaningful Name: An odd case of the most meaningful name in a Final Fantasy game not going to the protagonist: Faris is an Arabic boy's name meaning "knight". Sarisa is a Hebrew girl's name meaning "princess".
• Meaningful Rename: Kind of. According to her fellow pirates, Sarisa mispronounced her name as "Farifa" when she first got rescued by the pirates, and it eventually shifted to her current-day alias.
• Pirate Girl: She's more than willing to engage in underhanded business, but she doesn't keel-haul anyone either. She does dress as a man, but that doesn't stop a few of her mateys from calling her "dreamy".
• Pirates Who Don't Do Anything:
  • Averted. Her first reaction to finding out she has a princess aboard is to hold her for ransom.
  • Played straight by the rest of her crew, though; the moment they reach the nearest town, they rush to the pub and just start drinking.
• The Reveal: She is a woman, and her real identity is Sarisa Scherwil Tycoon, i.e. Lenna's sister, making her a princess of Tycoon.
• Sailor's Ponytail: Sweet Polly Oliver Faris Scherwiz wears her hair in a longer-than-normal version of the classic sailor hairstyle in the Yoshitaka Amano artwork.
• Samus Is a Girl: Bartz, Lenna, and Galuf admitted that she looked like a pretty man at first impression until Bartz and Galuf tried to make "him" get undressed after getting their clothes waterlogged.
  Galuf: He's a she!
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Bartz becomes even more smitten with her when she's dressed up for a ball. Seems to apply when she's asleep, too.
• Stupid Sexy Flanders: Subverted. An optional scene at Tule's inn has Bartz and Galuf falling head-over-heels when they see Faris asleep, much to their confusion.
• Sweet on Polly Oliver: There's an optional scene before her outing where Bartz and Galuf fawn over "his" looks. If you talk to one of "his" crew at the start of the game in the Tule pub, he will say "Captain... so dreamy..."
• Sweet Polly Oliver: Faris was raised as a man since about five years old, as pirates in this world aren't very progressive about women. She's outed when Galuf and Bartz try to get her to dry her clothes over the fire.
• Talk Like a Pirate: Faris has a really pronounced "pirate accent" in Anthology, shouting "d'garr" and "arr" practically in every line. The Advance version redoes her dialogue so that she still speaks with a distinctly nautical flavor and idioms but doesn't go overboard with it.
• This Cannot Be!: Her typical reaction to upsetting events is to deny that it's true or possible. She does this almost every time someone dies as well as when Lenna first tries to make her admit their relation.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: The Tomboy to Lenna's Girly Girl.
• Unfortunate Names: In the Anthology translation, her non-alias name is Salsa.

Krile Mayer Baldesion

Voiced by: Yukari Tamura (Japanese, Dissidia Opera Omnia onward)

Krile is Galuf's granddaughter, not that he remembers her at first. A bright and optimistic girl, Krile is extremely knowledgeable and helps the others on their quest to defeat Exdeath and save the worlds. She's also a bit of a Walking Spoiler, but you probably know already that she eventually joins the party.

---

• And Now for Someone Completely Different: About halfway through the game, Krile will replace Galuf and inherit all of his job experience. As you may have noticed, Bartz have high Strength and low Magic, meaning he is suitable to be a warrior of some kind. Lenna's high Magic automatically qualifies her to be a pure caster. Faris has average stats overall, so she can be part warrior and part caster. However, Galuf and Krile are extremely different stat-wise, so many players level up Galuf in mage skills in preparation for her.
• Artistic Age: She's 14 years old. Her Amano art gives her an appearance to match that age. Her in-game designs, meanwhile, are clearly drawn with cuteness in mind, and she's given the child-type sprites that were used for preteens like Rydia and the Onion Kids.
• Aside Glance: Her battle sprite faces the camera rather than the enemy, like the child characters from IV and III.
• Badass Adorable: She's cute as a button, but she's a formidable force in battle.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • The first time the party meets her is when she busts into the Ronka Ruins on a meteor and knocks out an Exdeath-controlled King Tycoon.
  • She tries it again by knocking out Exdeath himself when he's about to kill the party inside the Guardian Tree. This time, however, Exdeath recovers almost immediately and starts unleashing all hell on her, with only Galuf's intervention stopping her from ending up being reduced to a bloody smear on the tree's interior.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Her first appearance is as an illusion the Siren creates to lure Galuf, but he has no clue who she is. She's later revealed to be his granddaughter and replaces him after his Heroic Sacrifice.
• Child Mage: Though fourteen, she's cast as the party kid, with stats geared towards magic. Before she joins the party, much of her scenes in the overworld have her casting Thunder and her appearances in spinoffs class her with magic abilities.
• Cute Bruiser: It seems that she was designed to be as adorable as possible. Especially her job classes. Berserker gives you a little girl in what looks like a cat Halloween costume, going on a rampage with an axe or a hammer. She also wins a fist fight against Bartz once.
• Elemental Eye Colors: In some artwork she has brown eyes that match her Earth element. Usually it's when her appearance is based on Amano's design (e.g. Theatrhythm and Opera Omnia), but Pictlogia and Brave Exvius (which use her Shibuya design) and Airborne Brigade (which uses both) color her eyes brown too.
• Establishing Character Moment: Her first onscreen appearance is to save the party from a possessed King Tycoon and she's there with Galuf and the army at Big Bridge, and both of these happen before she joins the party.
• Extremely Protective Child: Galuf himself is a Papa Wolf, but that doesn't stop Krile from herself jumping into any kind of peril if it means keeping him safe.
• Fragile Speedster: In terms of raw stats, she has the highest Agility among the playable characters, but also the lowest Stamina, making her the polar opposite of her grandfather. (That said, the difference is marginal, since assigned classes radically alter your stats; she's still a viable tank if you leveled Galuf in that role.)
• Friend to All Living Things: Being able to speak to animals means she can form close bonds with them; her best friends are a moogle and a dragon, and she gushes about the cuteness of Boko and Koko's chicks in the epilogue letter. Thankfully, her affection for animals doesn't come with a side of getting poisoned the way it does Lenna.
• Genki Girl: Perhaps the first one in the series.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: She's depicted as blonde in every artwork and is the youngest member of the party. In addition to Galuf's stats, she also takes his position as the warrior of Earth, which represents Hope. She's also a Friend to All Living Things who can communicate with benevolent ghosts.
• I See Dead People: If there's a ghost around, she's the one who will talk to him/her/it.
• Little Miss Badass: She's at Galuf's side at the Battle of Big Bridge and makes her entrance by knocking out someone possessed by Exdeath.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Is the smallest of the group and can hold up for herself as much as the rest. There was even a scene where she shoves Bartz back 2 whole squares despite him being much more older, bigger, and experienced in fighting.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: What Krile essentially says to Galuf after he dies and when she begs him to come back when his spirit speaks to her.
• Please Wake Up: Krile says this to Galuf while he's dying.
• Plucky Girl: Krile has by no means had an easy life, but that hasn't put a dent in her spirit.
• Princesses Prefer Pink: Many of her job classes involve quite a lot of it. (In the case of Knight, it's all pink.) The iOS release adds even more pink, even changing some outfits like the all-blue Ninja to include it. And, of course, her Amano art is a bright pink leotard.
• Psychic Children: The youngest party member is the one with the paranormal senses. The reason for it is subject to some Continuity Drift. NPCs in Bal tell you that her powers appeared after her parents disappeared in the desert, one Ultimania states that she is mildly telepathic (enough to pick up on animal thoughts to know what they are "saying"), and in Opera Omnia she says she was born with it.
• Psychic Nosebleed: Gets a migraine thanks to Ghido's mind-call, leaving her bedridden until the party answers it.
• Psychic Powers: She has numerous amounts including Telepathy, a Spider-Sense, the ability to communicate with the dead, and the ability to speak with animals.
• Raised by Grandparents: One grandparent, anyway. Her parents vanished in the desert when she was little.
• Rousing Speech: After everything has gone From Bad to Worse, Krile gives a brief one at the Guardian Tree.
  "We must stop Exdeath. The people around the world need us... No, not only the people, but all life..."
• Speaks Fluent Animal: She can talk to moogles. And wind drakes. And chocobos. They never really explain this except for one NPC in Bal that said her ability started to appear after her parents went missing in desert. One Ultimania says that this is due to mild telepathy, which would also explain why Ghido calls her instead of any old person in Bal.
• Take Up My Sword: Galuf uses the power of the Guardian Tree to give her all of his strength. This means that she enters the party at the same level as him, with whatever job abilities unlocked and only minor differences in her base stats.
• Token Mini-Moe: She is fourteen while everyone else is eighteen to twenty, and with Bartz especially has the dynamic of a younger sibling. Her in-game designs emphasize cuteness, making her look even younger at first glance.
• Visual Pun: Her Japanese name, Kururu, is similar the Japanese onomatopoeia for spinning (kuru kuru). Her appearances in Brave Exvius and Opera Omnia have her twirling around as her victory pose.
• Walking Spoiler: The mere fact that she joins your party alludes to one of the other members leaving since this was still before players could expect to freely swap party members in and out (that would happen in the next game). In this case, she takes Galuf's place after his Heroic Sacrifice.
• You Are Not Alone: The others tell her this during the ending.

The Supporting Cast

Cid Previa

Voiced by: Hiroaki Ishikawa (Japanese) [Legend of the Crystals]

The requisite "Cid" of the game, he's an elderly inventor and scholar who researches the Crystals.

---

• Cool Old Guy: Breaks out of prison cells with dynamite (or tries), resurrects ancient technology, bickers with Galuf.
• Determinator: According to Mid, Cid never gives up in the face of mistakes.
• The Engineer: Handles the party's machine-related needs. He converts a ship to a submarine and fixes a thousand year-old airship for them.
• Heroic BSoD: After the Fire Crystal breaks he runs off to brood in the pub. Mid snaps him out of it.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Invented the Crystal machines.
• Ignored Expert: When he tries to shut down the amplifier on the Fire Crystal, he's thrown in prison. Queen Karnak being possessed did help, probably, but judging by the rest of the kingdom's behavior Exdeath didn't need to do that much work. They only backtrack when a crack appears on the crystal.
• Must Make Amends: One reason he pulls all-nighters to find adamantite, reactivate meteorites, and refurbish vehicles. He blames himself for the destruction of the crystals and is working as hard as he can to fix his mistakes.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Inventing the crystal amplifiers. He did realize the danger they posed after the Wind Crystal shattered, but by then it was too late to stop.
• Non-Action Guy: With the good reason that he's old. He still alludes to it near the end by saying that he can't fight for beans, so fixing machines for Bartz and co. is the only way he can help save the world.
• Think Nothing of It: He brushes off the party's thanks for refurbishing the airship with adamantite and says he doesn't need to hear it. Given his comments before sending them off to the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, it's probably a combination of It's What I Do and some guilt over not being able to do more.
• Unwitting Pawn: Exdeath used his machines to help destroy the Crystals that sealed him.

Mid Previa

Voiced by: Etsuko Kozakura (Japanese), Julia Fletcher (English) ['-Legend of the Crystals'']

Cid's grandson. He is a bookworm and an inventor who looks up to his grandfather.

---

• Bookworm: He's so absorbed in his reading he doesn't even notice the party's battle with a vicious book-demon behind him.
• Determinator: He shares his grandfather's conviction to "just try again" after failures.
• The Engineer: He seems just as adept as Cid.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Towards his grandfather, snapping him out of his Heroic BSoD.
• Insufferable Genius: He would be insufferable if he wasn't so funny.
• Mythology Gag: There have been several references to Mid in the series. "Mid" is one of the default names for the Red Mage job in the remakes of Final Fantasy, The grandson of IV's Cid Pollendina grandson in The After Years is named Mid, Mid is Balthier's true middle name in XII, and Midadol Telamon from XVI takes her name from Mid as well.
• Nerd Glasses: Big round orange-tinted lenses.
• The Pollyanna: He's always cheerful about whatever challenges the party presents them with, is totally confident in his and his grandpa's abilities, and shrugs it off whenever a ship is lost.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Subverted. He seems like it when he snaps at the party for disturbing his reading (by fighting off a book demon that was about to eat him), but later he thanks them... for whatever they did.

Alexander Highwind Tycoon

Lenna's father, the king of Tycoon. Sets off to the Wind Shrine at the beginning of the game; when he doesn't come back, Lenna sets out after him, beginning the story of the game. He's also the father of Sarisa, AKA Faris.

---

• Brainwashed and Crazy: Exdeath forces him to manipulate the party into allowing the last crystal to be shattered and then attack them. Krile snaps him out of it before he can do serious damage to them, though.
• Disappeared Dad: His disappearance is a major plot point that also causes a great deal of personal worry for Lenna, and for some reason Faris.
• Dragon Rider: With his wind drake, Hiryu.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: If you select "yes" in the flashback where Jenica asks if Lenna really intends to kill Hiryu, Alexander will rush into the scene and slap her.
• Mythology Gag: His middle name is the common Dragoon last name, "Highwind".
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: He's the only monarch with any sense of responsibility towards his kingdom's Crystal. Prior to the game, he also spent a lot of time travelling personally to Find the Cure! for his wife.

Dorgann Klauser

Voiced by: Masaki Terasoma (Japanese, Dissidia Opera Omnia onward)

Bartz's father, who died three years prior to the events of the game. He trained Bartz in fighting, and is the one who encouraged him to become a wanderer. He is also one of the Warriors of Dawn and hail from Galuf's World. He decided to remain in Bartz's World to ensure the seal on Exdeath does not break.

---

• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: His watch over Exdeath's seal often took him far from home. Bartz didn't seem to mind and Stella was resigned to her husband's frequent disappearances. After her death, Dorgann just took Bartz with him.
• I Choose to Stay: Stays behind in the first world to keep watch over Exdeath.
• Posthumous Character: He died three years earlier, but he's a big influence on Bartz's life.
• What the Hell, Hero?: He's not pleased with the other Dawn Warriors for sealing Exdeath on someone else's planet and almost doesn't help them do it. He also insists on staying to take responsibility for it.

Xezat Matias Surgate

Voiced by: Takayuki Sugo (Japanese, Dissidia Opera Omnia onward)

A former Warrior of Dawn, the King of Surgate and good friend of Galuf. The party lands in the middle of his navy when he attacks Exdeath's barrier.

---

• Don't Call Me "Sir": He prefers the title "Xezat the Swordsman" to his kingly one.
• Master Swordsman: Famed among his fellow warriors for this.
• Pungeon Master: He likes to crack up a few jokes here and there.
  Xezat: I'm coming! Hang in there!
  Galuf (Who is hanging off of a ship's bowsprit): That pun was so bad, I'm gonna fall on purpose...
• Pyrrhic Victory: He deactivates the Barrier Tower's power source to allow Bartz to Exdeath's castle but becomes trapped in the process, leading to his death.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: You meet him on the flagship of the fleet he's leading against Barrier Tower.

Kelger Vlondett

Voiced by: Tetsuo Nakao (Japanese, Dissidia Opera Omnia onward)

The leader of the werewolf village of Quelb. One of the Warriors of Dawn.

---

• Doppelgänger Spin: His signature attack is to run in circles around his opponent so fast that they can't tell which image is him.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Lone Wolf aside, they're a friendly lot.
• Poor Communication Kills: His often-jumped-into-conclusion attitude costs him dearly when Bartz defeats him in a duel, leaving the old werewolf bed-ridden for the rest of the game.

Ghido

An ancient sage, who happens to be a tortoise. He has a very dry wit and loves to pick on Bartz.

---

• Actually, I Am Him: The party finds a turtle in the cavern the sage lives in, so Bartz starts bopping its shell. Everyone but Galuf is astonished when it speaks to yell at him and introduce himself as Ghido.
• Deadpan Snarker: Everything he says to Bartz is a veiled insult.
  • Well, sometimes veiled. Lines like "so enthusiastic and yet so stupid" aren't really subtle.
• Minored in Ass-Kicking: He's most useful as a source of knowledge and hangs around the Ancient Library as soon as he can get to it, but he would like you (and Exdeath) to know that he did not spend seven centuries just munching on pizza. Let that sink in. This turtle can trade blows with Exdeath.
• Telepathy: He telepathically contacts Krile to page Galuf.
• Weirdness Censor: He's a turtle. Bartz, Faris, and Lenna are the only people who find this strange—Galuf and the scholars in the Ancient Library don't bat an eye.
• Wise Old Turtle: He's a talking turtle around the size of a human, the oldest living creature in the world, supremely wise and monumentally sarcastic (especially towards Bartz) and he can engage Exdeath in hand-to-hand combat that leaves the young adventurers positively flabbergasted. He still needs help flipping over if knocked on his back, though.

The Villains

Exdeath

"Time for your viscera to see the light of day! Now DIE!"

Voiced by: Tarou Ishida [Dissidia] then Naomi Kusumi [Dissidia NT, Opera Omnia](Japanese), Gerald C. Rivers [Dissidia] (English)

The main villain and Final Boss of V. "Exdeath" was once a tree in the Great Forest of Moore which was used as a prison for evil souls to inhabit. Eventually the souls merged into the form of the warlord seen in the game. Exdeath's eventual goal is to control the Void Between the Worlds and erase everything.

