Final Fantasy a Casual Retrospective Part V

I have to be candid with you guys. Of all the games in this series, Final Fantasy V was the one I was looking forward to the most. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of games in this series I’m excited to get to. The next two games specifically are the big ones everyone loves. But V was the one I was personally giddy to play. Mainly because of its similarities to another RPG series I’m a huge fan of.

But I will discuss more of that when we get to the game proper. For now, let’s talk about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff. Development of Final Fantasy V began not long after the release of Final Fantasy IV. Despite that games critical and commercial success, the team still wanted to address some of the criticisms the last game received.

In a 1992 interview with Famicom Tsuushin, the team mentions they got criticisms for IV being too linear. To combat this the team increased the memory they were working with. Going from an 8-megabit cartridge to a 16-megabit cartridge. Although despite the increase in memory, the team apparently still ran into memory issues. Because of course they did. You would think they would have figured this out by now.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the team also suffered from a computer crash that made them lose all of their data. Forcing them to rewrite all of the data they lost. They don’t really go into detail in the interview, so I don’t know if it was just one guys work or if it was a Toy Story 2 situation where they lost everything and had to redo it all from scratch.

I highly recommend reading the interview yourself. I’ll post a link at the end of the review if you’re interested. But from what I can gleam the idea was to make Final Fantasy V a bigger, more open-ended experience then it’s predecessor.

Most of the main Final Fantasy team returned, but there were two major new additions. For monster designer, Square would bring on the man, the myth, the writer incapable of writing coherent lore, Tetsuya Nomura. Now Nomura would be a very important part of the Final Fantasy series. Both as a monster and character designer, but also as a director.

While he wouldn’t be the lead director on any mainline games, with one kind of sort of exception we will get into much later, he would create one of the most popular Final Fantasy spin-offs with Kingdom Hearts. I have my issues with Nomura as a creative, but he is an important piece of the Final Fantasy puzzle.

Then there’s Yoshinori Kitase. Now, Kitase is a name that is going to be very, VERY important as we continue this retrospective. I will get into why as we get there, but these days Kitase serves as a lead producer for the series and there is a damn good reason for it.

But as for Final Fantasy V, Kitase would act as co-writer alongside Hironobu Sakaguchi. With Sakaguchi focusing on the main scenario, while Kitase would add in a more comedic tone. Wanting to add some humour to lighten up the story.

Final Fantasy V would release on December 6, 1993, in Japan. Here’s a fun fact, according to a May 1993 issue of GamePro magazine the Japanese authorities asked Square not to release the game on a school day because they were worried kids would skip school to play it. No idea if that’s true, but it is very similar to a rumour involving fellow JRPG pioneer Dragon Quest, so it’s not that unbelievable. The Japanese really do love their RPGs.

 But yes, Final Fantasy V only saw release in Japan. The original Super Famicom game never saw a western release, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. They actually did plan on bringing Final Fantasy V over with an English translation being worked on shortly after the Japanese release. But these plans were scrapped because Square felt the tone was too different to the rest of the series, and because the difficulty was considered too high for us poor western gamers.

This tracks with Square’s opinion on the west at the time. If you’ll recall, Square brought over the easy mode version of Final Fantasy IV because they felt the base game was too advanced for our dumb gaijin brains to handle. Considering IV was pretty easy already, Square’s opinion on westerners must have been subterranean. They did make Final Fantasy Mystic Quest after all.

There was an attempt to bring the game over under the name Final Fantasy Extreme to differentiate it from the rest of the series. This idea never went anywhere though and thank God. With the confusion that was created from changing the names of IV and VI I can’t imagine what this would have done.

Two other attempts to bring the game to PC also fell through. There was so many aborted attempts to bring V westward that fans took it upon themselves to translate the game. Final Fantasy V was one of the earliest examples of a game receiving a fan translation. A practice that happily still exists today, allowing filthy gaijin like me to play Japanese exclusives in a language we don’t need Rosetta Stones from Mars to understand.

Final Fantasy V would of course see an official western release thanks to subsequent ports and re-releases. The first being on the original PlayStation. First being re-released as a standalone game in Japan, and in the west as part of the Final Fantasy Anthology where it was packaged with Final Fantasy VI in America, and with Final Fantasy IV in Europe.

