As I’ve mentioned before, Final Fantasy V is probably the last Final Fantasy game that I well and truly geeked out over, even going so far as to put together a FAQ. Having memorized all the ins and outs of the game, I was planning ahead for one crucial moment in the Game Boy Advance version.
About halfway through the adventure, you come across Bal Castle. It’s a friendly place, but some tough monsters lurk in its dungeon. With a little advance knowledge (or thorough preparation), you can use these monsters to raise your levels really high. And with the GBA version’s added speed and portability, you can really game the system. Check out what I accomplished in just five hours…
For the uninitiated, in Final Fantasy V you build up not only your standard experience levels but also job levels, that give you new abilities tied to character classes. Once you master these classes, if you switch back to the standard Freelancer class, every stat boost from those mastered classes stays with you. What ends up happening is that at the end of the game, you have a bunch of ultra-powered characters.
In general, the job-leveling process is a slow one, because you need ABP (ability points), which are doled out in tiny amounts as you defeat enemies. Killing boss monsters will sometimes give you as many as 9 ABP — and to master a class, you need literally thousands of them. So it’s slow going. There are a few ways to game the system, though. At the end of the game — literally at the final save point two steps away from the final boss — enemies called Movers give you 199 ABP. But at that point, you’re usually ready to go and beat the final boss having only mastered a couple classes.
But well in advance of that are the monsters in the basement of Bal Castle. They’re living stone knight statues; called RockStatue in the PlayStation version and Objet D’Art in the new, snazzier GBA translation. They’re the only enemy that shows up in the little basement room. In groups of two they give you 4 ABP, in groups of five they give you a whopping 8.
There’s a catch, of course. They’re really hard to defeat. They’re vulnerable to lightning, but using Thundera (the most powerful lightning spell in your arsenal at this point) only does about 750 damage — and they’ve got 3300 hit points each. Meanwhile, while you’re poking away at them, they hit you for huge damage, and sometimes they just cast Break on you, which turns you to stone.
You can use Golden Needle items, which usually cure Break, to instantly kill them. But that’s time-consuming, not to mention expensive. The way to really cheat your ass off is to use the highly optional spell Level 5 Death, which eliminates all enemies whose level is a multiple of 5 (the Objets D’Art are level 45).
If you managed to get this spell in the Ancient Library earlier in the game (it’s not easy unless you know exactly what you’re looking for), you’re golden — you can cast it at the beginning of the battle and kill the whole group without being scratched. Spend an hour in there blowing through the battles (restoring your health in the Inn just outside the basement) and you can get your job levels up quickly.