---

• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The battle with Neo Exdeath has a trippy tunnel effect similar to IV's Zeromus. In both cases, it's the first non-static background seen in the game. We're also treated to this quote whenever he activates Grand Cross, which itself has become a meme: "The laws of the universe mean nothing/are in chaos!"
• Ancient Evil: He’s a demonic being born from the evil souls sealed inside a great magical tree over 500 years ago, over the years the tree became sentient and Exdeath was born and began to seek the power of the void to plot the downfall of mankind.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: He swallows Bartz's hometown and the Moogle Village just to show off his newfound power over the Void. They are restored once Exdeath is slain.
• Ax-Crazy: For as much of a Card-Carrying Villain as Exdeath can be, he is straight up hellbent on destroying all of existence and killing everyone that gets in his way throughout. He goes out of his way to enjoy the suffering of those around him, and this is best exemplified by when the Glamour on his titular castle fails - showing the entire structure to be composed of the flesh of his still-living victims from top to bottom.
• Big Bad: His release and his desire to control the Void to become a god is the reason the warriors have to fight him.
• Black Knight: His 'human' guise is an odd blend of this and a Paladin, wearing sky-blue armour with gold trimmings. He also specializes in Holy-based attacks.
• Body of Bodies: When he's turned into Neo Exdeath, his form looks like a bunch of demonic entities mushed together.
• Botanical Abomination: His initial final boss form: A gigantic tree with a demonic face, with Exdeath's midsection sprouting from the top.
• Cardboard Prison: The Dawn Warriors booted him out of their dimension, with Dorgann staying behind as warden. As a dustbin for evil creatures, Exdeath himself is an embodiment of this trope.
• Card-Carrying Villain: You can tell Exdeath enjoys being the hammy villain he is.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: The first two battles against him, there is no way to exploit his weakness to Holy, and he's immune to all the status effects.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: In contrast to the past villains who are humans or humanoid creatures by origin, Exdeath was originally a tree that contained the Evil Spirits that were sealed away over 500 years ago, but managed to take a physical form to wreak havoc on the world by using the Power of the Void.
  • He mostly contrasts to the Cloud Of Darkness from III. Both are Ancient Evil beings that use the Power of the Void and both have taking humanoid forms to terrorize the Warriors of Light. But while the Cloud of Darkness physical form is female, Exdeath is has a male humanoid form with armor. The Cloud of Darkness is a primordial being that’s presumably as old as the world itself, while Exdeath in contrast was tree containing evil spirits within itself before combining to form Exdeath.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Exdeath has a monstrous 32,768 HP.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Exdeath's normal warlock form is the last boss fought in the first part of the game after going through his castle. After that, the game shifts into endgame prep mode.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: Exdeath had a castle erected on one of the larger continents in Galuf's World, where he sent his minions in all directions to lay siege to neighboring kingdoms. After his imprisonment, he returns to Castle Exdeath to resume his project of opening the Void.
• Duel Boss: After destroying the crystals, Galuf's last stand has him fighting Exdeath alone in the Great Forest; it is impossible to lose this duel, but the player can and must provide battle input.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: He thinks that Galuf is foolishly trying to overpower him with "hatred." He's wrong...
• Evil Is Bigger: The boss sprites are always much bigger than the characters, but even so, he towers over the Light Warriors in the mobile/PC port and Dissidia.
• Evil Is Hammy: Tied with Kefka as the ur-example of this in Final Fantasy. His personality can be described as a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain cranked up to 11.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: During the final battle, he becomes consumed by the Void which he had attempted to gain control over.
• Evil Is Visceral:
  • Exdeath's crystalline fortess is an elaborate glamour to conceal the fleshy, bone-covered walls and steaming lava pits within.
  • During the climax in the Interdimensional Rift, Exdeath's 'tree' form has exposed muscle tissue beneath its bark.
• Evil Laugh: Mwa-hahaha! Shows up so often that Dissidia NT made it one of his unlockable quotes (which are all taken from a character's most memorable lines/scenes). The only other character whose laugh is one of these unlockable quotes? Kefka.
• Evil Overlord: He has the multitude of demons sealed in the Rift at his beck and call, apparently by promising to reshape the world for them to rule. There's also the fact that he himself is actually composed of multiple demons.
• Evil Sounds Deep: He went from a less-popular villain who was shoehorned in between IV's Golbez and VI's Kefka, to a fan favorite once Gerald C. Rivers (M. Bison!) was cast in Dissidia to convey his hamminess.
• Fighting a Shadow: In the Merged World, the Sealed Castle is patrolled by "Exdeath's Souls": which are ghostly replicas.
• Final Boss, New Dimension: Pursuing Exdeath into the Interdimensional Rift.
• Final-Exam Boss: Each of Neo Exdeath's segments has a designation that is weak to a particular Legendary Weapon or summon. This means that once the player knows which one is which, they can make the fight very easy.
• Four Is Death: Neo Exdeath has four targets on his body who all have to be destroyed to kill it.
• From a Single Cell: Or rather, a single splinter in Krile's hand, he can regrow into the familiar Exdeath shape.
• Genius Bruiser: Exdeath relies on his high Defense to thwart melee attacks in battle. He's got a Herculean physique (which makes him stand out among Dissidia's rogues gallery). He's equally powerful in magic, as well as a keen strategist.
  Bartz: Exdeath! No way we'll let you get away with this!
  Exdeath: Mwa-hahahaha... Have you any idea what I plan to get away with in the first place?
• A Glass of Chianti: This◊ rather inexplicable piece of Amano art has him lounging in armor with a snifter of unidentified liquid.
• Godhood Seeker: Wishes to control the Void for this purpose.
• Healing Factor: Exdeath can seemingly regenerate from anything thrown at him, and quickly at that. The Dawn Warriors were unable to put him down permanently, leading some of them (over Dorgann's objections) to propose dumping him in Bartz's World as the sensible option. When the Void consumes Exdeath, however, his healing ability is nullified and his body loses cohesion (à la Zeromus in FFII), creating Neo Exdeath. This is just as bad for you as it is for him, since Neo Exdeath is the final opponent of the game and can be a bit of a challenge.
• Humanoid Abomination: Two arms and two legs, at least.
• Implacable Man: The reason why he was sealed away. Nothing Galuf and the other Warriors of Dawn did was able to kill him.
• Kick the Dog:
  • After his "defeat" in Castle Exdeath, he reduces himself to a splinter to hide among the group until he can unleash the next phase of his plan. He could have lodged in anyone's hand, but he picks Krile, the granddaughter of the old enemy he'd just killed.
  • After gaining the power of the Void, he uses it wantonly to erase several towns, in a manner similar to Kefka randomly firing his "Light of Judgement". There really was no reason for him to use the Void on Bartz's hamlet (aside from the fact that Dorgann chose to retire there), along with several other towns that had no bearing on the main plot whatsoever.
• Knight of Cerebus: Despite his bluster, he is good at outmaneuvering the heroes. The game gets noticeably more serious when he is on-screen. And usually somebody you cared about dies.
• Large Ham: One of his most distinct character traits is just how much of a scenery-chewing villain he is. Just about all of his dialogue is composed of grandiose evil speeches, and not a scene with him goes by without a "Mwa-hahaha!"
• Leitmotif: "The Evil Lord Exdeath". Complete with "Psycho" Strings and Evil Laughter in the background!
• Light Is Not Good: He knows Holy and is not afraid to use it. Then there is Almagest, the strongest Holy elemental ability. He also knows Dispel, another White Mage-exclusive spell.
• Made of Evil: An amalgamation of evil spirits who have become one, nihilistic being.
• Magic Knight: Wears bulky armor, wields a large sword, has strong melee attacks... and magic to kill you many times over.
• Merger of Souls: Exdeath came about after several creatures were sealed within a tree in the Great Forest of Moore.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Exdeath? You can be sure his objective isn't world peace.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Neo Exdeath wants to destroy everything in existence so he, too, can disappear. Whether or not this was the original Exdeath's goal is an open question.
• One-Winged Angel: His tree form and Neo Exdeath, his Void-ified form, make up the game's final battle scenario. It's the first final boss in Final Fantasy to have multiple phrases to it. (The Cloud of Darkness was a separate entity from III's Xande, and IV's Zemus was a Cutscene Boss.)
• Our Centaurs Are Different: The horned figure who can be seen during the final fight in the Void was apparently a possible design for Exdeath.
• Our Demons Are Different: He's a mass of demons sealed in a sentient tree.
• Outside-Context Problem: The reason for the first two crystals shattering seems to stem from their overuse, but the Water Crystal indicates that there's some outside force accelerating it. It's not until Karnak that Exdeath is mentioned by name. (Galuf's amnesia prevents him from remembering.)
• Percent Damage Attack: Exdeath's Blaze spell does a quarter of a character's max HP in fire damage.
• Physical God: He is a extremely powerful warlock with god-like powers born from the sage tree that contained the evil souls that merged together to create Exdeath, He becomes more powerful as Neo Exdeath who has complete control over the void, and the power to destroy both himself and all of existence.
• Power of the Void: His obsession is to obtain the Void which was sealed away and use it for his own ends.
• Recurring Boss: After he's freed, the party has to fight Exdeath several times throughout the game (much like Golbez and Kefka), including at the end of it.
• Scary Impractical Armor: The armor is molded to his muscles, colored cyan, and honestly doesn't look like something a human could practically wear. This is probably justified in that he's not human.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: He was sealed deep beneath the earth in a forest in Bartz's World using the power of the four Crystals, since the Dawn Warriors could not find a way around his seeming immortality. Secondly, the Great Forest of Moore once contained a tree that was used to seal away evil spirits, demons, and other such creatures. Eventually, so much evil was sealed away within the tree that the tree itself turned evil, morphed into a human shape, and left the forest to terrorize the world. That tree is Exdeath.
• Shoulders of Doom: Those spikes have got to be over a foot high.
• Signature Move: Grand Cross, which inflicts random status effects on the entire party. If you're really unlucky this can result in a Total Party Kill.
• Spikes of Villainy: Both the devil horns on his head and the shoulder spikes.
• This Cannot Be!: The normally-unflappable Exdeath succumbs to his fear—along with the Void—after you defeat his 'tree' form, causing him to be absorbed.
• Tin Tyrant: A stepping point between Golbez and Kefka Palazzo. Fun Fact: He's the last major villain to wear armor until XII's Judges, and the last out of an almost unbroken line for the first five games (III being the exception).
• Turns Red: The first segment of Neo Exdeath begins using Grand Cross more frequently as it loses health.
• When Trees Attack: What happens when you use a tree in a magic forest as a trash compactor for evil spirits.
• Where I Was Born and Razed: The tree which became Exdeath originated in the Great Forest of Moore. In his race to destroy the Crystals of Galuf's World, he burns down the entire forest, save for the eldest tree, because the forest would not allow him to enter.
• Why Won't You Die?: Exdeath says this to Galuf during the latter's Obi-Wan Moment.
• You Have Failed Me: He finally gets fed up with Gilgamesh's incompetence and sentences him to the rift between dimensions, where Gilgamesh has been wandering ever since.
• You Killed My Father: After Galuf dies of exhaustion from battling Exdeath, his granddaughter Krile replaces him as the fourth party member.

Gilgamesh

"Enough expository banter! Now we fight like men! And ladies! And ladies who dress like men! For Gilgamesh...it is morphing time!"

Voiced by: Kazuya Nakai (Japanese) and Keith Szarabajka (English) [Dissidia, World of Final Fantasy and various media]

Exdeath's Number Two for Brains. An enthusiastic warrior who challenges the party several times throughout the story.

---

• An Arm and a Leg: He somehow loses three of his arms in VIII, replacing them with obvious cardboard cutouts.
• Antagonist in Mourning: He is saddened to find out that Galuf has been slain, to the point he stays silent for the rest of the battle, in total contrast to his normal self.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: All of his battles (except for the first demo fight) have the bass-heavy "Battle/Clash on the Big Bridge" theme replace the stock boss theme.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Hammy, boastful, and packing a punch.
• Bootstrapped Leitmotif: In your very first encounter, his battle sequence uses the usual boss theme. However, the second encounter on the Big Bridge includes one of the series' all-time most popular tracks, "Battle At The Big Bridge," and every subsequent encounter with Gilgamesh (yes, including all of his subsequent cameos elsewhere in the series) features the tune.

• Breakout Character: Gilgamesh ends up becoming popular in the entire Final Fantasy mythos, having appeared in a number of other titles since, and been added to remakes of earlier titles, and become the most recurring singular character in Final Fantasy media. His role varies - he is sometimes an ally, an optional boss, a summoned monster, or all of these things - but as a whole he is a wandering swordsman with a vast collection of famous and powerful swords.
• The Cameo: He's notable for being the only character so far to appear in other numbered games while retaining his memories from V; as in, he's not playing a different guy with the same name (apart from his appearances in IX and XV who bear no relation): either as a boss fight, a summon, or both. To date, he has appeared in remakes of I, IV, and VI, as well as IV: The After Years, VIII, XII, XIII-2, XIV, Type-0, Dissidia 012, Stranger of Paradise, and VII Rebirth. He also cameos in World of Final Fantasy and Mobius Final Fantasy during the latter's anniversary event.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: His multi-armed form may look complex and dangerous, but due to wielding the Joke Weapon "Excalipoor', he can barely inflict Scratch Damage i.e. 20-30 HP at most.
• Continuity Cavalcade: His subsequent appearances. Not just the fact that he's the same character and thus references events from this game, but he has a habit of picking up bootleg versions of signature weapons from other FF games—even the games he never appears in! (Such as Cloud's Buster Sword and Tidus' Brotherhood.)
• Defeat Equals Friendship: Mostly by dint of being fired. With each subsequent battle with Bartz and company, he becomes more and more friendly with them, culminating in potentially performing a Heroic Sacrifice to save them from Necrophobe.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: While the game never explicitly describes him as one, Gilgamesh visually is a mashup of samurai and kabuki styles, his signature equipment set is the Genji equipment (named after the alternate reading of the Minamoto clan, one of the earliest samurai clans), he frequently has at least one katana among his possessions, and the spear he uses in his sprites most strongly resembles a naginata.
• Final Speech: Before casting Self-Destruct, he stops to give a personal little goodbye to each of the Light Warriors.
• Forgot Flanders Could Do That: His lackluster battle prowess and sword-obsession in other parts of the series. He doesn't actually use a sword until he grows extra arms, and he only uses one. What's more, he's a challenging boss most of the time and is described by one NPC as having defeated an entire Redshirt Army on his own. At some point, his incompetence was toned down and written off as being a capable fighter who's held back by a mix of bad luck (particularly when it comes to weapon appraisals...) and his over-confidence. He can One-Hit Kill boss characters in VIII, he's one of the deadliest Mark Hunts in XII, XIII-2 describes him as a legendary warrior, and XIV shows him defeating countless wandering duelists before encountering the player. XIV also expands interest his in weapons back to spears (his starter weapon in V), as he spends most of his early appearance seeking out a halberd.
• Friendly Enemy: His rivalry with the heroes becomes friendlier in nature as you keep beating him.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: The first example in the franchise.

• Incoming Ham:
  • Gilgamesh's speech before the battle on the Big Bridge.
  • "BAAAAAARTZ!!"
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: You gotta feel sorry for him when Exdeath dooms him to the Interdimensional Rift for his repeated failures, ensuring that Gilgamesh will never return "home".
• Large Ham: "INCONCEIVABLE!"
• Mascot Mook: One of the better-known characters in the series, due to his massive amount of appearances and memorable theme song.
• Medium Awareness: It appears he has developed this due to his travels in the Rift. He breaks the fourth wall in his XIII-2 DLC, and his appearance during the 1st anniversary event for Mobius Final Fantasy confirms it: He starts speaking in text boxes that Wol and Echo can apparently see (hear?) and claims that his "fans" demand it!
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: When he morphs in Castle Exdeath. Also subverted because the boss fight becomes a complete joke at that point, and Exdeath immediately banishes him.
• Phantom Zone: As punishment for his constant bungling, he gets tossed into the Interdimensional Rift by Exdeath. This doesn't kill him, however.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Gilgamesh happily follows his orders to stop the heroes, but he enjoys their battles (at least until he loses) and considers them worthy foes.
• Recurring Boss: Gilgamesh is fought a handful of times once the Light Warriors arrive on Galuf's World.
• Senseless Sacrifice: Due to Gameplay and Story Segregation with regards to his Heroic Sacrifice against Necrophobe. Gilgamesh only appears after Necrophobe has less than 10,000 HP remaining, at which point you're already winning against him anyway.

Demons of the Rift

When Exdeath sought to obtain the power of the Void, he released the legendary demons of the Interdimensional Rift, some whom he sent out into the world to stop the Warriors of Light, others guarding the way to the center of the Void, should the Warriors of Light make it inside. According to them, the demons of the Rift believe Exdeath would create a new world of darkness for them to inhabit.

