When we last left our heroes, they had acquired the ability to actually do damage, by learning how to befriend demi-gods and then launch them at high-speeds towards anything vaguely threatening.

Like so.

A reliable source of murder makes the next dungeon so much less of a slog you guys, you have no idea. Getting to the next boss is mostly painless, but it makes up for that fact by being extremely painful.

The Liquid Flame is another nasty wall for Fiesta parties, particularly if you don’t have a good source of Ice-aspected damaged. Thankfully, that is the one kind of damage that we can do throw around right now, so we’re good.

This is a shapeshifting boss. Every time you do damage to it, it throws a big ol’ magic attack at you and then changes between one of three forms. The humanoid form, pictured above, is offensively focused, uses Rush and other nasty physical attacks, and will hit your entire party with Blaze when attacked. Blaze causes moderate damage to the entire party and can really add up if you take a few in quick succession. 

The second form, hand form, is more defensively focused. Specifically, it is immune to magic attacks, has high physical evade, and its attacks have a paralyze effect. This form counters with Fira, which will do just shy of 300 damage to a single target. It can quite easily one-shot squishy or underleveled party members, so have a source of raise handy.

Lastly, and for the most part leastly, we have the tornado form, which will do nothing but heal itself with Fira spells. One useful strategy is, if you get this form fairly early in the fight, let it burn through all of its MP casting Fira on itself over and over until it runs dry. Then you can use the tornado form as a breather to deal with whatever damage the other forms did to you. Keep in mind, though, that this won’t affect the MP of the other forms, so they’ll still be able to hurt you plenty.

Once fire boss is down, we do have at least one more dungeon and boss to deal with before we get fire job. And the best part is:

It’s a timed dungeon. Thankfully, the 10 minutes is pretty generous, especially if you know exactly which treasures to go for, and/or have a map.

Once you stumble out of the exit, you enter what looks at first like a random encounter:

This is a fight you will see a few times throughout the dungeon, though the Sergeant there does make a comment when the fight opens, which is unique and a bit of a tip-off that something’s up. Now, if you really want to, you can focus down the Sergeant while leaving his dogs alone, and he’ll drop just like any other scrub without doing anything special. If you do take out the Cur Nakk’s first, though, you’ll get some party dialogue, and the Sergeant will turn into:

this... thing. If you have a Blue Mage, he does have a spell that is really hard to learn anywhere else, but otherwise he’s just a slightly stronger enemy than what you were dealing with all dungeon. Nuke him down and snag your third job.

Maybe.

The quirk with the third crystal is that you get its jobs in two waves. You get a few right at this point, and the rest a boss and two dungeons later. This can be really annoying for Fiesta parties.

But we are in luck and our fire job is one that we get now:

Team Pokemon Trainer is go!

Beastmaster is kind of an interesting job. At the start you can beat a monster into submission and snag it, legit Pokemon style, to do a single powerful attack.

Like so.

Later on, you get the ability to straight-up take control of one monster for a battle and have it do whatever you want. BST is useful in random encounters, but against bosses it take a lot of effort to do ultimately less damage -- one time! -- than our SMNs can do every turn by pointing a finger and saying, “Die.” It’s got a few cheap tricks it can pull off, but its not the best class in the game.

Now, where were we?

Right, this asshole. Garula is the biggest wall in the early game for fiesta runs. She/He (the game waffles back and forth) isn’t quite so bad when you have access to all of the tricks available at this point in a normal playthrough, but only having access to one job can make this thing a real bear.

Main thing for WHM is to put up Protect on everyone ASAP. Garula’s one of those bosses that gets nastier as you beat on it, and all of her/his attacks are physical-type, so using the early parts of the fight to prepare and set up defences is crucial. Then start bonking away.

After she/he’s taken enough damage, Garual will start countering every attack made at it with either one physical attack, two physical attacks, or a physical attack and Rush. Rush does decent physical damage and also inflicts HP Leak, which causes your Hit Points to tick away at a fairly alarming rate for a set amount of time. There’s no way to remove it, so aggressive healing is the only way to deal with it. Thankfully, that is the one thing WHM does well, so this fight boils down to a very long, measured battle of: 1. Poke the mammoth, 2. Deal with the consequences, 3. Rinse/Repeat.

Once healing and bonking have been applied in sufficient amounts, Garula will give up and wander away, and we get access to our second job:

Actual offensive capabilities, Hell yes. Team Sidequestin’ is go. For those not in the know, Summoner in this game, as in most Final Fantasies is all about huge, horribly MP expensive, multi-target damage. Also, while you can purchase a few (completely garbage) summons at the shop, most of the good SMN spells require you to track down the beast in question and convincing it to join you. Usually by beating the crap out of it. In fact, the first one can be obtained immediately:

Shiva! Series staple and possibly the oddest appropriation of Hindu mythology until bug-Ravana in FFXIV. Now, in the next town after Shiva becomes available there is an item you can grab to cheese the Hell out this fight, but being honorable women and men of the cloth, we will do this fight legit:

...Nevermind.

Fuck you, Shiva.

So one cool thing that most magic user have access to is rods. For the very reasonable fee of 750 gil you can snap a rod over your knee and cast a high level spell fairly early in the game. Pro cheese strats, but we’ll try to avoid it on most things that aren’t Shiva.