While western fans were initially happy to have an official release, the translation for this version was bad. I know translations back then were spotty at best, but the original translation of V is infamous for its poor quality. It’s filled with corny dialogue, bizarre name changes, and one character spoke entirely in old pirate speak which ruined many of the dramatic scenes. It’s one of the most hilariously bad translations of all time.

Fortunately, V got a Game Boy Advance port in 2005 that had a much better translated script, and included extra content like new enemies, dungeons and Jobs. Aside from those and the Pixel Remaster, that’s all the versions of Final Fantasy V out there. They actually had planned a DS remake similar to IV, but technical issues prevented that from happening. Kitase has expressed interest in remaking V, but as of 2026 nothing on that front has materialised.

Which is a shame because Final Fantasy V is a big fan favourite. Sales wise it was a huge hit. The Super Famicom original sold two million copies in it’s first two months, and critically it was very well received. It didn’t quite receive the same high praise as its predecessor, or its successor for that matter, but it still got accolades for its graphics and gameplay.

Even today it’s a very well-liked game among fans. While the story is often cited as one of the weaker of the franchise, it’s gameplay is often considered among the best. At least of its classic period. In fact, I would argue that Final Fantasy V is the ultimate evolution of the game design introduced in the first game. You know how Final Fantasy III built on a lot of the concepts in I, well V further builds on and refines those ideas.

But Final Fantasy I wasn’t the game on my mind as I was playing it. No, the game I was thinking of during my playthrough was Bravely Default. I’m a pretty big fan of the Bravely Default series and I knew that it took more than a few inspirations from Final Fantasy. It even spun off from a forgotten Final Fantasy spin-off; a spin-off of a spin-off that itself has spin-offs. Try wrapping your head round that.

Point is, I knew Bravely Default was very similar to Final Fantasy. With V in particular being the one it was more commonly compared to. But I didn’t realise just how much Bravely Default took from this game. From gameplay to even the cast of characters, Bravely Default I now realise was a spiritual successor to this game.

All that is to say, if you played Bravely Default first like I did then going back to Final Fantasy V is an interesting experience. In a lot of ways it feels like a Bravely Default 0. Which for me is great because I love those games. It was fascinating seeing where a lot of Bravely Default’s systems came from. I even started playing the HD remaster of Bravely Default after finishing V to compare the two.

Now, I’m not going to compare the two in this review. I want to keep this mainly to talking about Final Fantasy V. I only mention Bravely Default to say that if you liked those games, you’re going to really like Final Fantasy V.

Our story begins in the kingdom of Tycoon. King Tycoon has sensed that something is wrong with the wind, and he heads off to investigate the Wind Crystal that controls it. Leaving his young Daughter Lenna behind to watch over the kingdom. The issues with the wind are also noticed by a pirate at sea, who realises the wind has stopped blowing. On arriving at the crystal’s shrine, Tycoon witnesses the crystal shattering.

Meanwhile, a young man named Bartz is travelling with his Chocobo, Boko. The two are busy camping when suddenly a fucking meteor lands nearby. So yeah, first the crystal that controls the wind shatters, and now we have massive space rocks falling to earth. We’re only in the opening cutscene and already a lot of shit is going down.

Wanting to investigate, because who wouldn’t check out a giant hunk of space rock that just crashed nearby, our two unlikely heroes set off towards the landing site. Arriving at the scene, Bartz discovers Lenna being taken by goblins and swoops in to rescue her.

Bartz then introduces himself which serves as an excuse for the player to give him a name. Bartz is just the default name, but you can rename him to anything you want. He is the only character who can be renamed though. Everyone else keeps their pre-established ones. It’s a little weird to do it like this, at least let us rename the other characters if you’re going to let us do it at all.

After making their formal introductions, an old man crawls out from under the meteorite. He introduces himself as Galuf, but that’s about all he can remember. The man has complete amnesia and has no idea who he is or what he’s even doing there. We did see him riding down in the meteor in the opening, but that doesn’t give us any answers it just raises further questions.