---

• 13 Is Unlucky: Invoked as there are 13 of them.
• Barrier Change Boss: Melusine changes weaknesses every several turns during battle via the "Barrier Change" move.
• Berserk Button: Having Float active will anger Catastrophe to use 100 G to put you back on the ground. However, 100 G is reflectable, which means with both Float and Reflect active, Catastrophe does nothing but spam the ineffective move, letting you whack at him with utter impunity.
• Crystal Ball: Calofisteri's battle sprite has her posturing next to a crystal ball that's about half the size of her entire body, and this demon focuses primarily on spellcasting in battle.
• Demonic Possession: The demon Melusine possesses Lenna at one point.
• Master of Illusion: The demon Halicarnassus outright refers to himself as this, and naturally uses illusions as a power. Disguising himself as a woman, he gives Bartz a kiss of death when saved from what appears to be a trap, only to reveal his ruse later before the battle with him.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Necrophobe, the final demon to be faced, is a vampire-like entity.
• Terrible Trio: The demons Triton, Nereid and Phobos are fought together as a team.
• The Unfought: The red demon, who is killed by Leviathan before you can fight him.
• Villain Ball: The demon Azulmagia will only attack the heroes if they admit they are heroes; furthermore if you use the spell Self-Destruct on him he will learn it and use it on himself for no reason.
• We Can Rule Together: The reason they worked for Exdeath was that he promised them a share in the new evil world he was going to create. How truthful he was being is anyones guess of course.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: A red demon confronts the party as they go for the last tablet that will give them access to the Twelve Sealed Weapons but is killed by Leviathan, the guardian of the tablet, who the party optionally has to fight instead. His name is never even revealed.

Enuo

The original evil. A dark wizard who 1,000 years before the events of the game nearly destroyed the world and whose defeat caused the world to split in two.

---

• Adapted Out: He's back to being The Ghost in the Pixel Remaster version as said version cut away the GBA-onwards content.
• Ascended Extra: Went from being The Ghost in the original version to the ultimate opponent in the GBA version.
• Deal with the Devil: As a wizard, he decided he would trade his immortality for mastery and control over the Void.
• Eldritch Abomination: His design◊ is humanoid, actually. Apart from the vest made of tentacles that may or may not be part of his body.
• Expy: Enuo's design (seen above), takes a lot from Yoshitaka' Amano's concept art◊ of Garland,◊ and of◊ Chaos,◊ from Final Fantasy. Enuo, as noted in the Shout-Out trope below, is also named after Enuo, the goddess of war and discord, sometimes identified with Eris, which ties him to the modern interpretations of Chaos, and Chaos is named the God of Discord, in Dissidia Final Fantasy. The Sealed temple Enuo is fought in, has also parallels to the Chaos Shrine.
• The Ghost: In the original versions Enuo was mentioned but never appears, having been killed 1000 years ago. Averted starting with the GBA version, where he was promoted to Superboss status.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He's indirectly responsible for the events of the game, and his presence can be felt through the Void.
• Posthumous Character: Was killed 1000 years before the game starts. He summoned the Void and his actions split the world into two, before he was swallowed by the void. His past deeds set into motion the events of the main game.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: His domain is entitled the Sealed Temple.
• Shout-Out: Possibly to Enyo, Greek goddess of destruction and counterpart of Ares, whose name could also be transliterated as Enuo.
• Superboss: In the GBA version.

The Job Classes

The job system is the cornerstone of the game, acquired from the spirits of the warriors who fought Enuo, who reside in the shards of the crystals that shatter one by one as the party fails to protect them. The jobs include reworked versions of those from the original game and Final Fantasy III and also originates a number of new jobs, most of which have since become staples in the franchise.

Freelancer

Unspecialized fighters who can equip any armor or weapon. (This is the starting 'job' of the game.)

Command Ability: !Fight; !Item

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 0

Agility: 0

Stamina: 0

Magic: 0

ABP for Mastery: 12803 (SNES, Pixel Remaster); 15658 (GBA, PS); 15618 (Mobile and Steam)^note  Upon mastering the entirety of the jobs in-game, your Freelancer will gain the three stars associated with job mastery over their head. This does nothing and is entirely cosmetic; Freelancers automatically gain stat bonuses and native abilities upon mastering a single job.

---

• Anti-Frustration Feature: Freelancers will gain the passive abilities of any job that's been mastered. The exceptions are Berserk and Undead—otherwise players would have to avoid mastering those classes to keep from being forced into those status effects.
• Badass Normal: They don't earn any ABP and have no abilities of their own besides attack and defend. However, their ability to equip everything allows them to have a piece of equipment for just about every situation.
• Cast Speciation: Each character has slightly different starting stats. Bartz is slightly stronger than the rest, Galuf is tougher, Lenna is best at magic, Faris is good in speed and strength, and Krile is the fastest. Downplayed, in the sense that these only affect you at the very early game, with equipment and job choices affecting your stat growth the most through the rest.
• Crutch Character: They're a combination of this and Magikarp Power. Very early on, they are mostly useful for their ability to equip everything. Then they suffer a sharp drop in effectiveness as the specialized stat spreads and native commands from the different jobs become essential to progress. It's until you start mastering jobs, allowing the Freelancer to gain stat bonuses and equip different battle commands, that it transforms into a Master of All.
• Jack of All Stats: The Freelancer is this at the start of the game. No bonuses, no penalties. The only differences between Bartz, Lenna, Faris and Galuf are slight stat differences that only affect them in the very early game.
• Magikarp Power: Freelancers gain the passive abilities of any mastered job. By the final dungeon, they're liable to have several powerful stat boosts and can equip two abilities from whatever job they've learned it from, and don't carry the statistical penalties that come with being assigned a specific job.
• Master of All: The general result by the final stages of the game. Since Freelancers get all the passive boosts of jobs that have been fully mastered and none of their stat penalties, they will probably have mastered several weapon types and be incredibly powerful both physically and magically.
• Multi-Melee Master: Freelancers can equip every type of equipment.

Wind Crystal Jobs

Knight

Valiant warriors who protect allies low on HP and bravely slash their way through hordes of enemies. Knights are one of the oldest Final Fantasy staples; able to equip knight swords, shields and heavy armor, the Knight is a tough nut to crack.

Very simple and straightforward, it's an ideal class to introduce newcomers to the "Job" concept and its quirks.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: !Guard (default)

Support Ability: Cover, Two-Handed/Dual Grip, Equip Shields, Equip Armor, Equip Swords

Ultimate Weapon: Excalibur, Ragnarok, Brave Blade (SNES, Pixel Remaster); Apocalypse (GBA on)

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 23

Agility: 1

Stamina: 20

Magic: -14

ABP for Mastery: 690

---

• Alliterative Name: The Brave Blade.
• Boring, but Practical: Knights do not have the complex or flashy skillsets of some other jobs, but they can hit enemies very hard, can protect characters from needing a revive, and are difficult to kill.
• Clothes Make the Superman: The Knight relies entirely on your available equipment to be able to deal damage and tank, with only one of its abilities allowing you to increase damage. This is possibly lampshaded by the support abilities of the class; it's the only job in game that has three of them, all centered around allowing other classes to use their heavy armor/weapons.
• Crutch Character: Knights are useful in the early game to deal reliable damage and Cover the squishier mage classes when they get in trouble, but as the game progresses, they become less useful and their linearity becomes a liability.
• Draw Aggro: When other characters are in critical health, a Knight will automatically intercept attacks with their passive Cover ability.
• Gendered Outfit: The men wear red armor, the women wear blue, and Krile wears pink.
• Healing Shiv: A Knight equipped with a Flame Ring and a Flametongue/Firebrand will be able to heal themselves by attacking themselves.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Excalibur, one of the Twelve Legendary Weapons. 110 Power, Holy-elemental, +5 Strength, and only available for Knights.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • Ragnarok, which is only available as a drop from super-boss Shiryu or as a rare steal from one of Neo Exdeath's sections. It's non-elemental, but also has 140 power.
  • The Brave Blade, which is only available in a secret passage in Moore. 150 power - the strongest in the entire game bar none -, and +5 Strength, but it decreases in power for every time you ran from battle, and yes, this includes the times you did so before obtaining the blade.
• Joke Weapon: The Excalipoor, though not exclusive to the Knight, is a facsimile of the true Excalibur - it has the same attack strength, but will always deal 1 point of damage when attacking.
• Knight in Shining Armor: The Knight's innate abilities points to the notion of romantic chivalry—they are masters of swordplay who automatically shield wounded allies from attack.
• Knightly Sword and Shield: Although several jobs use swords, Knights have a specific type called a knight sword which only they, Freelancers, and Gladiators wield. They also grant the Equip Shield ability at level 4.
• Magically Inept Fighter: Outside of being able to equip knight-specific magic swords, Knights have a significant penalty to their magic stat. This extends to all melee jobs in this game, with the exception of Mystic Knight.
• Magic Knight: They're inferior to the actual Mystic Knight of the game, but Knights are able to equip various elemental swords that infuse their attacks with Fire, Ice, Lightning or Holy.
• Mighty Glacier: Knights are very strong and tanky, but are between the slowest characters in your party, even if they lack a native Agility penalty. This is because heavy armor, starting from this game, comes with a higher weight stat; the heavier the armor, the less turns your character will be able to take.
• No-Sell: The !Guard ability. Rather than attacking, the Knight becomes invulnerable to physical attacks that turn.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: The Blood Sword has a 25% Hit Rate. Damage dealt to the enemy (barring the Undead) is drained by the user, and it counts as a magical attack, as well. This means the damage isn't halved by Back Row.
• Status Buff: Two-Handed increases the Knight's damage output at the expense of being able to hold a shield.
• Useless Useful Spell: !Guard, the class' single battle command. You become immune to physical damage, but to do so you must give up your turn. This is only useful in very specific situations (such as protecting multiple characters on critical health when you are battling a purely physical attacker), but otherwise, your turn is better spent healing those characters or killing whatever is threatening them.
• Weak to Magic: Downplayed. Cover and !Guard are ignored by magic-based attacks, but the Knights themselves can equip the Aegis Shield, and various armors and helmets that reduce magic damage or ignore harmful magic statuses.

Monk

Masters of hand-to-hand combat who intuitively counterattack, and can concentrate their energy to deal massive damage or heal themselves. Another staple from the old days of the franchise, Monks are a bit different this time. Unable to equip weapons or shields at all, they rely on high HP numbers and innate counters in order to progress through the game. Monks can only equip light armor, combat hats and armlets. They also have the highest Stamina and Strength values in the game.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: !Kick (default)^note !Kick can only be used by Monks, and can't be learned or equipped by any other class in-game, not even Freelancers.; !Focus/!Build Up, !Chakra/!Mantra (learnable)

Support Ability: Counter, Barehanded, HP +10%, HP +20%, HP + 30%

Ultimate weapon: None; the Kaiser Knuckles accessory gives the user +50 Attack if Barehanded.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 26

Agility: 1

Stamina: 26

Magic: -23

ABP for Mastery: 700

---

• Achilles' Heel: The Monk's battle effectiveness is based on two factors; level and high HP numbers. So spells that reduce your level (Discord, Dark Spark, Sonic Wave, etc.) and HP percentage-based attacks (Missile, Gravity, Maelstrom, etc.) are the Monk's bane.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: The Kaiser Knuckles accessory adds a huge amount to the Monks' attack stat, which makes up for their late-game disadvantages.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Monks do not equip knuckles as they do in other games, instead using only fists. Their attack power is based on the character's level, with the number being twice that.
• Boring, but Practical: Monks don't have a lot of versatility, but their attack power is handy early in the game and many of their passive abilities provide significant HP boosts, making them useful to master. In addition, they have the highest Strength and Vitality modifiers, making mastering it useful for min-maxers.
• Charged Attack: !Focus uses a turn to charge up two really powerful punches.
• Critical Hit Class: Bare fists have an 8℅ chance to critically strike.
• Crutch Character: Barehanded makes Monks powerful attackers without any equipment, which makes them useful in the early game and also cheap to equip. However, not using weapons means that they can't upgrade their damage when powerful weapons become available for other jobs, and they are also unable to spellcast using weapons as items, add elemental affinities to their attacks, or use weapons/shields for added evasion, stat boosts or assorted effects.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Monks are based around tanking damage with their massive HP, and dish it back with Counter. This also makes them play well with the Cover ability. However, percent-damage attacks like Missile, Gravity or Maelstrom will quickly put them on the ropes.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: The !Kick command lets them hit all foes for reduced damage.
• Magically Inept Fighter: Although they have a magical ability in Chakra, Monks have the biggest (-23) penalty to their Magic stat. The Monk's signature style also has its drawbacks; barehanded punches are difficult to boost, and the fact that the Monk cannot equip weapons or robes means it's the only job in the game which cannot boost any elemental attack.
• Meditation Powerup: Chakra heals some HP and low-level status ailments.
• Secret Art: !Kick, the main battle command for the Monk, can NOT be accessed, equipped or learned by any other classes, including the Freelancer.
• Useless Useful Spell: Unfortunately for the Monk, most of its abilities are subpar.
  • !Kick, the job's main battle command. It's quite useful in the early game, but as you progress, it becomes increasingly weak to the point where attacking enemies one by one ends battles faster.
  • !Focus/!Build Up. You spend a turn charging up, then unleash an attack with double the normal strength. This can be useful to avoid certain enemy scripts and counters, but attacking twice usually accomplishes the same without wasting a command slot.
  • !Chakra/Mantra. The Monk restores a small amount of HP, and also removes Blind and Poison from themselves. Nifty effect, but what's the catch? This ability scales from Magic Power, and the Monk has the worst Magic stat in the game. Very useful when your max HP is in the low hundreds; not so much when your HP increases to the several thousands.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Galuf is entirely shirtless for this job. Bartz wears a small pink vest.
• Weak to Magic: Monks are quite vulnerable to status ailments and other magic atacks. Their attack power being twice their character level means they're hit particularly hard by status effects or spells that result in Level Drain. Not to mention they have no way to protect themselves from Instant Death spells like Break or Banish.

Thief

These nimble rogues run circles around foes, whilst pilfering valuable items from them. Thief is another classic class from Final Fantasy, able to equip knives, boomerangs, light armor and combat hats, but unable to equip shields. They are the fastest class in the game; this enables them to take several turns in the time it takes an enemy to attack even once. This is balanced by their almost non-existent battle prowess, and bad equipment.

Type: Utility

Command Ability: !Steal (default); !Flee/!Escape, !Mug/!Capture (learnable)

Support Ability: Find Passages/Passages, Vigilance/Caution, Sprint/Dash, Artful Dodger/Agility

Ultimate equipment: None. The Thief's Gloves will double the success chance of !Steal/!Mug to 80%.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 1

Agility: 16

Stamina: 2

Magic: -6

ABP for Mastery: 635

---

• Achilles' Heel: The class is dependent on its high speed to act; so spells like Slow, Stop and Web/Thread will remove any speed advantage the Thief has.
• Elite Tweak: Giving the Thief a magic school that doesn't rely on Magic Power - such as Blue, Sing or Time - is one way to make their high speed useful.
• Fragile Speedster: The Thief is the fastest job in the game, but their Strength and Stamina are one of the weakest for the physical classes.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Chicken Knife can be considered one for the class, despite the fact that most classes in the game can equip it. This is because of an exclusive quirk; the Chicken Knife takes into account both Strength and Agility for damage calculation, and with the highest speed stat in the game, a Thief will deal massive damage in a single stroke.^note Ironically, using Agility for damage calculation was the intended effect for all knives in the game. The Chicken Knife is the only non-bugged knife in all versions of the game.
• Long-Range Fighter: In the middle of the game there are a few Battle Boomerangs they can wield, allowing them to be used from the back row.
• Magically Inept Fighter: Has the usual Magic penalty associated with melee classes.
• Not the Intended Use: The cost of using the Chicken Knife is its 25% chance of making the party flee... when used with the Attack command. If a Thief uses it only with Mug, they will be able to ignore the escape chance.
• Random Drop Booster: Thief Gloves double the chance of successfully stealing from an enemy - from 40% to 80%.
• Spider-Sense: Vigilance/Caution prevents rear attacks from enemy mobs.
• Sprint Shoes: Another passive ability that allows the party to run two times faster in dungeons and towns. (The Steam and Mobile release extends this to the overworld, too.)
• Stealth Clothes: Galuf sports this as a Thief.
• Support Party Member: Stealing from enemies is sometimes the only way to get certain gear and items, and you can even equip/use stolen gear in the middle of battle. The Thief's additional speed is also useful for item usage, sometimes allowing the Thief to act as a pseudo-White Mage by spamming consumables and potions. The class also benefits from equipping a Magic school like White, Blue or Time, which have a number of spells that don't require the user to have high Magic Power and benefit from being able to act faster.
• True Sight: The Find Passages passive ability makes secret hallways and tunnels visible to the player.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Find Passages is only useful on a blind playthrough - taking note, memorizing the passages or simply browsing the internet functionally accomplishes the same for any repeated playthrough.
  • Sprint allows your party to moves twice as fast on the overhead map, but this effect can be simulated on any emulation software for the SNES by simply setting the speed of the game to x2. The versions starting from GBA also have a default dash button, and using it with Sprint on only makes your character move at uncontrollable speeds.
• Utility Party Member: Most of their Job abilities provide some sort of utility, such as Sprint's increase walking speed or Find Passages making it easier to discover secrets.
• Video Game Stealing: The requisite job that lets players rob enemies for potions, weapons, etcetera. !Mug, the level 6 ability, adds an attack to it.
• Weak to Magic: The Thief has no way to defend against harmful magic statuses or Instant Death attacks. Only being able to equip light armor also means that magic attacks will harm them quite a lot, and unlike physical damage, this won't be cut in half by staying on the backrow.

Blue Mage

V introduces this unique Mage. Instead of the standard Black, White, and Summon magicks, they study the techniques of enemies. Blue Mages are a strange beast; their equipment options are reminiscent of the Red Mage, being able to use swords, shields and light armor like some physical classes, but also rods, magic hats and robes like most spellcasters. Despite being one of the starting jobs, it takes quite some time to start to pull off its weight in battle. With enough investment, Blue Magic is arguably the most versatile and powerful school of magic in the game.

