Final Fantasy 5 Beginner Club W02
| Week 02 | 2026-09-25T15:00:00Z |
|---|---|
| Previous week | 📿 Final Fantasy 5 - Week 1 |
| Next week | 📿 Final Fantasy 5 - Week 3 |
| Home Threads | FFBC / FF5BC |
Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:
Please be extra-mindful of spoilers, as these games become more and more plot-driven it’s important to avoid revealing even minor details of future events, characters and locations. If you’re not sure if something is spoilery or not, better just throws it in a [spoiler] just in case.
Stopping point
Before entering the ship at Karnack. I’m covering some optional content this week as well:
- Visit to タイクーン
- ウォルスの配水塔
週刊完璧主義通信
Missable location
Karwen is technically missable since you can go straight for 北の山. It’s on your path though, so there’s no reason to avoid it. Similarly I think the town part of Wolse can be skipped if you just go straight for the castle.
Missable enemies
ウォルスの塔
This location is not revisitable and contains an exclusive enemy:
Akashelia’s quest
There’s a piano you can play in Karwen and another one in Karnack.
青魔法コレクター会報
北の山
- フラッシュ from the ブロックス
There’s a trick for this one however: while the enemy will attempt to use Flash, they never have enough MP for the attack to go through, and as a result you won’t be able to learn it. Therefore the only way to get the spell is to first use an ether on the enemy to let it cast the spell successfully.
At this point in the game ethers are quite valuable, so you may want to wait until later to get this spell (we’ll get several opportunities to do so). However Flash is quite good, for 7MP it attempts to blind all enemies. Up to you.
ウォルスの塔
- 蛙の歌 from the エルフトード
This enemy will only use the technique when alone, so you have to kill everybody else and wait. It also took me quite a while to encounter this enemy in the tower, seems to be a rare encounter (or I got unlucky). We can also encounter this same enemy in the optional dungeon this week (the 配水塔), and it seems quite common there.
カルナックの地域
- ？？？？ from the ワイルドナック in the forests near Karnack on the world map.
More details
Last week we lost our ship so we must continue the journey towards the Water Crystal on foot.
カーウェンの町
Head South until you reach the town of Karwen. There you can do some shopping, play the piano, and ask around for a way to reach the kingdom of Wolse, where the Water Crystal is kept.
Note that there’s an Ice Rod hidden in a crate:
You can use it to cheese a bossfight later if you want.
北の山
After discussing with the denizens of Karwen, you should know that our next step is 北の山, through a forested valley to the North of the town. There you just have to climb to the top.
The boss shouldn’t be a big issue but if you struggle you can use (from the item menu) the Ice Rod you can find in Karwen. Doing so will kill the initial boss immediately and win the fight before the 2nd enemy has a chance to appear. You’ll lose the rod in the process however. Also note that the boss is also vulnerable to the Flash blue magic spell you can learn just before, so you can also use that to make the fight a lot easier.
タイクーン城〔任意〕
Before continuing toward Wolse, we can use our new means of locomotion to return to the start of the game and go visit Lena’s Castle. You’ll be rewarded with a special scene, some backstory and a bunch of treasures.
ウォルス国
Time to finally explore Wolse. I recommend starting with the town, there’s some good shopping to be done. Then you can move on to the castle. Be careful there: there are some sections with enemies, and they’re tough. We’ll return later to fetch those treasures (although if your version allows disabling the encounters you can cheat your way through). For now focus on exploring the safe parts of the castle.
You may also find the prison section where some NPCs ask you to free them. This is not a very critical choice, so do as you wish. If you want the details: attempting to free the human prisoner will just trigger a silly cutscene and achieve nothing. Freeing the werewolf gets you nothing but he’ll steal a few minor treasures later on, so you’re better off leaving him here.
To move the story forward, talk with the King.
ウォルスの塔
The next objective is the tower north of Wolse (across the water). Climb your way to the top. It’s a non-revisitable area, so collect everything you need.
If you wonder how to get the last shard before leaving the tower, you can’t.
ウォルス城
If you want a more detailed explanation of the new jobs, you can read the various entries in the miscellaneous section below.
Return to the Wolse castle and speak to the king in his bedroom. Our next objective is to go to Karnack to protect the Fire Crystal (surely this time we’ll succeed). Before that, if you feel a bit bold, you can try to do the dungeon that’s hidden behind the waterfall at the back of the castle (the 配水塔):
It may still be too hard at this point though, if that’s the case we’ll try again later. The boss will be a test of your ability to effectively use the job system. A small, rather obvious tip: use fire.
Regardless of how you fare you’ll still want to ignore the other dungeon section that’s located in the castle’s basement, that one is probably a death sentence still.
隕石
By talking to the king and other people in Wolse, you should be able to figure out that the path forward has something to do with the meteor that just crashed near the Wolse tower. Go there and you’ll find an unexpected route…
On the other side you’ll end up in the middle of nowhere. Walk inland until you reach Karnack.
