Part 50: Other People’s Magicians

Kids Pick The Dardnest Jobs

This isn’t a solo run, or an omni run. It isn’t a blind run. For any of the parties involved.

What this is is a different kind of challenge with potential pitfalls all its own: Delegating strategic decision-making to a 3-year old.

When going about my first Five Job Fiesta run, my son spied me early on and wanted to see. He ended up watching it all, more or less, and asking questions about my ‘magicians’, the monsters, what was happening. Darker elements were glossed over, of course and grinding for !dualcast, well, noone needs to see that. He got pretty invested. He liked Mid and Cid (or 'the kid' and 'grandpa'). He was super into the final World 2 fight versus Exdeath (and kept pulling for me to go 'fight eks-deff' throughout World 3). He was on the edge of his seat in the final exdeath fight when he started taking cities, and was all when Galuf showed up at the end too. He even got to see some (magic lamp) summons for the first time because I didn't get Summoner off Gilgabot.

“Do you think we should get dragons to help us?”

”YES.”



At the end, during the credits with Bartz and Co. riding chocobos and wind drakes he said to me, ”I want to play your game more. A lot.”

Being 3 years old, he didn’t realize there were other magicians, other jobs, until he spied me looking at Sully’s web page, showing their sprites next to next to the solo runs , at which point he went and had a million questions about all these new magicians. “They’re other people’s magicians, in other games.” “I only get four the way I am playing.” “After we can do one with all of them.” All technically true.

For this challenge run I am going to let the whims of my son dictate my party jobs at any given time. We play for small runs now and then usually when my wife is driving during our fairly long commute. I can’t promise high production values or even completing this (I can get busy) but we’ll see.

But first we need some jobs.

Chapter 1: Other People’s Magicians

"What's that?"

"It's a meteor. A biiiig rock falling from the sky."

"What's it doing?"



"Falling out of the sky."

My kid was a bit impatient for action after the big show against Tree Exdeath (or the “long badguy”) and Neo-Exdeath (or, the “last badguy” fought in the “last room”). Just Bartz wasn’t enough. He wanted more magicians.


There’s one.


”Three magicians?”
“Yep.”
”Go in the mountain.”


”Go in that hole.”
He checked that he wss holding four fingers on his hand, then showed them to me.
”I want four.”
"We'll get four soon."


”They’re pirates!”
“They sure are”

He always asks if Syldra is a bad guy, and I always explain that, no, Syldra is nice.

We blow through the tower, he asks why the bird is hiding when it pops wings. He wants to know what that wind spell it uses is (“It’s blowing wind at them.”) He is antsy for magicians, though. These freelancers are not doing it for him.


“The crystals are lending us their power so we’ll have six jobs.”
”Six magicians?"
"No, still four. Six costumes though!"

Now that we have the jobs I ask my kid what he wants them to do. Now this is where it could get messy. What if he picks a bunch of crappy jobs, or just picks the cool looking ones? I mean he could stick me with an utterly unworkable te-



Oh. Oh my son.