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !Blue (default); !Check/!Observe, !Scan/!Analyze (learnable)

Support Ability: Learning

Ultimate spell: None; Mighty Guard is one of the most potent Blue Magic spells, but also between the hardest and latest you can learn.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: -8

Agility: 1

Stamina: 3

Magic: 23

ABP for Mastery: 350

---

• Anti-Frustration Feature: Few Blue Magic spells are Permanently Missable Content; if you miss some in Bartz' world, there will be enemies that use them in Galuf's world. Ditto for Galuf's and the Merged World. Failing all this, Azulmagia on the final dungeon is able to use all but two Blue Magic Spells - those being Transfusion and Moon Flute.
• Blow You Away: The Aero- spell line deals wind-based damage.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Using a Blue Mage requires dedication, a strategy guide, and some cheesing here and there, but they have a number of very powerful and/or immunity-dodging spells that aren't available to any other job.
• Disc-One Nuke: Death Claw reduces an enemy to a single digit of HP and can be obtained in Karnak. Aqua Breath, another early spell, is very powerful even against things that aren't weak to it. Their only drawback is massive MP cost at the time.
• Domino Mask: ALL party members wear a domino mask.
• Elemental Powers:
  • Blue Mages have an inherent affinity to the Wind element, being able to learn Aero, Aera and Aeroga - appropiate, given that you receive the job from the Wind Crystal shards. They are also able to boost its damage by equipping the Air Knife.
  • Emission is a single-target mid-tier Fire spell that has the same power as Fira/Fire 2.
• Enemy Scan: Check, which shows enemy HP, and Scan, which is identical to the Libra spell - showing Level, HP, weaknesses and status -, except in that it takes up an ability slot rather than consuming MP.
• Fixed Damage Attack:
  • 1000 Needles always deals 1000 damage, no matter what.
  • The '???' spell uses the difference between current and max HP, while Vampire absorbs HP using the same formula, only at half power.
• Guide Dang It!: Blue Magic requires your learner to be hit by an enemy spell that can be learned, and then winning the battle. This seems straightforward, until you realize that the game doesn't give you a list of the enemies that can use these attacks and where to find them. And on top of this, some enemies won't use these attacks unless you control them with the Beastmaster, or confuse them.
• HP to One: Done by Death Claw, which reduces an enemy to a single digit of their HP and also paralyzes them.
• Life Drain: Vampire is a single-target spell that removes half of the caster's max HP less their current HP - if your max HP is 750, and your current HP is 700, this will drain the target's HP by 25. This is particularly useful in combination with White Wind.
• Magic Knight: Blue Mages have a Strength penalty and therefore are much more weighted to 'magic' than 'knight', but they can equip swords and shields, if anything for the buffs they provide.
• Magic Music: Ponds' Chorus, Lilliputian Lyric, and Moon Flute are still cast as spells rather than bard Songs, but they have the same music-note visual effect.
• Magikarp Power: Although Blue Mage is a starting class, it becomes most potent by the end of the game once the player can obtain most or all of its 30 available spells. It can use offensive magic, attack elemental weaknesses inacessible by any other mage, and give powerful buffs to the party.
• Mana Burn: Magic Hammer cuts the target's MP in half.
• The Medic: Can pull off this duty for your party with White Wind and Transfusion.
• Nerf: Using the Excalipoor and Goblin Punch together was a traditional way to get a really powerful attack out of the Blue Mage, but the mobile and Steam version removed this strategy. Vampire was also twice as powerful in the GBA version due to a Good Bad Bug, but mobile/Steam versions fixed it, and made Vampire fail against "Heavy" type enemies.
• Non-Elemental: Level 3 Flare. Also, weirdly, Aqua Breath is this rather than Making a Splash.
• Not Completely Useless: Transfusion/Fusion costs 13 MP to cast, and kills the user to fully restore the HP and MP of the target. The healing can be easily replicated; the MP recover not so much. This is particularly useful in long dungeons or through the way of Loophole Abuse; as long as you have a way to revive the caster, you basically have infinite MP. Transfusion also works on the caster themselves; the 13 MP will be removed and the Blue Mage will die immediately, but upon revival, they will have all of their MP back.
• One-Hit Kill: Doom, Roulette, and Level 5 Death. The last in particular is notable because it even works on bosses, which are otherwise immune to this kind of spell.
• Percent Damage Attack:
  • Missile damages the target for 75% of their HP. Of course, it fails on bosses.
  • Level 4 Graviga removes 75% of the HP of every target whose level is divisible by 4.
• Power Copying: The Learning ability. To obtain Blue Magic, at least one person must be equipped with it (whether as the Blue Mage's inherent ability or equipped on another job), and then be hit with the appropiate opponent's skill.
• Situational Damage Attack:
  • Level spells only affect an enemy if their level is divisible by that number.
  • Goblin Punch will deal octuple damage if the user and target are at the same level.
  • Aqua Breath deals octuple damage to "desert" type enemies, like the Sandworm.
• Support Party Member: Blue Mages get few but potent support spells. Of note is White Wind (which heals the party based on the caster's current HP number), and Mighty Guard (which in this game sets the Protect, Shell and Float status to the entire party).
• Taking You with Me: Exploder/Self-Destruct kills the caster to deal unblockable damage to a target equal to the user's current HP.
• Useless Useful Spell: Check/Scan, since it's an ability that takes up a command slot and all it does is replicate the level 1 White spell Libra for no MP cost.

Black Mage

The now-iconic Black Mage is a master of offensive magic. With the fire, ice and lightning elements to their call and beck, all enemies upon their wake will be blown to smithereens. Black Mages are heavily directed towards the use of damaging magic, with penalties to all their other stats. They can equip rods to boost their elemental powers, robes and magic hats to increase their magical power, and armlets for a bit of defense, but are unable to use shields, which only aids to their overall squishiness.

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !Black (default)

Support Ability: MP +30%

Ultimate spell: Flare; also heavily associated with the Wizard Rod.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: -9

Agility: 0

Stamina: -2

Magic: 31

ABP for Mastery: 680

---

• Achilles' Heel:
  • A Black Mage is entirely centered on offensive magicks; as such, an enemy using Reflect will force the Black Mage to skip their turns, or attack with its weak rod, until the status is removed or expires on its own.
  • The Black Mage has no native protection against the Mute/Silenced status. However, spells cast through weapons - such as elemental rods - can still be used as normal.
• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: The class is limited to robes, magic hats and armlets as defensive gear. Despite having one empty arm, they can't equip shields.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Flare, the most powerful Black Magic spell, ignores magic defense.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Flare isn't that much more powerful than the -ga spells (unless the enemy has high Magic Defense) - and is actually somewhat weaker than them if the caster is equipped with an elemental rod -, while also costing more MP. It can't multi-target like the elemental spells either.
• Balance Buff: Break has a better hit rate against non-boss enemies here than it does in other games in the series.
• Boring, but Practical: The Black Mage only does one thing well: deal massive damage, irrespective of enemy numbers. But it's damn good at it.
• Crippling Overspecialization: They focus on dealing damage to detrimental levels; the class has penalties on both Strength and Stamina, and doesn't receive any bonus on Agility. But they have the second highest - 31 - magic stat in the base game.
• Dark Is Not Evil: As usual for heroic Black Mages in the franchise.
• Elemental Powers:
  • In addition to the Fire, Ice and Lightning trio, Black Mages also make use of the Poison and Bio spells.
  • The Black Mage makes the best use out of the Wizard Rod, which boosts all elemental magic - except Water and Holy - by 50%. With four elements to choose from, a Black Mage will never lack an option to deal massive damage against most enemies.
• Elite Tweak: One way to avoid the Black Mage's linearity is to have your caster equip another school of magic. Blue is a prime target for this, but White and Time can also work for a pseudo-Red Mage effect.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Most of the Black Mage's spellbook is based on these three elements.
• Glass Cannon: They're more akin to this than Squishy Wizard. They're able to dish out massive damage, but their defenses suck on both ends of the spectrum.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Legendary Weapon, the Wizard/Magus Rod. It's actually not exclusive to the Black Mage, but it's the job that makes the best use out of the elemental damage boost.
• Joke Weapon: The Lilith/Power Rod. It's not exclusive to the Black Mage, but associated to them thanks to having a 25% chance to cast Osmose when used. When attacking, it doesn't deal any damage, but instead attempts to cast the Charm status (loses its next turn) on the target. This is fine, until you realize the Charm status has a success rate of 50%. So, overall, this weapon has a 37.5% chance of doing nothing at all.
• Last Disc Magic: Flare, which isn't obtainable until the third world comes into being. It's found alongside Holy in Fork Tower.
• Life Drain: Drain, which steals HP from the target to restore the caster's own.
• Mana Drain: Osmose, which steals MP from the target to restore the caster's own.
• One-Hit Kill: Break, which does so via Taken for Granite, and Death, which simply kills.
• Status Effects: Can inflict some of these to enemies - Poison, Toad, Sleep and Sap. Break inflicts Petrify too, but petrified enemies are treated as being KO'd.
• Useless Useful Spell: As usual, it's far more efficient to simply kill whatever is in front of you with the Black Mage than attempting to use status against them. There will be two or three times where a Sleep or Break spell will get you out of a hitch, but these are far and few in between.
• Weak Against Magic: Somewhat ironic given their spellcaster status, but the Black Mage has zero defenses against harmful magic statuses other than trying to max out Magic Evade as much as possible.

White Mage

White Mage is the premier user of support magic. Unlike Black Magic, White Magic is essential to surviving the game. With less power than dedicated offensive casters like Summoner and Black Mage, and also unable to deal damage outside of a single spell in the late game, the White Mage is based on supporting and healing the party, with a small subset of harmful status at its disposition. Like the Black Mage, they can only equip robes, magic hats and armlets; but their weapon of choice is the staff. They are also one of three classes unable to equip knives.

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !White (default)

Support Ability: MP +10%

Ultimate spell: Holy; also heavily associated with the Sage's Staff.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: -7

Agility: 1

Stamina: 0

Magic: 25

ABP for Mastery: 580

---

• Achilles' Heel:
  • The White Mage is entirely centered around support magic, and lacks offensive options for the most part. As such, the Berserk status makes the White Mage completely useless in battle - barring the use of the Flail/Morning Star.
  • Silence/Mute as with most spellcasting jobs. But the White Mage can attempt to preemptively prevent the application of these statuses with Shell/Reflect.
• Animal-Eared Headband: Krile wears a cloak with cat ears on it, a reference to the Devout class from III. (A sister job to the White Mage.)
• Anti-Frustration Feature: The Flail, and later, the Morning Star, give the White Mage the ability to somewhat deal decent damage. This prevents a Berserked/Silenced White Mage from being entirely dead-weight in battle under those conditions.
• Anti-Magic: Shell, which cuts magic damage in half (and halves the chance of the spell successfully landing in the first place), and Reflect, which bounces standard magic spells back onto the caster.
• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: Like the Black Mage, they can't equip anything other than robes and magic hats, and are unable to equip shields despite having a free hand.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Holy negates 31/32 of the target's Magic Defense for damage calculation.
• Boring, but Practical: A White Mage doesn't have much in the way of flashy powers or spectacularly offensive nukes (at least, not until the very late game), but they fullfill their role as supporters and healers fairly well.
• Defend Command: Blink locks out physical damage entirely - for two hits -, even from bosses.
• Dispel Magic: With, well, Dispel, a tier 6 spell able to remove all positive statuses from the target.
• Elemental Powers: The White Mage only has one offensive spell - Holy, whose power is boosted by 50% if equipped with the Sage's Staff.
• Elite Tweak: White Mage can massively benefit from having access to other magic schools in order to prevent it from being entirely useless offensively.
• Enemy Scan: The Libra spell, which shows level, HP, status, and elemental weakness for just 1 MP.
• Healing Shiv: The Healing Staff, obtained during an optional stop in Tycoon, casts a free Cura spell when used with the "Attack" command.
• Holy Hand Grenade: The ultimate White Magic spell is Holy, which is obtained next to the powerful Flare spell.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Legendary Weapon, the Sage's Staff. Though not exclusive to the White Mage, it is heavily associated with it since it boosts the power of Holy by 50%.
• Last Disc Magic: The White Mage does have one purely offensive spell, Holy. It's found in Fork Tower alongside Flare during the last leg of the game before the final dungeon.
• Long-Range Fighter: The Flail weapons deal the same damage from the back row.
• The Medic: The class has the dedicated duty to keep your team healthy, with 3 tiers of Cure- spells, Rise/Arise, and Esuna/Heal.
• Revive Kills Zombie: The Cure series spells has the reverse effect on undead enemies - Raise outright kill them.
• Situational Damage Attack:
  • The Sage's Staff will deal octuple damage against undead targets.
  • Holy will deal double damage against all undead enemies.
• Squishy Wizard: Along with having the usual penalties on Stamina and Strength, the White Mage has very little defensive utility thanks to only being able to equip robes and magic hats. However, they can boost their magic defenses with the use of Shell and Reflect.
• Status Effects: Can either inflict some of these with Mini, Berserk, Confuse and Silence or remove them from your party with Esuna/Heal.
• Support Party Member: White Mages have a small but powerful selection of status spells that increase your party's battle prowess. Protect and Shell cut physical and magic damage in half respectively, Blink allows the target to evade physical hits, and Berserk allows a physical attacker to freely cut loose on enemies.

Water Crystal Jobs

Mystic Knight

These magical warriors are able to enchant their blades with the elements, drain health or magic, or make them pierce the enemy defenses for massive damage. When in low health, a magic barrier will automatically rise to protect them. The Mystic Knight is able to equip swords, shields, light and heavy armor, and they are able to imbue their blades with every offensive spell the party knows.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: !Spellblade/!Magic Sword (default)

Support Ability: Magic Shell/Magic Barrier

Ultimate spell: Spellblade Flare

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 14

Agility: 14

Stamina: 14

Magic: 1

ABP for Mastery: 680

---

• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • All Spellblades ignore defenses and increase in power if used against an enemy weak to their element.
  • Spellblade Flare increases the blade's battle power by 100 and ignores 75% of the target defense when attacking.
• Boring, but Practical: Similar to the Black Mage, the Mystic Knight is all about dealing massive damage and offensive magic. Their equipment options allow them to tank damage very well, and their innate Magic Shell abilities and Spellblade Drain/Osmose make them self-sustaining. But since dealing damage is all they can do for your team, it's fairly standard to add Spellblade to physical attackers rather than staying as a Mystic Knight.
• Chainmail Bikini: The outfits for the female party members make them look like belly dancers (although it's downplayed for Krile compared to Faris and Lenna).
• Charged Attack: Enchanting the sword consumes a turn, but the selected spell remains until the end of battle, unless the player decides to switch to a different one.
• Critical Status Buff: Magic Shell, which casts Shell on the user once their health is lowered to critical. The status will remain even if the Mystic Knight is brought back to form.
• Cycle of Hurting: Applications of Sleep and Silence against the enemies vulnerable to them. And unlike their Magic versions, the blade statuses are guaranteed to hit every enemy not immune to them.
• Elemental Powers: They are able to enchant their blades with Ice-, Fire-, Lightning- and Poison- affinities.
• Elite Tweak: A Mystic Knight with Equip Swords will be able to equip the powerful Knight Swords for massive damage. Spellblade is also similarly added to melee jobs with knives/blades like Knight or Ninja to increase their battle prowess.
• Improvised Lightning Rod: The effect of Thundara Sword—lightning strikes the sword from above before the Mystic Knight strikes.
• Life Drain: Spellblade Drain has the same effect as the Drain spell.
• Lightning Bruiser: Mystic Knights are the second fastest class in game - tied with Ninja -, but they're also physically hardy and powerful to fit in with the knight part of the title. They can even forgo heavy armor in order to gain extra turns, at the cost of durability.
• Magic Knight: Mystic Knights are effective as regular melee fighters even without Spellblade active. They're also the only melee job to not receive a penalty to their Magic stat.
• Mana Drain: Spellblade Osmose drains 25% of the target's MP, but deals no actual damage.
• Master of All: They're this statistically, at least compared to the other classes. They have high Strength, Stamina and Agility, and their lowest stat isn't punished with a penalty. In fact, they are the class with the highest base stat total.
• Mythology Gag: Bartz and Galuf wear an Arabian-themed outfit reminiscent of Minwu.
• One-Hit Kill: Third-tier Black Magic used in Spellblade instantly kills enemies weak to that element unless the enemy is tagged as Heavy. Break also instantly petrifies any enemy not immune to it.
• Situational Damage Attack: Elemental Spellblades will deal double, triple and quadruple damage to enemies weak to their element, respectively based on their spell tier.
• Spell Blade: The Trope Namer. Spellblade can apply most Black Magic spells and a few White Magic spells to sword attacks, although elemental damage is only boosted against enemies weak to the element. Status effect spells will always apply if the attack connects.
• Useless Useful Spell: Spellblade Osmose, since it comes late and makes it so attacks don't do damage at all (instead draining MP); also keep in mind the fact that any particular Spellblade spell only has to be cast one time per battle and doesn't expire unless the caster is killed, so Mystic Knights use up MP at a slower rate than other casters, if they aren't using some other school of magic as well.

