The Latecomers
It had been several years since I played a Final Fantasy 5 run on Livestream before starting this group in the Spring of 2026. I was looking for an introductory game to use before Season Nine of Civ4 AI Survivor and FF5 was a great change of pace that I could pilot in a low-stress, relaxing environment. One idea that had been kicking around in my head for some time was running a team that used nothing but the extra jobs added in the Gameboy Advance version. Most of these jobs don't get much attention because they weren't in the original version of FF5 and don't unlock until ridiculously late in the gameplay, normally failing to appear until everything but the final dungeon has been defeated. They are essentially intended to be used only in the postgame dungeon added in the GBA version (and the Necromancer doesn't unlock until even THAT has been finished!) which meant that they were good targets to spotlight here. I dubbed this group "The Latecomers" due to their tardy arrival on the scene and, thanks to an all-jobs cheat code, the party was off and running with these forbidden jobs from the outset of the gameplay.
Now because these jobs aren't supposed to unlock until the end of the third world, several of them have abilities that can trivialize pretty much all of World 1 and 2. The Gladiator's Finisher move deals 9999 damage when rolling its Elemental Attack, the Oracle's Predict ability deals full damage regardless of character level or stats, the Cannoneer's Open Fire move deals huge damage and never misses its target, etc. Since these jobs were never intended to be used in this part of the gameplay, Galuf didn't even have a Necromancer sprite and was invisible for the entire first world! With that said though, FF5 is not a particularly balanced game and these abilities weren't really out of line compared to what classes like the Samurai and Ninja and Chemist can do. There were plenty of things that reined in the power of this group: Bartz only had 25% odds to pull his Elemental Attack from Finisher at the outset, Lenna's Condemn was painfully slow to trigger while Predict was its usual awkward self, Cara's Necromancer was stuck using the weak and random Oath skill for lack of Dark Arts, while Faris couldn't even use Combine for lack of Blitzshot materials. They were a strong party with an answer for every challenge but hardly invincible.
The early stages of the gameplay were carried by Faris' Open Fire ability which was an easy one-shot kill against most monsters throughout the first world. Bartz's Finisher defeated a bunch of the early bosses when it pulled the 9999 damage Elemental Attack, though notably both Liquid Flame and Sol Cannon absorbed wind element and were healed by this ability. I went through the annoying process of setting up a Cleansing prediction against several of the early bosses, with this process made even harder than usual because the healing aspect of the Blessing prediction was unusable because it would kill Necromancer Galuf! That Necromancer class started to take over in the second world when Hellwind unlocked upon visiting the basement of Bal Castle. The damage of that Dark Arts spell was amplified when picking up an Air Knife and basically carried the party for the rest of the game, never really falling off or becoming less effective. The Oracle's Condemn also became extremely useful once Lenna maxed out her job level, with Doom on a 5 second timer killing almost any random encounter while Rejuvenation on a 2 second timer with Haste status was great for healing. I got to play around with Faris' Combine debuffs in the final dungeon and had a great run through the ending boss gauntlet, only dying once to Twin Tania when its Giga Flare went off one second too early. This was a good thing because I was racing against the clock to finish the last dungeon before starting an AI Survivor game and narrowly made it on time!
If you've never seen these GBA jobs in action before, the various Livestream recordings are linked below on YouTube. Enjoy!
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five
Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine
