Ranger was my trial run for this challenge! It is absolutely unreasonably strong and begins the game with a bow, so there’s no weak point. I farmed the scripted Demon in Hein’s Castle for a Yoichi arrow to get even more unreasonable power. Ranger completely steamrolled the game, frankly. I needed to grind some levels in order to kill yellow dragons for an elixir grind, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. Ranger has extremely bad defensive options, but being able to do extremely high unresistable damage from back row to every boss can offset a LOT of problems. This was a riot.

This was the true test! Dark knight gets NO weapon until two dungeons after Garuda, the 10th boss, so I needed to take some creative measures. I grinded in the west wing of Castle Sasune until I was out of money, by throwing potions at the undead enemies in there. This was barely enough levels to one-shot Djinn with a single antarctic wind. I had exactly enough attacking items to get through Giant Rat and Medusa, which allowed me to get to the Subterranean Lake and begin the real grind. Bombs have a 0.72% chance to drop bomb arms (consumable item that casts firaga), and they have a chance to self-destruct. Thankfully that still awards us exp/gil and item drops.

I had to allow 2287 bombs to self-destruct on me to get the 15 bomb arms I needed to defeat the next 6 bosses, in addition to using an earthen drum to farm for two raven’s yawns for Garuda and the forced gold knight fight in Saronia. After that, I could get a weapon and proceed naturally! This run was a blast and paves the way for the other weaponless classes to succeed!

Summoner! This is a really fun class, because the stats are huge and the spells are extremely strong and can be boosted by the elemental rods, but HP is terrible and I don’t get summons until after Goldor. I don’t get rods until after Djinn, and I also need to use my attacking items on Giant Rat, so I needed to do a pretty excessive grind on the undeads using potions like Dark Knight, until I was able to kill Djinn with a single antarctic wind. It wasn’t too unncessary though, because I couldn’t comfortably farm the Nepto Gulf without those levels and needed to in order to kill Giant Rat in a few casts.

The big hassle, as expected, was survivability on Two-Headed Dragon. Entering world of darkness with 4600 health was not nearly enough to survive two hits from him (his damage range was like 1900-3200, and averaged 2300-2500), but I was fortunately able to get above 5000 health by killing the others and a few random encounters first. The other bosses presented such little threat I could sit and reroll damage ranges by just spamming elixirs on THD. Still was a scary fight!

I was taking almost no damage from magic at the end. Summoner had a whopping 80% magic evade, so even particle beam was doing 350 damage to me. The worst meteor/flare hits were only around 800 damage, but were usually much lower. I was not expecting such tankiness and such damage from summoner, but it resulted in a really funny playthrough.

Well, Ninja starts with 26 strength at level 2, so that is about as accelerated as you can possibly get. I was one-shotting damn near everything from back row for most of the game. Being able to use any weapons and any armor really opened up some tremendously powerful combinations for both offense and defense (black robe when I need magic defense and crystal gear otherwise). Two-Headed Dragon could be comfortably handled with dual crystal shield and backrow by throwing shurikens. Everything else was cozy!

Our weapons really don’t matter for most of this (except the draining weapons) because our strength is so comically enormous, but the real unexpected heroes are the bells. They have huge stats to compensate for geomancer’s bad stats, but when used on a ninja they are tremendous. Massive attack power, 99 accuracy, and non-elemental. I’m honestly blown away by how good they are compared to most other weapons.

Red mage has a very good early and mid game and terrible end-game damage. We do have good survivability and equipment options but we do so little damage to the end bosses that they took ages. Our IGT at the final save was 6:58 and was 9:05 after clearing, so it was well over 2 hours to kill a few bosses. Most of the World of Darkness bosses took 15-20 minutes and 70+ rounds of attacking.

I opted to level in Lake Dohr this time using thundara to clear encounters, just to save one turn per battle over Bahamut’s Cave. Not sure if it’s actually better or not.

Warrior is a truly lamentable class. His early game damage is outstanding, he’s quite tanky, and he gets blood sword for the sustain to power through random encounters. However, his best non-elemental weapon is the iron arrow, which we get in the second town. The last 12 bosses resist every other weapon that warrior has, which means I lose out on the sustain that blood sword offers. I had to grind to level 82 before I could even attempt to farm for elixirs, and had to resort to back row “great bow + iron arrow” against Two-Headed Dragon. I was resetting for good HP growth for close to half the run, and that turned out to be pretty necessary. I really needed the extra value from the elixirs.