Berserker

These fur-clad heroes smash enemies with their axes and hammers, without pausing for commands. The Berserker is an... interesting job. They are able to equip heavy armor, shields and axes. But the equipment screen is all the interaction the player will get with them; the Berserker does nothing in battle except Attack! Attack! Attack!. This can be a blessing in disguise in random encounters; but usually ends up frustrating the player who is reduced to a mere spectator in battles.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: None

Support Ability: Berserk, Equip Axes

Ultimate weapon: Rune Axe, Thor's Hammer, Titan's Axe (SNES, Pixel Remaster); Earthbreaker (GBA on)

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 21

Agility: -9

Stamina: 25

Magic: -23

ABP for Mastery: 500

---

• Armor-Piercing Attack: Axes and hammers ignore 75% of the target's defense for damage calculation.
• The Berserker: Well, duh.
• Clothes Make the Superman: As the equipment screen is all the interaction you will get to have with the Berserker, it has this effect on their overall gameplay. The betters weapons and armor the Berserker gets, the better it will perform in battle.
• Crippling Overspecialization: A Berserker can only do one thing: attack. They can't not attack, and they can't use any action abilities because they're out of the player's control. This makes using Berserkers a cute novelty at best, and detrimental at worst.
• Crutch Character: The Berserker's strength and axes' advantage against enemies with high defense means they can be used to brute-force their way through difficult encounters in the early game. However, as battles start to require strategies other than brute strength, the Berserker becomes a liability for any player that wants to progress through the game.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Berserker's Death Sickle is the earliest access to an instant death ability, as it has a 33% chance to cast the spell on an attack. It's also possible to steal a Gaia Hammer from Titan at the end of Bartz' world, when otherwise you can't get it until the Merged world.
• Elemental Powers:
  • Poison Axe and Earth's Hammer. They have a chance of casting Poison and Quake respectively.
  • Earth's Hammer boosts the power of Earth magic by 50%.
• Elite Tweak: For Berserkers themselves, Artful Dodger fixes their awful agility, while Doublehanded/Dual Wield can massively boost their damage.
• Female Feline, Male Mutt: All of the women have tiger pelts and the men have wolf pelts, which, ironically, would imply that the women are more brutish, because a tiger is bigger and harder to kill than a wolf.
• Fur Bikini: Lenna's outfit is less of a savagely-hacked pelt and more of a tiger-patterned bathing suit.
• Game-Breaking Bug: In the first two versions of the game, having a party of four Berserkers with one equipped with the Chicken Knife could lock the game because Berserkers can't themselves escape from battle. But with the Knife's override command to Flee, they can't attack either.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Actually three of them, all with different advantages.
  • Rune Axe, one of the Twelve Legendary Weapons. 71 power, it consumes 5 MP for a guaranteed critical hit and adds the Magic stat for damage calculations, which makes it deceptively strong despite being statistically the weakest of the Berserker's ultimate weapons.
  • Thor's Hammer, which is 10 points stronger than the Rune's Axe and can be used from the backrow.
  • Titan's Axe, which has 91 power but no other effects.
• Leeroy Jenkins: A Berserker will attack relentlessly no matter what else is going on.
• Long-Range Fighter: The two best hammers in the game - Earth's Hammer and Thor's Hammer - have full power from the backrow.
• Magically Inept Fighter: Berserkers have the worst magic penalty in the game - tied with Monk. They can't use any magic-based skills anyway, but it does make the Rune Axe - which uses both Strength and Magic Power for damage calculations - less powerful than it could be.
• Mighty Glacier: Berserkers are very tough and hit for massive damage, but have the lowest Agility in the game, so other jobs can take two or three turns in the same time it takes a Berserker to get one.
• Nemean Skinning: They all wear animal pelts, calling to mind the original Norse berserkers who were dreaded for their uncontrollable battle frenzy. Krile's outfit is the one that doesn't follow this pattern, looking more like a cat kigurumi.
• One-Hit Kill: Death Sickle has a 33% chance of instantly killing enemies it hits.
• Poisoned Weapons: The Poison Axe has a 67% chance of inflicting Poison on targets it hits.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Berserkers hit hard but they choose their targets at random, and axes/hammers vary between 80% and 90% accuracy.
• Psychic Block Defense: Berserk neatly protects your character against Charm and Confuse. They will attack endlessly until one of two things happens: either the Berserker dies or the enemy dies.
• Randomized Damage Attack: Axes can deal anywhere in between 50%-150% of their listed damage. This quirk - along with their lack of accuracy - makes them less appealing to use than they could initially be.
• Sinister Scythe: The Death Sickle. Technically an axe according to the game, but hoo boy.
• Situational Damage Attack: Poison Axe deals double damage to humanoid-type targets - just like the Bio-series spells.
• Technicolor Toxin: The Poison Axe has a vivid purple color to it.
• Useless Useful Spell: The class as a whole. There are better ways to do massive damage that don't require you to leave everything in battle down to luck. In fact, the Berserker is so bad at progressing through the game, that even a Level 99 Berserker will find it outright impossible to complete the game.

Red Mage

These scarlet-clad, scabbard-wearing wizards are equally adept at magic and combat. Like in Final Fantasy and III, they can learn low-level Black or White Magic, but V sweetens the pot by adding the Dualcast ability. The Red-Mage this time around is more adept to spellcasting than to slashing enemies on the front row; they can equip everything in the game except knight swords, heavy armor and shields. This class also takes the longest to master; a whole 1159 Ability Points!

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !Red (default); !Dualcast/!X-Magic (learnable)

Support Ability: None

Ultimate spell: None; !Dualcast is the class' ultimate ability.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 8

Agility: 5

Stamina: -6

Magic: 8

ABP for Mastery: 1159

---

• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: They can't equip shields or heavy armor like all the other magic-based classes in this game.
• Awesome, but Impractical: !Dualcast spells still use the full amount of MP that casting spells on two separate turns would consume.
• Crutch Character: Red Mages are unlocked early in the game. They're able to use White Magic, Black magic, and a large variety of equipment, meaning they can take whatever role is required of them at the moment and are also cheap to equip. But they can't learn magic above tier 3, their Magic Power is weak for dedicated spellcasters, and they aren't that strong as melee attackers either. They also don't gain any support or command abilities other than !Dualcast, so they become largely inept in combat early on Galuf's World.
• Elemental Powers: Can cast Fire-, Ice- and Lightning- Black Magic up to tier 2.
• Elite Tweak: Red Mage's balanced stats allows them to be effective with a number of different commands from other jobs, like !Blue. !Dualcast also acts as the ultimate tweak for spellcasting jobs other than Blue.
• Jack of All Stats: Subverted. Contrary to how the Red Mage is usually portrayed in Final Fantasy, the class has a harsh Stamina penalty this time around, and although they can be equipped with swords, their low defenses mean that the job isn't as suitable physically attacking in the front row, as it is at casting spells. They are also unable to equip shields for some reason.
• Long-Range Fighter: They can use the standard mage weapons in addition to swords, which includes the white mage's Flail.
• Magikarp Power: It takes a very long time to get there - and in fact, it's the class that takes the most ABP to master -, but !Dualcast improves the Red Mage's effectiveness in battle by a thousand-fold. Not that many players would know, given that it makes more sense to equip !Dualcast to better magic classes than to stick with the Red Mage.
• Master of None: Red Mages can wield swords and staffs, but are weaker than dedicated physical jobs, and can cast up to tier 3 spells from both Black and White magic, but don't excel at any of these roles past Bartz' World.
• Necessary Drawback: !Dualcast allows you to cast two spells in the same round, but you are required to equip the respective Magic command in the status screen. This also means that Freelancers are greatly limited in how much !Dualcast actually benefits them; the ability is better used on Mimes, who can remove the now largely redundant !Fight and !Item command for additional magic schools.
• Squishy Wizard: They're more akin to this in FFV, with how much the class is focused on the "magic" part of the description, and their lack of defensive prowess.
• Status Effects: Has the largest collection of status spells for a magic school; they can cast Mute, Charm, Mini, Sleep, Poison and Toad.

Time Mage

Masters of time and space, able to speed up allies, slow down foes, rewind time to the beginning of a battle, and summon meteors. Time Mages are able to equip the standard spellcaster package; rods, staves, magic hats and robes. Though they excel at a support role, they have difficulty dealing damage thanks to a lack of offensive spells, and the random nature of the few they get.

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !Time (default)

Support Ability: Equip Rods

Ultimate spell: Meteor, Quick

Stat modifiers:

Strength: -5

Agility: 2

Stamina: -3

Magic: 24

ABP for Mastery: 530

---

• Anti-Magic: Mute causes an anti-magic field that silences every participant in the battle, enemies and allies alike. It even prevents weapons that work off of characters' Magic stat (like Diamond Bell) from working.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Quick at first sight is amazing. Two actions during the same round, and the in-game clock stops while you choose both. But at 77 MP, it is usually saved for boss battles.
• Cycle of Hurting: Time makes a good secondary spell list. By combining !Dualcast and Quick on a Mime, they can chain any spell up to five times: five castings of Holy, Meteo, Flare, and so forth.
• Death from Above: Comet, and their ultimate spell, Meteor.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Return (restart battles over again from the beginning) is a weird spell which is not included in later games, largely due to its abuse potential.
• Elite Tweak: Time Mages have low offenses on their own, and get a lot of benefit from magic skillsets that actually put their Magic Power to use. Time Magic on its own works as fantastic support for classes with low Magic stats.
• Gravity Master:
  • Gravity and Graviga are Percent Damage Attacks, that reduce the enemy to 1/2 and 1/4 of HP respectively, as is typical.
  • Float makes your characters immune to Earth attacks like Quake.
• Healing Factor: Regen heals the target periodically based on level and Stamina.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Meteor can hit multiple targets on the battlefield.
• Long-Range Fighter: Like White Mages, they have access to both of the flail-type weapons that are classified as staffs.
• Not Completely Useless: Contrary to most status effects in the Final Fantasy series, Slow is extremely useful. Bosses for the most part lack immunity to the status, and some will even waste a turn casting Haste on themselves, allowing the Time Mage to force the boss to continuously skip turns.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Meteor picks its targets and its damage at random. It also doesn't rely on the caster's magic power or level, so that it will still be powerful even if you've been hit with level-impairing status effects.
• Randomized Damage Attack: Comet and Meteor both have the same randomized damage formula that only takes the enemy's Magic Defense into account. The only difference is on their multipliers; Comet has a multiplier of eight, while Meteor has a multiplier of fourteen.
• Robe and Wizard Hat: A conical hat and a star on their robe.
• Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: You would expect Comet to be a Game-Breaker, considering how much pain Atomos brings with it, but it really isn't. Meteor also doesn't grow stronger, and becomes this in post-game.
• Squishy Wizard: Like other mages, Time Mages wear robes and have very little in the way of defensive capabilities, so you better keep them in the backrow.
• Stats Dissonance: That huge Magic Power the class gets? It's entirely useless for Time Mages by themselves. The hit chance for status Time Magic works off level, the rest of Time Magic is supportive in nature, and Comet/Meteor are randomized damage attacks that only take the target's Magic Defense into account for damage calculation.
• Support Party Member: They actually have few damage-dealing offensive spells. Instead, Time Magic is about buffs, debuffs, and turn manipulation. Haste and Hastega/Haste2 are the premiere example of this, allowing a party to make double the actions in a single round.
• Time Master: But of course.
• Time Rewind Mechanic: Return restarts an entire battle for the cost of 1 MP. It's easy to tell why that spell isn't in any other FF game.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Speed/Drag increases the rate at which the ATB gauge fills... for both enemies and allies. Functionally, it sets the Battle Speed at 5. If you had already put it at 5 on the configuration screen, the spell does nothing.
  • Offensive statuses are this, for the most part. Most bosses are outright immune to Stop, Old is acquired at a point where it becomes largely useless, and Mute is ignored by most enemies, since even magical attacks don't actually count as Magic for the enemy.
• Utility Party Member: The Float and Teleport spells are useable out of combat. Float lets the party avoid taking hits from damage floors, and Teleport gets you out of a dungeon instantly.
• Weaponized Teleportation: Banish flings the enemy through a portal to the Rift. They don't come back.

Summoner

These mages call upon magical creatures, ranging from the humble Chocobo to the Dragon King Bahamut.

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !Summon (default); !Call (learnable)

Support Ability: None

Ultimate summon: Bahamut

Stat modifiers:

Strength: -10

Agility: -1

Stamina: -1

Magic: 33

ABP for Mastery: 750

---

• Anti-Magic: Carbuncle, found in Castle Exdeath, casts Reflect on the party.
• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: Summoners can't equip armor or shields. But at least Golem can protect them from physical attacks.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Not in the traditional sense; but Summon magic negates the usual split target penalty associated with other magic schools, which means that summons will do as much damage to multiple targets as they do against a single one.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Bahamut and Leviathan. They are supposed to deal more damage than Syldra, and accordingly, cost a lot more MP. But thanks to elemental quirks (Water can't be boosted by any equipment on the game; Mega Flare is non-elemental), they are weaker than Air Knife-boosted Syldra (for Leviathan) or barely tie with it (Bahamut).
• Blow You Away: Syldra is a Wind-based summon, even though the animation (and name, Thunderstorm) reference lightning.
• Cycle of Hurting: You can cast Remora repeatedly in order to keep enemies paralyzed.
• Defeat Means Playable: Most of the high-level Summons require your party to fight the monster in order to be able to call them.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Titan, which deals large Earth elemental damage to all non-flying enemies.
• Draw Aggro: Golem takes physical attacks for the party.
• Elemental Powers: Summoners have the following summons at their disposition. They are also able to boost their damage by equipping the Wizard Rod, the elemental rods, the Gaia Gear and the Air Knife.
  • Shiva (Ice), a tier 2 summon.
  • Ifrit and Phoenix (Fire), a tier 2 and tier 5 summon, respectively.
  • Ramuh (Lightning), a tier 2 summon.
  • Titan (Earth), a tier 3 summon.
  • Syldra (Wind), a tier 4 summon
  • Leviathan (Water), a tier 5 summon.
• Elite Tweak: Summon Magic is the most damaging magic school; as such, it's commonly included in Mime setups with Dualcast.
• Ground Pound: Rarely, casting the Chocobo summon causes Fat Chocobo to fall from the sky, walloping every enemy on the screen with its mass.
• Horned Humanoid: As with Final Fantasy III, summoners in this game have a golden horn on their foreheads, though it's hard to tell whether it's attached on a band or if it's supposed to be a real (if temporary) one.
• I Owe You My Life: Unlike other summons, Golem isn't obtained through defeat. Instead, you have to rescue him from a couple of undead dragons, after which he decides "it'd rock if I could roll along with you!"
• Javelin Thrower: If you summon Odin against Death-immune enemies, he will throw Gungnir at them instead.
• Life Drain: Sylph drains a small amount of health from the enemy and shares it with the entire party.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: When all summons are bought and collected, summoners can exploit elemental weaknesses, shield the party from physical and magical damage, revive KO'd party members, and overall do massive damage while doing these things. Downplayed in that they also expend a lot of MP doing so.
• Magikarp Power: The level 1 summons available at Walse are fairly weak and unspectacular. Once the party starts to progress through the game, and acquire more powerful summons through battle, they will become the premiere offensive spellcaster of choice.
• Making a Splash: Leviathan, a tier 5 summon. Too bad Water is the only element that can't be boosted by equipment.
• One-Hit Kill: Catoblepas. It uses Demon's Eye, which can Petrify and kill many targets.
• Permanently Missable Content: Shiva is found in the Walse Tower, and you cannot return there after leaving Bartz' world. Catoblepas is encountered near the Northern Lake in Galuf's World. Carbuncle is found in Castle Exdeath after the illusion is stripped from it. You can't recruit any of them once the Worlds are merged. Surprisingly averted with Ramuh, who can be encountered in the Interdimensional Rift if you didn't find him in Bartz' world.
• Piranha Problem: The Remora summon, which doesn't summon a remora at all.
• Single-Stroke Battle: Odin, one of the end-game summons, can inflict this on everything that's not tagged as Heavy, all at once.
• Squishy Wizard: Summoners fall into this, as every other mage in the game. They aren't quite as squishy as the Black Mage, but they still have a stamina penalty, low HP, and robe armor.
• Status Effects: The Remora summon inflicts Paralysis on a single enemy, but deals no damage.
• Useless Useful Spell: !Call performs a random summon for zero MP cost. With 15 summons in-game, this can run the gamut from a powerful nuke with zero cost (Bahamut and Leviathan) to entirely useless (Golem against a magical attacker, Sylph on the Merged World) to outright detrimental. There's just too much randomness involved for it to be useful.

Mime

The Mime is the hidden class in the original FFV, found in an optional sidequest in the third World. It's a seemingly weak job which can't do anything but Mimic the last move by an ally, but they're much stronger than expected...

The Mime is the premiere spellcasting job by virtue of their quirks. They inherit every stat boost from mastered jobs, can equip 3 ability slots in the configuration screen, and can equip almost every gear in the game - with the exception of weapons, since they are limited to knives, staves, rods and boomerangs. This allows them to boost elemental damage, cast two spells in the same turn, tank damage for your team, basically everything you need, with a key exception; acting as physical attackers.