カルナック
You won’t be able to enter the castle, so you should visit the town first. There’s a piano in the pub. To move the story forward, you should go buy some gear in the shop to trigger a cutscene.
Once inside the castle, there’s not much you can do besides walk around and wait for the next cutscene to trigger.
Afterwards you’ll be able to explore the castle and talk to the people. You can also leave and return to the town, this time the magic shop will be open!
Don’t enter the ship just yet, we’ll take care of that next week!
Map
Miscellaneous
カエルはいいなあ
The FF4 frog easter egg has now graduated to running gag since we can encounter it this week in Wolse:
If you want more details about this, see this thread in the FF4 club: 🐋 Final Fantasy 4 - Week 5
募集・バーサーカー
- Number of levels to master: 2
- ABP to master: 500
Probably the simplest job in the game: the berserkers are, as the name indicates, permanently berserk. Good strength and stamina, although not as good as the monk. Pairs well with the time mage’s haste spell.
Kinda amusing job, but the lack of flexibility makes it a bit difficult to recommend. One possible use is to automate grinding sessions (for versions of the game that don’t have an autobattle option).
募集・魔法剣士
- Number of levels to master: 7
- ABP to master: 680
Now that’s a good one. The fencer mages have one special ability, 魔法剣, that imbues the equipped weapon with an offensive spell for the rest of the fight (usually a black magic spell, but Holy works too for instance). This can be extremely powerful and in some ways outranks raw black magic because you only need to cast the 魔法剣 ability once per fight (so less MP attrition for long boss fights), it’s not affected by reflect and you can always fall back to simple physical attacks if the enemy absorbs magic.
The main inconvenient is the lack of crowd-control (you can only attack an enemy at once) and that you have to waste a turn casting the 魔法剣 at the beginning of combat. The raw stats of the 魔法剣士 also aren’t super impressive, so they wont deal as much damage as a knight or monk with raw physical attacks.
Note that not only swords can be imbued with the 魔法剣 ability, but for instance bows can’t be. On the Pixel Remaster each weapons clearly states if it’s usable with the ability.
Oh and this job automatically casts barrier (increases magic defense) at low HP, which is pretty neat too.
募集・時魔導師
- Number of levels to master: 7
- ABP to master: 530
Oh, a shiny new mage type! The time mages have all sorts of spells that are best described as “not really white or black magic”. You have some very useful support spells like haste and levitate, teleport to get you out of dungeons, “return” to reset an encounter completely (a strange but surprisingly useful spell), and comet/meteor spells when you just want to pummel the enemies.
A very good and flexible support job. It’s only lacking a bit in the healing department, “regen” is a time spell but won’t usually manage to keep up with the DPS from bosses.
募集・召喚師
- Number of levels to master: 6
- ABP to master: 750
It’s the summoner. That’s about it really. There are some very powerful offensive but also support summons in this game, but many of them won’t be available until very late in the game. Unlike black magic, summons can’t be reflected, so that’s nice.
Upon mastery you gain the 呼び出す ability that casts a random summon for 0 MP cost. Seems a bit unreliable unless you make sure to only collect very powerful summons I suppose.
募集・赤魔導師
- Number of levels to master: 4
- ABP to master: 1159
When I noticed that the Wind crystal gave us the FF1 jobs with the exception of the red mage being substituted for the blue mage, I assumed that it was because there was no point in having a red mage in FFV given that the ability system lets you hybrid jobs at your fancy. If you want a job that can cast black and white magic, you can already do that. If you want a warrior class that also can cast magic, you can do that too.
So, what’s the point of the red mage then? Well, the stats are pretty bad, the 赤魔法 ability is also pretty trash given that it lets you cast all white and black magic up to level 3 only. This means that the job becomes near-useless when you start getting spells level 4 and up, you’re not going to be casting blizzard against the final boss. On top of that the red mage requires the most AP of any job to master!
So, a useless class? Well, almost, but not quite: upon mastery, you unlock the 連続魔 ability which lets you dualcast spells. That means that you can cast two spells every turn. In the hands of the red mage that means two low-level white or black spells, which is still garbo, but this ability can be used by other mages (white, black, time but not blue) and even the summoner to dual-cast the strongest spells and summons in the game. You can dual-meteor, dual-leviathan, dual-flare. You don’t even have to cast two of the same spell, you can chain “raise” and a party-wide “curaja” for instance. Incredibly powerful stuff.
So yeah, red mages are pretty trash but still worth mastering eventually for the 連続魔 ability alone. They’re also reasonably useful in the early game, where you don’t have access to high-level magic anyway.
Track of the week
銀嶺を行く
Participation
- I’m playing along
- I will catch up later
- I’m a filthy preplayer but I’m here for the discussion
