Final Fantasy V is a lot harder than I remember! Granted, I haven't played it a ton in the past, but I have gotten a little further than the point I'm currently at in my bedtime playthroughs… and I'm sure I don't remember the bosses being as tough as they've been in this run!
"Tough" might not be quite the right word, because I've been managing to make it through the encounters by fiddling around with the Job system. This is certainly something that was absolutely necessary to do in Final Fantasy III but I was always under the impression that Final Fantasy V handled things a little more elegantly in this regard. Or perhaps I'm simply using an inelegant solution to a problem, and there's also an elegant one out there.
The best example is the boss I just beat: Liquid Fire. With the lineup I'd been playing with up until that point — Knight, Berserker, Sorcerer, Summoner — I'd been getting through random encounters just fine without any difficulty, but the boss absolutely obliterated everyone… except the Sorcerer, who took very little damage from the boss' fire attacks but was also completely incapable of hitting it in anything other than its "humanoid" form. This meant that once you got it into its "whirlwind" or "hand" forms, which seemingly require magic damage of some description to get it to morph back into "humanoid", the fight was impossible to win with just the Sorcerer left standing.
So my solution? Get in there with a party of four Sorcerers, one of which had previously spent some time as a Black Mage and another of which had previously spent some time as a Summoner. It worked; they took very little damage as Sorcerers, but were still able to dish out damage in the forms you apparently can't hit with physical attacks. It was satisfying when I finally beat the boss, but I couldn't help but wonder if what I'd just done counted as "cheesing" it somewhat.
I guess it doesn't really matter. If it works, it works, huh?
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