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !Mime (default)

Support Ability: None; like the Freelancer, it inherits every innate support ability from jobs already mastered, with the exception of the "Equip X" series.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 0

Agility: 0

Stamina: 0

Magic: 0

ABP for Mastery: 999

---

• Badass Cape: Their outfit is largely the same as the Freelancer outfit, save for the addition of a cape.
• Chekhov's Gun: This would have been part of the Water Crystal job set if it hadn't landed just out of reach in full view of the player way back in the first world. You can go back and get it during the leadup to the final dungeon.
• Ditto Fighter: As the name suggests, Mimic lets the Mime copy whatever was done by the party member who acted last, whether it was spellcasting, attacking, or a Chemist's mixing. The best part is that they do so without wasting any MP or consumables.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The job is actually the last one that the player can unlock in the base game, but the crystal can be seen when gaining the rest of the crystals from the Water Crystal. It is just unreachable due to being on a high ledge the player cannot reach (and on top of that, you have no time to attempt to reach the crystal as the tower is about to sink due to the crystal's destruction). It remains unaccessible until near end the game when you are able to access the now sunken tower with a submarine.
• Elite Tweak: Probably the biggest recipent of this in the game due to having three free command slots.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Their equipment choices gear them more towards magic, and they can equip three different types of magic so long as they've learned other jobs. Not to mention that mimicked spells don't consume MP.
• Long-Range Fighter: They can use staffs (which means the two flails), but they're also one of the jobs with access to the boomerang-type weapons.
• Loophole Abuse: Mimed commands have a few quirks that make them extra useful. Of note;
  • Mimed spells won't consume any MP.
  • Mimicking item usage won't consume an extra item from your inventory. This also applies to !Mix and !Throw.
  • A Mime copying a command doesn't have to know the ability themselves. Spells will be mimed properly, but attack commands will have the Mime use whatever weapon they're currently equipping.
• Master of All: Mimes do indeed get stat boosts and innate abilities from other jobs. Though, not as much of a master as Freelancer is due to having equipment restrictions. In exchange, they make superior mages compared to the Freelancer due to their three empty ability slots allowing them either three separate schools of magic, or two schools plus Doublecast.
• Secret Character: Technically the existence of the crystal shard isn't a secret; it's still sitting there when the party has to flee Walse Tower before it sinks. But it is a secret that you can actually go back and get it from the sunken tower once you get the submarine, at least if you figure out how to get past Gogo.
• Spam Attack: With Mimic, it's possible to chain commands together to create all sorts of game-breaking combos, like Miming Dualcast or Rapid Fire.
• Stats Dissonance: The Mime doesn't get any innate bonus or penalty to their stats. However, they inherit the stat boosts from any mastered job, and none of the penalties, which makes them deceptively strong.

Fire Crystal Jobs

Ninja

Stealthy warriors who can hold two weapons, or simply throw them. The Ninja is a sneaky fighter; with the second best Agility in the game, and various evasion-boosting techniques, it travels through the battlefield, unable to be hit, while it slashes away at the enemy with short swords, knives and boomerangs. Be warned, though; any hit that goes through their fancy footwork will quickly put them out of comission, by virtue of their light armor.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: !Throw (default); !Smoke (learnable)

Support Ability: Dual-Wield/Double-Handed, First Strike/Preemptiv

Ultimate weapon: Sasuke's Katana (SNES/Pixel Remaster); Kagenui (GBA)

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 15

Agility: 14

Stamina: 3

Magic: -10

ABP for Mastery: 690

---

• Action Initiative: Their First Strike passive ability doubles the party's chance of making a preemptive strike on a random encounter.
• Cast from Money:
  • Throwing an item removes it from your inventory permanently, so the ability has this effect on your pocket.
  • Fuma Shuriken cost a whooping **25,000** gil each, but are the strongest purchasable items a Ninja can throw.
• Defend Command: !Image creates two illusions of the Ninja, allowing them to completely dodge the next two physical attacks.
• Disc-One Nuke: Once the player gets access to Lix and its scroll-selling weapon shop, Ninja become very dangerous for the rest of the first world.
• Dual Wield: Ninjas hold a weapon in each hand, doubling their damage output. Even better, once Ninja is mastered, they impart the ability to dual wield to Freelancer and Mime.
• Fragile Speedster: Ninjas are only slower than Thieves. Their ability to wield a weapon in each hand and the strength of those weapons means they can deal a lot of damage in a very short time. However, their avoidance of damage lies in dodging and illusion, not stamina and defense.
• Fuuma Shuriken: One of the thrown-only weapons Ninjas can use. It's a lot bigger than the standard version.
• Implausible Fencing Powers: Sasuke's Katana allows a Ninja to block attacks 25% of the time. Note that this includes magic attacks, which means that the Ninja can use their short sword to block magic nukes, headbutts and sword slashes all the same.
• Joke Item: The Ash/Soot, a throwable item that deals low damage... and nothing else. Its uniqueness tricks players into thinking it has some extra use or is needed to access better secrets. Nope. Just a weaker Shuriken.
• Lethal Joke Item: One well-known strategy for the final battle in Castle Exdeath is to take the Excalipoor—the sword which only ever does one damage—and throw it. Because when thrown, it does damage equal to the real Excalibur.
• Long-Range Fighter: In addition to hurling things with the Throw skill, Ninjas are one of the few classes who can use the boomerang-type weapons, so players have the option of making them back-row fighters.
• Non-Indicative Name: Sasuke's Katana, which is actually not a katana, and hence can't be equipped by the Samurai. Later versions simply name it "Sasuke" to avoid the confusion.
• Not the Intended Use: Holding the Chicken Knife in the left hand keeps the Flee effect from tripping thanks to a bug.
• Scarf of Asskicking: Lenna, Faris, and Krile all get a matchig scarf with their ninja suits.
• Smoke Out: The Smoke ability references the traditional ninja smoke bomb; it's essentially the same as Flee with special effects.
• Stock Ninja Weaponry: Ninja use knives and can stock up on Shurikens to !Throw for serious damage.
• Technicolor Ninjas: Galuf is the only one wearing a sensible dark color in this job. Bartz, Lenna, Faris, and Krile all go with blue or purple.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: There are several items which are specifically designed to be thrown, but you can do it with any weapon that no one has currently equipped, and they all do a lot of damage (at the cost of destroying the item).
• Unblockable Attack: Short swords - only equippable by Ninjas - take only half of the target's Evasion into account when attacking.
• Weak to Magic: Between !Image, being backrow fighters and having a high evasion stat, they're very good at evading physical attacks, but not magical ones. Sasuke's Katana adds a bit of defense against magic, but it's the only defensive item the class gets.

Beastmaster

Beastmasters are trained to keep monsters under control. They can also Catch monsters and Release them in future battles. Long-ranged fighters, by virtue of equipping whips, they are able to use light armor and combat hats. The Beastmaster is not much for direct combat; preferring to use their skills to put monsters under their thrall to do their dirty work.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: !Catch/!Release (default); !Calm, !Control (learnable)

Support Ability: Equip Whips

Ultimate weapon: Fire Lash, Dragon's Whisker.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 13

Agility: 1

Stamina: 8

Magic: -3

ABP for Mastery: 460

---

• Ability Required to Proceed: One requirement for completing the Sealed Temple is Catching a Behemoth and bringing it to the guy who requested it.
• Amplifier Artifact: The Hypno Crown/Coronet increases !Control success rate from 40% to 75%.
• Animal Disguise: Beastmasters take to the battlefield dressed as sheep, fluffy tail and all. Faris is the only one who doesn't, instead wearing a slightly more normal outfit with excessive wool trim and earmuffs.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Catch only holds one monster and it's expended upon release, after which you have to carefully reduce another monster's HP to 1/8 (or 1/2, if you have the Kornago Gourd) if you want to use it again. Simply attacking usually accomplishes the same in the long run, with much less effort involved.
• Cycle of Hurting:
  • Most whips inflict Paralysis half of the time, and many enemies are vulnerable to Paralysis. Even some bosses won't do jack about being whipped into submission.
  • !Calm freezes "magical-beast"-type enemies. It cannot be avoided so long as the target is vulnerable to Stop.
• The Dragonslayer: The Dragon's Whisker whip is both the most powerful whip and inflicts critical damage against dragons.
• Elemental Powers: Both the Blitz Whip and the Fire Lash have a 33% chance of casting a spell when attacking - Thunder and Firaga respectively.
• Guide Dang It!: The only way to know which skill a creature will use upon !Release is to !Catch it and then !Release it. Having a Bestiary available in some game versions only helps a little, as even those versions won't tell you which monster uses which attack.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Fire Lash/Fire Bute, one of the Twelve Legendary weapons that casts Firaga 1/3rd of the time when attacking.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Dragon Whisker, which is 10 points stronger than the Fire Lash, but also significantly harder to get. It's a rare drop from the Stingray.
• Injured Vulnerability: You can't Catch monsters until you've reduced them to less than 1/8 of their HP. The Kornago Gourd cuts this to 1/2.
• Last Disc Magic: The monsters you find at the end of the game can result in very powerful attacks on Release—the King Behemoth's Gigaflare is one example.
• Long-Range Fighter: Beastmasters can do the same amout of damage from the back-row with their whips.
• Percent Damage Attack: Several enemies use attacks that deal a percentage of max HP, such as flying enemies that will use Breath Wing when unleashed (1/4 of max HP).
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: When Releasing a monster who can't multi-target, their attack is erratic. You don't get to pick the target.
• Secret A.I. Moves:
  • Control gives the player access to an enemy's command menu. Some of the Blue Magic spells can only be learned by having a Beastmaster take control of an enemy and then ordering it to cast the spell on the party.
  • Released creatures will use their signature abilities for the most part, which in some cases includes skills such as Encircle, Maelstrom or even Almagest.
• Situational Damage Attack:
  • The Beast Killer deals double damage against Magic Beasts.
  • The Dragon Whisker does the same against Dragon-type enemies.
• Summon Bigger Fish: The point of the Beastmaster is to find a more powerful monster and unleash it, or to take control of a more powerful monster and command it. Its own attack power is not that strong.
• Support Party Member: Beastmasters' most obvious utility are to assist the Blue Mage with learning new spells. Their Control ability allows them to force monsters to cast the one you need.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: There are a number of viable boss strategies that involve the Beastmaster catching one specific type of monster and unleashing it. (Particularly monsters that use level-based Blue Magic when released.)
• Useless Useful Spell: All !Calm does is use the Beastmaster's turn to delay one enemy's turn. And it only works against Magic Beast enemies.
• Whip of Dominance: The Beastmaster job is the only job that is able to equip whips ^note outside of Freelancer that can equip any type of weapon as a nod to the whip's connection to animal taming. And while the whip is mostly symbolic as it doesn't play a part in the beastmaster's control or catch abilities, the fact whips have high chance of causing Paralysis is a deliberate design choice to help with the process of controlling or catching a monster.

Geomancer

Magi of the earth, feng-shui practicioners, they use the environment to wreak havoc on foes. Geomancers are one of the strangest jobs in Final Fantasy; relying on the terrain and an entirely random skillset in battle. They can equip magic hats, robes and bells; being the only class in-game able to equip the latter.

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !Gaia (default)

Support Ability: Find Pits/Find Holes; Damage Floor/Light Step

Ultimate weapon: Gaia's Bell, Rune Chime, Tinklebell

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 4

Agility: 2

Stamina: 4

Magic: 24

ABP for Mastery: 175

---

• Alliterative Name: Bottomless Bog.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The Gaia Bell and the Rune Chime only take 25% of the target's defense into account for damage calculation.
• Awesome, but Impractical: You have no way of knowing which effect you will get upon using !Gaia on a terrain. Even with the level requirement removed in the mobile/Steam versions, you only have a 25% chance of getting a specific spell.
• Balance Buff: The mobile/Steam version removes the level requirement for Gaia calls, meaning that high-level geomancy can trigger right when you get the job.
• Convection, Schmonvection: They can ignore damage from lava floors and similar hazards.
• Deadly Dust Storm: There are three sandstorm spells in the desert.
• Deadly Gas: Poison Mist, one of the cave-based spells.
• Elemental Powers:
  • !Gaia executes attacks based on the landscape of the battlefield. There are 34 different backgrounds, and just as many Gaia skillsets. Some !Gaia skillsets are completely identical, and others share a few moves.
  • Geomancers have a secondary attack in the Gaia Bell, which has a chance of casting the Quake spell. 170% stronger than !Gaia's Earthquake, if it triggers. The Gaia Bell also boosts Earth-elemental damage by 50%.
  • The Rune Chime raises the power of all elemental magic by 50%.
• Green Thumb: The spells you get in the forest are all plant-based. Most do damage, though Bindweed inflicts Slow.
• HP to One: Twister and Whirlpool reduce non-Heavy enemies to critical HP.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Gaia's Bell, one of the Twelve Legendary weapons. 35 Power, 25% chance of casting Quake when used, and boosts Earth-damage by 50%.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The Rune Chime, which is a better weapon than Gaia's Bell in all respects - higher power, consumes 5 MP for a critical hit and adding Magic Power to damage calculation, and boosts elemental damage for all elements, not only Earth. But it's a rare random drop from the Baldanders enemy, in the Interdimensional Rift.
  • The Tinklebell, which is stronger than both the Gaia Bell and the Rune Chime, but with no additional effects. It's a rare random drop from Twintania, one of the hardest bosses in-game.
• Instrument of Murder: The chosen weapon of the Geomancer is a hand bell.
• Joke Character: Feng-shui practicioners, dressed as Christmas elves, that have to make do with an extremely weak weapon for the first two-thirds of the game, whose entire skillset is randomized, and with easily replicable support abilities. Geomancer is not a class you want to use in the long run.
• Long-Range Fighter: Bells deal the same damage from the back-row. The only exception is the Rune Chime, which is apparently bugged and only deals whole damage in the front-row. The Diamond Bell and the Tinklebell also deal damage based on the user's Magic Power.
• Lost in Translation: Geomancy was an Ancient Greek practice of using soil, rocks, and sand to cast and interpret. prophetic patterns. But the Geomancer in FFV is more like a Feng Shui practitioner—the bells that they use are the main indicator.
• Magikarp Power: Gaia is another ability that uses a character's base level to pick the attack that is performed.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Going by the name and the visual effect, one would expect Whirlpool to drown your enemies, much like Quicksand and Bottomless Bog. Instead, it reduces one target's HP to single digit.
  • Despite its name and appearance, Tsunami does non-elemental damage rather than water-elemental.
• One-Hit Kill: Quicksand and Bottomless Bog are a one-hit kill on all enemies in an encounter so long as they don't have an immunity to instant death.
• Pajama-Clad Hero: The Geomancer takes on dragons, knights, and warlocks while apparently cosplaying as one of the Keebler elves.
• Quicksand Sucks: Quicksand and Bottomless Bog. The animation shows enemies getting sucked underground to their demise.
• Randomized Damage Attack: Bells use the Axe damage formula, which means that they can deal anywhere in-between 50%-150% of their listed damage.
• Squishy Wizard: Although they aren't a standard type of magic user, Geomancers have the same kind of stats as one. They don't take a Strength penalty but they are quite fragile.
• Stalactite Spite: Stalactite drops from the ceiling and falls onto the monster in question.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Since the !Gaia skillset has plenty of Instant Death and PercentDamageAttacks, a lot of bosses will be immune to whatever the Geomancer throws at them. For example, the Soul Cannon is entirely immune to !Gaia by virtue of the background.
  • Some enemies will be immune to the element the Geomancer uses based on the background. One of the most common cases are Aevis-type enemies, which are immune to Earthquake.
  • Light Step and Find Pits are largely useless; the first can be replicated by the Float spell, and the latter is made redundant by simply memorizing where the holes are on latter playthroughs. Even then, some dungeons will require you to voluntarily drop through the holes in order to fully explore them and acquire loot.
• Utility Party Member: Geomancer has two abilities that are useful in certain dungeons: Light Step, which protects from damage floors, and Find Pits, which causes your character to jump back when you find a pitfall trap instead of falling into it.
• Whatevermancy: The only class with such a naming before the Advance additions.
• Will-o'-the-Wisp: These come up in caves and do erratic fire-based damage.

Ranger

This job and the Bard are of the Fire Crystal, but they are found separately, coughed up by a Black Chocobo after the Crystal breaks. Rangers specialize in ranged assaults and forming alliances with woodland creatures. They can equip light armor and bows, but are unable to use shields, given that bows are two-handed. Rangers are well-known for their ability to get off multiple attacks in a single round with Rapid Fire.