Pajama party! Geomancer’s !Terrain ability is extremely strong in the early game, but it can’t hurt Goldor and I don’t get access to a weapon until after him, which means some time with our favorite bomb grind. It took 1345 bombs to get the 7 bomb arms I needed and then I could get equipment.

Bells are extremely powerful even for geomancer, so this job actually did tremendous damage. The main issue is the lack of defense and HP, and that I needed to be front row to take advantage of the bell damage. I had no solution for Two-Headed Dragon and spent a lot of time trying to find some alternative to elixir grinding because yellow dragons were impossible. In the end I just had to grind more levels so I could kill yellow dragons.

I got very very lucky in World of Darkness, with great Echidna luck and some nice Ahriman reflected curajas, so I ended up with a few elixirs over budget to make it through Two-Headed Dragon and Cloud of Darkness. Level 94 feels excessive, but I barely made it.

Black belt is comically powerful. Kick is ridiculously efficient for grinding, and black belt has enormous stat growth. The only vulnerabilities were lack of magic defense and healing, so I finished the game with no high potions and only 2 elixirs. Two-Headed Dragon was very scary, but back row and !Boost ended up working! Even with a grind for Giant Rat and a short elixir farm, I still finished ahead of Ninja’s time. Ridiculous job.

Evoker is my absolute favorite job in the franchise. It learns 8 summons and each summon has two equally-likely spells it draws from. Most are bad in boss fights because they attempt status effects that can’t land, but others are incredible. Ifrit has a heal that is nearly as strong as curaja, Odin has a reflect, and Leviathan has two multi-target attacks for grinding. The only fight that presented a challenge was Two-Headed Dragon as usual, but it really brought it.

I attempted him at level 70 and was consistently one-shotted from full health. I returned at level 85 and it was still not enough, so I had to grind further to 90 to have a realistic chance. I’m confident it was possible at 84 still, but this fight required getting 9 hits with Odin out of 16 uses, and never going last on any of my 22 healing turns. With the way agility and turn order work, that is quite unlikely. In the end, I spent close to 4 hours trying to find my win condition against THD, but I finally succeeded.

No elixirs were used in any other fight in this playthrough.

Monk is a struggle. He does a ton of damage and fists are unique in that they are non-elemental and classless, so nothing is able to resist them (Garuda, Hein, etc). However, monk has no healing and is incredibly frail in the endgame, so I spent almost the entire run resetting to manipulate good HP rolls to maximize my elixir value. I had to do a lot of my grinding in Ancient’s Maze in hopes that I’d get some elixir help from King Behemoth (he did drop 2 for me!), but even at level 90 or so, I was struggling to consistently kill yellow dragons to get more. In the end, I had to get 6 elixirs and get extremely lucky on the boss rush, but we made it through!

White Mage is devastating in this game. They have access to wind magic and a lot of charges of extremely good heals, they have good defensive and offensive equipment at every point in the game (fire staff for early mini dungeon, light staff for water grinding, rune staff for mid/late game grinding, golem staff to petrify everything in endgame, white robe, scholar hat, scholar robe, and even rune bracers!), and surprisingly good HP growth among other good stats. Frankly, the only issue white mage runs into is that the end-game damage is really bad for the boss rush.

That issue, though, is substantial. We could’ve pretty comfortably cleared the game at level 70 or earlier, except for two-headed dragon. White mage isn’t slow enough or fast enough to have consistent turn order against THD, and our source of damage is the Break spell via golem staff, which does 800 damage. With enough health to survive only 2 hits, that means I’d need to go first on each of my 80+ rounds of healing. This fight took about 2.5 hours of strategizing and attempts, with some breaks to level a bit in between, and the final successful fight took a solid 22 minutes. Brutal end but very fun playthrough!

Knight is an extremely good class. It has fantastic stats and HP growth, and consistently gets equipment upgrades throughout the game. He has access to a draining weapon, a back-row viable weapon, some non-elemental weapons, and Excalibur and Ragnarok which are absurdly strong even through they’re resisted by most endgame bosses. This was a very fun playthrough!

Black mage is deceptively great! Black magic is so strong at every point in the game, so there really weren’t many issues anywhere. Leveling was very smooth, and the end bosses can be hit for 3k easily with bio. The only snag was my planning for the end boss gauntlet, because I didn’t know how much damage to expect to take, and because his elixir farm is extremely inefficient. In the end it was fine without an elixir grind, because of some really concerning tankiness from this job.