Type: Ranged

Command Ability: !Aim (default); !Animals/!Critter, !Rapid Fire/!X-Fight (learnable)

Support Ability: Equip Bows

Ultimate weapon: Yoichi's Bow, Artemis' Bow (SNES, Pixel Remaster); Fairy's Bow (GBA-on)

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 16

Agility: 12

Stamina: 1

Magic: -5

ABP for Mastery: 600

---

• Always Accurate Attack: Both !Aim and !Rapid Fire are guaranteed to hit unless the attacker is afflicted with Blind.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: !Rapid Fire ignores Defense.
• Bee Afraid: Bee Swarm hits all targets. They do damage based on the enemy's level;
• Blue Bird Of Happiness: Nightingale summons blue birds that restore HP and cure Blind and Poison from the entire party.
• Critical Hit Class: The Elven Bow and Yoichi's Bow have, respectively, a 15% and a 30% chance of dealing critical damage when attacking. The only other weapons in the game able to do so are katanas.
• Elemental Powers: The Flame, Frost and Thunder Bow. All of them can be acquired immediately after getting the Ranger shard in the Crescent Forest.
• Fragile Speedster: Although they are one of the fastest and strongest jobs in the game, they have very low vitality and equip only light armor, which means that they are usually put in the back row.
• Full-Boar Action: Wild Boar targets a single enemy for big damage, but Airborne Mooks are immune.
• Healing Shiv: Rangers can heal themselves by the simple means of equipping a Flame Ring and shooting themselves with the Fire Bow.
• Herd-Hitting Attack:
  • Flying Squirrel and Bee Swarm target all enemies on field.
  • The four powerful, random attacks of Rapid Fire can deal a lot of damage to enemy groups.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Two of them actually.
  • Yoichi's Bow, one of the Twelve Legendary weapons. 101 power, boosts Strength and Agility, and has a 30% of performing a critical hit when attacking.
  • Artemis' Bow, which is 10 points stronger, and deals double damage against Magic Beasts.
• Long-Range Fighter: Naturally, the job that equips bows can hang out in the back row.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Rangers are famous for Rapid Fire; as their most powerful ability, it's unlocked only when the class is mastered.
  • The higher a character's base level, the more powerful the Animals that show up when called.
• Noble Bird of Prey: One animal is the Falcon, which takes off 1/4 of an enemy's HP.
• Not the Intended Use: Using Aim or Rapid Fire bypasses the Chicken Knife's risk of causing you to flee when using it with a plain attack.
• One-Hit Kill: Killer Bow has a chance to inflict instant Death.
• Percent Damage Attack: Falcon removes a quarter of an enemy's current HP.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate:
  • !Rapid Fire can hit all enemies on the field or one of them—targets are chosen at random.
  • Ironically, most bows vary between 70% and 90% accuracy when used with the !Fight command.
• Rascally Rabbit: Mysidian Rabbit, which does nothing at all in this game.
• Screwball Squirrel:
  • Squirrel summons a scurry of... well, squirrels, that deal weak damage to a single non-flying target.
  • Flying Squirrel/Momonga summons a flying squirrel that paralyzes all enemies.
• Smelly Skunk: Skunk inflicts Blind and Poison on all enemies.
• Spam Attack: !Rapid Fire is four full-powered shots with the bow. It can let you hit a maximum of eight times if you equip it onto a character who's dual-wielding.
• Status Effects:
  • The Rune Bow has a 33% chance of casting Silence on the target, but it deals no damage; the Darkness Bow has a 66% chance of inflicting Blind; Fairy's Bow has a 12% chance of inflicting Confuse.
  • Flying Squirrel inflicts Paralysis, and Skunk inflicts Blind and Poison; both do so against all enemies on-screen.
• Situational Damage Attack:
  • The Artemis' Bow will deal double damage against Magical Beasts.
  • The Aevis Killer always deals double damage against Aevis-type enemies.
• Summon Magic: Animals is a woodland version of Geomancer's Gaia. It randomly summons a creature, based on level, who will either attack enemies or heal the party.
• Trick Arrow: Several bows have magical effects, either doing elemental damage or inflicting a status effect.
• Unblockable Attack: !Rapid Fire attacks will completely ignore the enemy's evasion.
• Unicorn: The rarely-seen Unicorn completely restores the party's HP/MP.
• Useless Useful Spell: !Animals is pretty funny, but the random selection means it's unreliable for any specific use. It also requires the user to be at an outrageously high level in order to trigger the most useful effects.

Bard

This job is acquired alongside the Ranger. The Bard's stats are nothing to write home about, but their repertoire can stop all manner of enemies in their tracks, and raise the power of your party to astronomical levels. They can equip the standard mage package; Magic hats, robes and armlets, alongside knives. They are also the only class in the game able to equip Harps. As a whole, they may appear pathetic; but you shouldn't underestimate them, as they hold some of the strongest support abilities in the game.

Type: Magic

Command Ability: !Sing (default); !Hide/!Return (learnable)

Support Ability: Equip Harps

Ultimate weapon: Apollo's Harp

Stat modifiers:

Strength: -8

Agility: 8

Stamina: -9

Magic: 11

ABP for Mastery: 175

---

• Alliterative Name: A few of their songs; Alluring Air, Swift Song and Mighty March.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Bards can jack up the party's stats to their max levels, but doing so takes a very long time, in which the Bard is nothing but a sitting duck, and they can't be hit or their song is immediately interrupted. This means that the stat-raising songs are more effort than they are worth it on random encounters, so they are usually saved for boss battles.
• Combo Breaker: Certain songs require the Bard to be continously singing, and being attacked will put a stop to it.
• Cycle of Hurting: Sing can cast multi-target Confuse/Stop without any penalty from the moment you get them, and can even lock down some bosses.
• Defend Command: !Hide in V is the same as Edward's in IV; they literally run offscreen and stay there, immune from all damage, until they choose to come back with the Return command. Of course, they can't deal any damage either while hiding.
• The Dragonslayer: The Bard's Legendary Weapon, Apollo Harp, deals a lot of damage against Dragon-type enemies.
• Expy: Their moveset, equipment, and fragility are all based on what Edward could do in IV.
• Fragile Speedster: About their only good stat is Agility. Their Magic Power is good too, but they can't do much with it until you get Requiem and the Apollo's Harp.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Apollo's Harp, one of the Twelve Legendary Weapons, with 75 power, and the only harp in the game to not deal fixed damage.
• Instrument of Murder: Songs are complimented by harps, which do very low percentage-based damage.
• Joke Character: Very low stats, extremely fragile, one of their command abilities makes them hide from battle, low Magic Power compared to other spellcasting jobs, and terrible equipment options. However, with enough effort and patience they can evolve into a...
• Lethal Joke Character: Their songs have the power to neutralize enemies (even bosses), jack up other characters' levels to 99, or decimate the undead. By the end-game, they also gain enough support options to pull their weight in-battle and even a few damaging options of their own.
• Magic Music: !Sing effects run the gamut from hypnotizing enemies, to stat-boosting the party, to massive damage against undead enemies.
• Magikarp Power: They start as a support and debuffing character, but later in the game they get some abilities that make them legitimately deadly to certain enemies, not to mention some really nice support songs too.
• Mind-Control Music:
  • Alluring Air confuses all enemies on the field, if they aren't immune to it.
  • Romeo's Ballad stops all enemies for a few turns.
• Not Completely Useless: !Hide is of very little use in random battles - all it functionally does is extend the pace of battle by several rounds, and if you !Hide all your living characters, you flee from battle. However, you can't run from boss battles, and bosses will keep attacking despite having no targets on-screen. This means that - with enough patience (or any emulation software) - you can make any boss run out of MP. This is a legitimate winning strategy in challenge runs involving the Bard. !Hide can also be used to avoid scripted attacks, such as those from Omega.
• Percent Damage Attack: All Harps except for the Apollo Harp deal percentage-based damage.
• Permanently Missable Content: Three of the songs (Alluring Air, Romeo's Ballad, and Mana's Paean) are found in places that become inaccessable after certain points in plot progression (the trip to Galuf's World for the first two and re-acquisition of the airship for the last one).
• Situational Damage Attack: The Apollo Harp deals octuple damage to Dragon-type and Undead-type enemies.
• Status Effects:
  • Dream Harp inflicts Sleep on the target; Lamia's Harp inflicts Confuse.
  • Romeo's Ballad stops all the enemies; Alluring Air confuses them instead.
• Support Party Member: About half of the Bard's songbook buff the party. They can enhance magic abilities, increase Agility and Strength, apply Regen, and even boost level up to 99 if you manage to get Hero's Rime.
• Talk to Everyone: To complete the entire roster of Bard songs, you have to talk to every bard you see so they'll teach you their songs (in addition to playing every piano).
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Requiem functions as a Dia spell from the original Final Fantasy, dealing magical damage to all undead enemies. Bard is outstanding in the Great Sea Trench for that reason, since everything down there is undead.
• Useless Useful Spell: Equip Harps. Harps are already horrible weapons; why would anyone want to waste an ability slot just to equip them?

Earth Crystal Jobs

Samurai

These honorable warriors from faraway lands can block attacks with their bare hands, as well as hurl money at the enemy for surprising damage. The Samurai is the only class able to equip katanas, and is also able to use heavy armor and shields. With great abilities, equipment options and stats, the Samurai is one of the most powerful jobs in the game.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: !Zeninage/!Gil Toss(default); !Mineuchi/!Swd Slap, !Iainuki/!Slash (learnable)

Support Ability: Equip Katanas, Shirahadori/Evade

Ultimate Weapon: Masamune, Murakumo (SNES, Pixel Remaster); Mutsunokami (GBA on)

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 19

Agility: 2

Stamina: 19

Magic: -12

ABP for Mastery: 820

---

• Action Initiative: The Legendary Katana, Masamune, allows its wielder to act first in battle regardless of their speed.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Critical hits ignore defense in this game, and Samurai is the main job to utilize them.
• Barehanded Blade Block: Shirahadori/Evade, one of this job's passive abilities, has a 1/4 chance to block a physical attack.
• Blow You Away: The Kazekiri (known in this game as the Wind Slash or Air Blade) is a Wind-elemental katana that has a chance of casting Wind Slash and also boosts Wind-type damage by 50%.
• Cast from Money: !Zeninage is a great skill if you're not worried about money anymore.
• Charged Attack: !Iainuki requires one turn of charging before it is unleashed.
• Critical Hit Class: Katanas have an innate chance to critically strike, something which nearly all other weapons in the game lack.
• Death or Glory Attack: !Iainuki. It's a multi-target, instant death attack which deals no damage otherwise.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Masamune, one of the Twelve Legendary weapons. 107 power, allows the user to always go first in battle, and casts Haste when used as an item.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Murakumo/Strato, which is 10 points stronger than the Masamune and has a higher crit rate, but is only available as a rare steal from Yojimbos and the final boss.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Katanas get a unique animation and sound, and are the only weapons to have a chance of getting a critical hit other than bare hands or Yoichi's Bow.
• Lightning Bruiser: Samurai have an innate high evasion rate, Shirahadori has a 25% chance to trigger for extra evasion, and katanas have a nifty critical rate. Even if they can't evade the hit, Samurai are able to equip shields and heavy armor, with most physical attacks barely scratching them. Their sole drawback would be their low speed... and Masamune allows them to ignore it by allowing them to act first in battle, and also acting as a Haste spell when used as an item.
• Logical Weakness: Throwing coins doesn't work quite as well against enemies with a high defense.
• Magically Inept Fighter: It's hard to pick a skill which doesn't complement Samurai. The only one is Spellblade, since katanas don't work with it.
• Money Mauling: !Zeninage has the Samurai open up the party's wallet and fling what's inside for massive damage. Not only does it ignore defense, it also ignores the damage penalty from multi-target spells.
• Not the Intended Use: !Mineuchi can cancel out unwanted effects like the Chicken Knife's Flee.
• One-Hit Kill: !Iainuki, which hits all enemies on the field after a charge turn, and has a very high chance to instantly kill them.
• Sheath Strike: !Mineuchi. It's like a regular attack with a chance of Paralyzing (when not bugged).
• Single-Stroke Battle: Iainiuki has the Samurai do the classic single-stroke kill against all enemies on the field.
• Status Effects: !Mineuchi is meant to work as a normal attack that inflicts Paralysis on the enemy, but it's bugged in the SNES, GBA and PS releases. It was eventually fixed for the mobile and Steam versions.

Dragoon

These high-jumping champions carry spears into battle and are adorned with heavy armor. The Dragoon is the only class in the base game able to equip Spears/Lances, and with high stamina, the ability to equip shields and heavy armor, and !Jump making your character stay on the air for some time, the class is quite hard to knock-out.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: !Jump (default); !Lance (learnable)

Support Ability: Equip Lances

Ultimate Weapon: Holy Lance, Dragon Lance (SNES, Pixel Remaster); Longinus (GBA on)

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 18

Agility: 5

Stamina: 15

Magic: -12

ABP for Mastery: 600 (SNES, GBA and PS versions); 560 (Mobile and Steam)

---

• Crippling Overspecialization: Dragoons don't benefit from equipment skills, since Jump only boosts spear damage and they already have armor and shield proficiency. Spears are incompatible with Two-Handed and Spellblade. On top of that, Dragoons don't mesh well with their own tank status by virtue of spending half the time in air, which means defensive abilities like Cover and Counter are wasted on them.
• Critical Hit Class: !Jump will always deal double damage, making it a guaranteed critical hit whenever the player decides to do it.
• The Dragonslayer: The Dragoon Lance deals double damage to dragons.
• Elemental Powers: With the Trident (Lightning-elemental), the Wind Spear (Wind-elemental) and the Holy Lance (Holy-elemental).
• Elite Tweak: Putting non-standard magic skills on the Dragoon (such as Sing) is one way to have a really, really tough support character.
• Goomba Stomp: !Jump causes them to leap into the air, become un-targetable, then land and deal double damage after a delay. The amount of time spent up in the air is exactly the amount of time needed for the action bar to fill up again. This also ignores the standard backrow damage penalty (50%), which only aids the Dragoon's tankiness.
• Joke Weapon: The Spear is the weakest weapon available for the Dragoon, and also one of the hardest to get, as it's only available as a rare steal from the Shell Bear in Castle Exdeath, making it easily missable too. The only reason to go out of your way to get one is for a 100% collection rate.
• Life Drain: One of the things that !Lance does is drain HP from an enemy.
• Magically Inept Fighter: Same as the other melee classes in the game, which can be a problem when using the magic-based Lance skill.
• Mana Drain: The other thing !Lance does is steal MP, although Dragoons are not a magically-oriented job.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: The class has a lot of quirks. It's a melee job whose main battle command (!Jump) allows it to sit on the backrow and tank damage like a champ, but said command removes the Dragoon from the battlefield, which means that it won't be tanking damage for the rest of your team. !Lance is a HP/MP drain for a class that doesn't use the latter, whose damage depends on Magic, which is the only stat the Dragoon has a penalty for. By virtue of these quirks, a Dragoon that wants to play the tank role will need to forgo using !Jump entirely, and a Dragoon that wants to use !Jump will have to avoid playing defensively. Overall, the Dragoon isn't a team player, which is a bit strange in a RPG game, but said qualities also make the class less linear than other melee classes.
• Mighty Glacier: Thanks to the quirks of the !Jump command, and being able to equip heavy armor and shields, a Dragoon will need double the time to finish off enemies, but will also be quite hard to KO. Strangely, they're not this stats-wise, as they don't get any Agility penalty and actually sit right on the middle for speed tiers — alongside the Red Mage and the Dancer.
• Mythology Gag: Bartz's Dragoon outfit very closely resembles Kain Highwind.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Twin Lance is not actually a spear, so Dragoons cannot use it.
• Situational Damage Attack: All spears/lances are this, dealing double damage when used with the !Jump command. The Dragon Lance doubly so, as it deals even more damage against Dragon-type enemies.
• Summon Magic: Casting Lance summons an ethereal blue dragon to attack the enemy.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The Dragoon class is immensely helpful when fighting in turn-scripted battles, as they can avoid nasty attacks by timing !Jump properly. Applies doubly to Shinryu, as Dragoon even gets a weapon to slaughter the powerful dragon and can easily avoid Tidal Wave attacks.

Dancer

A sort of Ascended Extra from Final Fantasy III and IV. (They were put into those games to add a whimsical element; just there for laughs and entertainment purposes.) This class uses deadly dances to defeat foes, which is translated into the !Dance command. Using it in battle has four random results (each with a 25% chance): Tempting Tango, Mystery Waltz, Jitterbug Duet and Sword Dance. The Dancer can equip knives, light armor and the exclusive Dancer set - The Man-Eater, the Rainbow Dress, the Lamia's Tiara, the Red Slippers and the Ribbon, but is unable to equip shields.

Type: Melee

Command Ability: !Dance (default); !Flirt (learnable)

Support Ability: Equip Ribbons

Ultimate weapon: Man-Eater, Dancer Set

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 5

Agility: 5

Stamina: -10

Magic: -5

ABP for Mastery: 400

---

• Alliterative Name:
  • Tempting Tango
  • Dancing Dagger (a weapon that makes other jobs perform !Dance when used to attack).
• Clothes Make the Superman: Dancers have horrid stats and, at best, inconsistent battle commands. The job derives most of its strength from fantastic equipment options (which are exclusive to them), that allow them to ignore harmful status, deal heavy damage despite their low stats, and have also impressive defense values despite their light armor class. Possibly lampshaded by their support Ability, Equip Ribbons, which despite what it says on the name, allows you to equip all the Dancer-related equipment upon mastery.
• Dance Battler: Their very job description says they leave blood on the dance floor. They're certainly dressed for a stint on Dancing with the Stars.
• Fan Disservice: Somewhat mitigated due to the game's sprites, but... what the hell is Galuf wearing?!
• Glass Cannon: Dancers have the lowest Stamina in the game, are unable to equip shields and can only use light armor, but they also have a 1/4 chance to use Sword Dance when using the !Dance command - which is an attack with four times the damage of a normal attack.
• Joke Character: A whimsical melee class that has the harshest Stamina penalty for seemingly no reason, with two modifiers that are weak at best, and that also doesn't have the option to equip shields, heavy armor or any weapon other than knives, whose main battle command has a randomized result. However, by the endgame it can evolve into a Lethal Joke Character.
• Lethal Joke Character: The Dancer set increases the chances for the class to use Sword Dance with the !Dance command, it's the only class in the game able to equip Ribbons (which negate most harmful status effects), and you gain the Man-Eater and the Chicken Knife as options. However, all these equipment options are only available in the late game.
• Life Drain: Jitterbug Duet has the same effect as the Drain spell.
• Luck-Based Mission: This is the downside to using the Dancer as a dedicated battler. You can deal massive damage to any enemy you come across... but only 25% of the time. Even if you use the Dancer exclusive equipment, this only boosts Sword Dance to a 50% chance, which basically makes every attack of yours into a coin flip.
• Magically Inept Fighter: As is common with melee jobs in this game, the class gets a penalty on the magic stat.
• Mana Drain: Mystery Waltz has the same effect as the Osmose spell, despite the Dancer not employing MP for anything. A popular strategy for players that don't want to rely on Sword Dance is to equip a Magic ability and elemental gear so the class can spam offensive Magic from the backrow, and use !Dance when low on MP to restore it.
• Master of None: Stat-wise, Dancer is this, thanks to being a melee class with the harshest Stamina penalty in the game (which means they can't comfortably sit on the front row), with the lowest Strength modifier for a melee job, and also not shining in the Agility department.
• Mating Dance:
  • Tempting Tango presumably has this effect on monsters, resulting in the Confuse status. This is the command that gets rewritten with Sword Dance when using the Dancer set.
  • The separate command !Flirt can cause enemies to lose their next turn unless they are Heavy.
• No-Sell: Ribbon negates most harmful status effects.
• Situational Damage Attack: The Man-Eater is the Dancer's ultimate weapon that has a 100% crit chance against humanoid targets... and also deals double damage when used with !Jump like a spear.
• Spin Attack: !Dance does this all the time.

Chemist

These intrepid alchemists are a rather oddball job. With weak stats and bad equipment options, the Chemists rely on item crafting to wreak havoc in-battle. Don't underestimate them; some of the most game-breaking options in FFV are available through the !Mix command. Chemists can equip knives and staves, light armor and robes, but are unable to equip shields.

Type: Support

Command Ability: !Drink (default); !Mix/!Combine, !Recover/Pray, !Revive (learnable)

Support Ability: Medicine/Pharmacology

Ultimate equipment: None; the Angel Robe is mid-tier body armor exclusive to the Chemists.

Stat modifiers:

Strength: 2

Agility: 3

Stamina: 6

Magic: -4

ABP for Mastery: 630

---

• Acquired Poison Immunity: The Angel Robe is a bodysuit exclusive to Chemists, and provides the user with an immunity to both Poison-elemental damage and the Poisoned status.
• Alchemy Is Magic: The robes-and-turban outfit that Chemists wear calls to mind the Islamic Golden Age, where modern chemistry has its roots in alchemy.
• Anti-Magic: Several mixes grant immunity to a status effect(s) or element—or causes it to heal the affected character.
• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: Despite not casting Magic, the class has similar equipment options to the spellcasting jobs.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: All mixes ignore defense and status immunities on their target. This enables a Chemist to sequence break the final battle against Exdeath in the SNES version.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Dragon Fangs and Dark Matter are rare in normal playthroughs, which means that a normal player will only use the potent mixes that require them only when they really need them.
• The Berserker: Can inflict this on targets with Bacchus' Wine or Kiss of Blessing.
• Cast from Stamina: The "Breath" mixes do elemental damage based on the Chemist's present HP.
• Chemistry Can Do Anything: Chemistry Mixes can create items that heal and grant buffs or debuffs, but they can also classify a character as a Dragon-Heavy type, boost character levels, and self-destruct the chemist, among other things. Often, they are a guaranteed hit unless the target has specific immunity to the effect.
• Combat Medic: They are basically pharmacists who compound really fast. Depending on what they Drink, they can become powerful warriors too.
• Difficult, but Awesome: It needs a lot of inventory grinding, and a list of mixes on hand, but it is possible for one Chemist to beat both of the game's superbosses. Players with a good knowledge of Mix and a well-stocked inventory can trivialize difficult fights by jacking up their party's levels, vampiring everything to death, or reclassifying how a game reads an enemy's type.
• Drunken Master: Bacchus' Wine grants Berserk.
• Elemental Powers:
  • Holy Breath and Dragon Breath - which is Fire, Ice and Thunder elemental -, despite their Fixed Damage Attack status.
  • The Elemental Power mix boosts the power of all elemental damage by 50% - for some reason, this is the only way to boost Water-type damage in the entire game.
  • Dragon Shielding and Resist Ice, Thunder and Fire - which make the target immune to all elements, and absorb said element respectively.
• Fixed Damage Attack:
  • The mixes which use either the chemist's HP or some calculation based on their HP will always do that amount of damage.
  • Dark Potion/Devil's Juice always deals 666 damage.
• Gendered Outfit: In the mobile and Steam versions, the girls wear orange robes instead of gold.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Downplayed with !Mix. The game doesn't actually tell you what Mixes produce what, and at the time the game was released, required players to take note of desirable item combinations and effects. However, a dedicated player can simply sit down and try out every possible item combination, loading to a previous save to not waste consumables.
  • Some of the most potent Mixes in game require you to consume a Dark Matter. You're limited to 10 of these in an usual playthrough. The game doesn't tell you that Prototypes drop them 100% of the time, and that they can also be stolen from rare enemies.
• Healing Factor: Lifewater/Water of Life casts Regen on the target.
• Item Amplifier: Pharmacology, a Chemist's passive ability, doubles the effect of curative items.
• Life Drain: Drain Kiss/Succubus Kiss drains HP from the target to the caster.
• Long-Range Fighter: Staves are part of their equipment set, so they can use the Flail and the Morning Star.
• Made of Explodium:
  • Dark Matter + a Turtle Shell results in TNT/Explosive, which kills the Chemist and deals its current HP as damage to the enemy.
  • Dark Matter + Dark Matter results in Shadow Flare, a massively powerful non-elemental spell that ignores magic defense and causes Sap on the target.
• Mana Burn: Dark Ether drops the target's MP to 1/4.
• Mana Drain: Lilith's Kiss drains MP from the target to the caster.
• Master of None: Statistically, Chemist are this. They have minuscule stat bonuses, and lack good equipment options. Justified, as they are already extremely broken; the class needed some kind of drawback.
• The Medic: Can fullfill this role for the party by mixing Potions, Ethers, Phoenix Downs, etc. Pharmacology also doubles the power of healing items.
• Number of the Beast: Devil's Juice will deal exactly 666 damage.
• Our Dark Matter Is Mysterious: Dark Matter in combination with another consumable item will usually do the opposite of what the item does in regular gameplay. Maiden's Kiss transforms the target into a toad, Eyedrop causes Darkness, Phoenix Down kills the target, Ether drops the enemy's MP to 1/4... High-end combinations with Dragon Fang or itself result in high-level magic like Dark Breath and Shadowflare.
• Poison Mushroom: The "Dud Potion" mix casts Confuse and Sap on the party.
• Power Floats: Levisalve grants Float status to the target.
• Purposely Overpowered: The !Mix command. The class derives all its power from it, and the weak stats and equipment are meant to encourage players to try out different Mixes so they can avoid these disadvantages. A dedicated player that takes the time to grind for ingredients and try different combinations will be rewarded with game-breaking power to breeze through the story. In fact, !Mix is so powerful, that a solo Chemist is able to take down Shinryu with minimal level grinding.
• Status Buff:
  • The !Drink command allows the Chemist to consume class-specific tinctures that temporarily double HP, increase Attack and Level, or cast Haste/Protect on the user.
  • !Mix can replicate the above effects for any target on-screen, as long as you combine the right items.
• Status Effects: Some Dark Matter mixes - and others, like Dark Sigh and Lamia Kiss - that include healing items all have the opposite effect - meaning this job can cast unblockable Toad, Darkness, Confusion and Poison.
• Support Party Member:
  • Chemists aren't much for attacking, despite their default ability being to drink stat-boosting drinks. With !Mix they can heal the party, give them powerful protection against many different types of spells, buff their stats, and even change the way the game reads their enemy type. They even get a few offensive mixes that all have extremely high Magic Power, allowing the class to ignore its weak Magic stat.
  • !Recover and !Revive are the equivalent of a multi-target Esuna and Raise spell, respectively.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • !Recover and !Revive are a free Esuna and Raise for the entire party, respectively, but they are overshadowed by the !Mix command, which can easily replicate their effects, and then some.
  • Power Drink is meant to greatly increase the user's Attack, but it's bugged on the SNES, GBA and PS versions, doing nothing at all.
• Weak, but Skilled: They have weak stats, but they also have access to a truly ridiculous loadout of combinations that can smash through the game balance like glass.

Jobs introduced in Final Fantasy V Advance

Secret jobs that appear in the Game Boy Advance and iOS versions. The first three can be found after unsealing all 12 Legendary Weapons, which causes a fissure to appear under the sea. The fourth one, however, can only be earned by defeating Enuo.

Gladiator

Disciples of war, this class has the second-most diverse weapon selection behind the Freelancer. The Gladiator debuted in Tactics Advance, and most often appears as a Bangaa class. (Bangaa being the most physically-fit species in Ivalice.)

---

• Blade Spam: Bladeblitz does what it sounds like.
• Captain Ersatz: The original artwork of this job dresses the cast like Saint Seiya, along with summon-themed armor: Odin for Bartz, Shiva for Lenna, Syldra for Faris, and Carbuncle for Krile. They're redrawn as Roman gladiators in the mobile version, which came out while a new Saint Seiya series was airing.
• Cast Speciation: The elemental essences each character represents have no bearing in gameplay, except for this job. Each individual's Finisher is of their particular element.
• Critical Hit Class: The Finisher ability will do maxed-out elemental damage, nothing, or a non-standard critical hit (doing double damage, but still accounting for enemy defense).
• Death or Glory Attack: A Gladiator only has one move and you're rolling the dice every time. Finisher executes elemental attacks more often (thereby failing less often) as you train the Gladiator. It can, and will, still fail at max.
• Elemental Punch: The Finisher ability is a powerful elemental attack, with the element matched to whoever is using it—Wind for Bartz, Water for Lenna, Fire for Faris, and Earth for Krile.
• Encounter Bait: One of their passive abilities increases the party's encounter rate. (Fortunately this is not automatically applied to Freelancers on mastery.)
• Fixed Damage Attack: Finisher essentially ignores weapons, class, level, and support abilities; thus, it's very good on a Thief, and very useless on a Freelancer.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Bladeblitz hits all enemies without fail. It's generally more useful against groups compared to Rapid Fire.
• Long-Range Fighter: One of their passive abilities, Long Range, negates the penalty for using melee weapons from the back row.
• Magically Inept Fighter: Gladiators are a completely physically-focused job and their low magic stats reflect that.
• Multi-Melee Master: Gladiators can use almost every weapon type in the game, including axes (which were previously exclusive to Berserkers).
• One-Hit Kill: Finisher usually deals a hefty amount of damage. Against enemies weak to the element, it's an insta-kill. (For enemies weak to that element but death immunity, it hits the max damage cap.)
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: In the GBA version, the costumes greatly resemble Saint Seiya characters.
• Palette Swap: Finisher is just Iainiuki with some different coloring added.

Cannoneer

This class uses more modern armaments: a cannon primed with magical shot. They would soon reappear in Tactics A2 as a Bangaa job.

---

• Cycle of Hurting: Cannoneer can stop Neo Exdeath by overwhelming him with damage, causing him to continually trigger new AI sequences before he can fire off an attack.
• The Dragonslayer: One of the possible ammo combinations produces Dragon Cannon, which deals twice the damage to dragons.
• Dressed to Plunder: The iOS version makes all of the characters pirates. Accordingly, Faris gets a hat.
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: Scaled up to cannonballs. All of the Open Fire shots are accompanied by a color-coded visual effect to indicate what status they're going to inflict.
• Experience Booster: EXP Up increases your EXP earned to 1.5.
• Four-Star Badass: Cannoneers resemble French soldiers, complete with tricorn.
• Holy Hand Grenade: Divine Cannon, one of the Combinations, does holy damage.
• Item Crafting: Combine, like Mix, uses items from inventory plus one of the ammuntion types to create unique effects.
• Jack of All Stats: Without the cannonfire, their stats aren't hugely strong or hugely weak in any one direction and they don't carry any stat penalties.
• Long-Range Fighter: The cannon used in Open Fire does the same amount of damage from the back row.
• Mage Marksman: Open Fire has a chance of inflicting a status effect. Combine lets cannoneers enchant their shots with various specific status or elemental magic.
• The Musketeer: Canonneers' actual weapon is a sword, which along with the costume gives them a 19th-century flavor.
• Too Awesome to Use: Any Combination that involves the rare Dragon Fangs and Dark Matters.
• Trick Bullet: They are trick cannonballs and can be used to inflict different types of elemental damage or afflict enemies with status effects.

Oracle

This harbinger of good and bad fortune can peer into the future. The Oracle is another casting class, but unlike every other spellcaster, they initiate a ticking clock.

---

• Death or Glory Attack: The Oracle's signature skill is Predict. There are three levels for the Oracle to choose from, and once chosen a countdown begins. Some of the resulting events target the entire battlefield with damage and/or status effects. There's also Pestilence, which hurts only the party.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Misuse Predict, and you will shred your own party to pieces. Use it correctly, and you will deal massive damage while at the same time healing your party.
• Experience Booster: A variant for ABP.
• Guide Dang It!: Nowhere does the game actually tell you that what you get with Predict is based on the last digit of the caster's MP.
• Light 'em Up: The best Prediction is Divine Judgment, which damages enemies with the Holy element while healing the party at the same time.
• Only Smart People May Pass: Despite appearing random, Predict is actually, well, predictable. But the player has to be willing to do some math if they want to use it effectively.
• Overrated and Underleveled: Oracle is one of the bonus classes added in the Advance version and obtained after all the standard ones have been unlocked, beating out all the other mage classes in their magic stat. However, it has limited equipment options and is very challenging to use effectively.
• Squishy Wizard: Oracles have some of the lowest strength, vitality, and stamina of any class in the game. They do have the highest Magic in the game, not that they use it with their skillset.
• Weather Manipulation: Some of the predictions are weather-based, such as Hurricane.

Necromancer

An avatar of death and practitioner of the dark arts. Necromancer is only playable here in terms of mainline games (they were actually supposed to debut in Final Fantasy XI, but were scrapped); the job has ony appeared in a few spinoffs since.

---

• Always Accurate Attack: Drain Touch always hits and sucks out more HP than the regular Drain spell, and it doesn't exact a penalty when used on undead targets.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: Necromancers are flagged as undead, meaning that healing spells will hurt them; they have much higher stamina and vitality than other mage classes to compensate. Also, they can be revived with Raise. Finally, they don't count as undead when outside of combat.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Dark Arts spells are powerful, but from level 2 onward they all cost well upwards of 30MP.
• Bonus Feature Failure: The sprites are awesome looking, and the spells are good. They're souped-up Summons with status ailments thrown in. However, getting their abilities can be a pain, being Undead is slightly annoying, and there's nothing to use them on.
  • Dark Arts does a better job than Black Magic for the most part. Too bad it's incompatible with Dualcast. About half of the Dark Arts can only be found in the bonus dungeon, anyway.
  • Doomsday is a barely stronger Bahamut. Not groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination.
  • Wearing Bone Mail to be Undead is better than tying up a whole ability slot. Since the Bone Mail accomplishes what Undead does and more, a character with both Bone Mail and Undead will simply act as if the character only has Bone Mail on. Undead is an interesting mechanic to screw around with, but it isn't necessary for anything. It doesn't carry over to Freelancers or Mimes.
  • Overall, the Necromancer would be a great job to master simply for the purposes of passing on their stats onto the Freelancer/Mime, or at least it would be if it didn't unlock so obnoxiously late.
• Bragging Rights Reward: This class is only acquired after defeating Enuo, after which there are at most four meaningful foes to fight.
• Glass Cannon: Functionally, because they can't be healed by other characters' items or healing abilities, the Necromancer is very powerful and also prone to dying if you're not keeping an eye on things.
• Healing Shiv: The Death spell. As you would expect, it raises any character with the Undead status back to full HP.
• Life Drain: The Drain Touch under Dark Arts does what it says; it's the only way a Necromancer can heal normally.
• Revive Kills Zombie: White magic healing spells and healing items do a commenserate amount of damage to the Necromancer.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet: Everyone is wearing a skull mask, necklace, and/or brooch with their dread darklord robes.
• Summon Magic: Oath summons one of four demonic monsters (Skeleton, Flaremancer, Rajiformes, or Zombie Dragon) to unleash a special attack, a sort of undead version of Ranger's !Animals ability.
• Useless Useful Spell: Oath (way too weak by the time you can use it), Curse (Multi-status attack at the time when enemies having status immunities is the norm) and Undead (why would you voluntarily make one of your characters undead).
• Whatevermancy: One of a few classes with such a naming.
• You Can't Kill What's Already Dead: Equipping Necromancer basically makes the character a temporary Lich. They get a higher Vitality stat than some of the toughest physical classes.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Necromancers learn their abilities by delivering the killing blow to a monster and presumably stealing their soul (and the spell the necromancer gains).

---