Lenna then leaves for the Wind Shrine to find her dad since he never returned. On hearing where Lenna is going Galuf decides to travel with her. Despite not knowing why, something is telling him that he needs to go there. Bartz wishes them well but doesn’t come along since he’s on his own journey. But after some prodding from Boko he does follow after them. He can’t exactly leave a young girl and an amnesiac old man to fend for themselves. He is the hero of the tale after all.

After they all catch up again the trio decide to look for a way to reach the Wind Shrine since they need to go by sea, which means they need a ship that doesn’t need sails due to the lack of wind. Fortunately, they’re able to spot a pirate ship that is able to do just that while traveling through a nearby cave.

The group tries to steal the ship, only to find out they can’t even move the thing. The pirate captain, Faris, then arrives to capture them. Lenna asks nicely for a ride and also reveals to the others that she is a princess. Faris just thinks that she’ll be a good ransom and puts them in the brig, but not before they get a look at Lenna’s pendant.

This is of interest to Faris who has another pendant that is identical to Lenna’s. Curious about this they agree to travel with them to the Wind Shrine. How is Faris’ ship able to move despite there being no wind you may be asking. Oh it’s only because they have a giant sea lizard pulling it. Yeah, they have a fucking loch ness monster as a personal chauffeur. I already love this game.

With that we have our four main party members. Bartz, Lenna, Galuf and Faris are the group we’ll be following throughout the rest of the game. Well sort of, you’ll see later. Rather than have a set of rotating characters with their own abilities, we have instead returned to having four set characters that you can customize.

How you customise them will come into play when we get to the Wind Crystal. Before that though, you can head to the town of Tule to get some items and equipment. You can also visit the Greenhorn Inn which serves as the in-game tutorial. Teaching you about the various mechanics of the game. Nothing I needed, but it is a good feature to have for those new to the series.

Now that we’re in the game proper, I might as well get the battle system out of the way. Since I don’t really have much to talk about. It uses the same ATB introduced in IV, but it feels a lot snappier now. There’s less waiting around for moves to activate. Even magic will be cast as soon as you select it rather than having a cast time. While this does remove some of the strategic planning and tension that IV had, it does make fights flow much better.

In IV the fights felt a little jittery with how much time was spent on waiting for things to happen. Here things are far smoother, and it makes the battles a lot more fun. Aside from that though it’s pretty much the same as before. But hey, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

But let’s get to the fun part. After fighting their way through the shrine and seeing the shattered crystal, our four heroes are then blessed with the essences of the four elements. They also see King Tycoon who informs them that they are the, you guessed it, Warriors of Light. Blessed by the crystals to save the world from disaster.

It’s too late to save the Wind Crystal, but he implores them to save the other crystals before they suffer the same fate. Then he just kind of vanishes. Lenna’s upset by this but I’m mostly just confused. Like did he die? Was he banished to the Shadow Realm? I legit could not tell what happened. Spoilers he did not in fact die, but why he vanished is never really explained.

But enough about that though, we have Jobs to discuss. Because while the Wind Crystal is in pieces, the individual shards are still able to bestow on us the returning Job System, and this is where things get good.

Chances are you’re already familiar with how the Job System works given I’ve talked about it before. I won’t repeat myself here, but if you are new to this retrospective then I recommend reading the Final Fantasy III review if you want to get the basics. Because V’s system pretty much works the same as it did there but with some big improvements.

Firstly, the Job balance is much better. Unlike in III where Jobs obtained later were basically just upgraded versions of Jobs you got earlier, which made said Jobs useless after a certain point, here that isn’t the case. In fact, a lot of the jobs that served similar purposes have been combined into one job. Instead of having a Warrior and a Knight, now you just have the Knight, while the Monk is basically just the Black Belt which was just a better Monk anyway, and you now only have one class for every magic type.

This helps streamline things while preventing Jobs from becoming outdated. The Jobs you get at the beginning are just as useful at the end. The later Jobs aren’t treated as upgrades but instead offer new abilities and playstyles that you can experiment with.

Are all Jobs made equal? No but I can’t say any one Job is definitively the best. They all have things about them that make them worth trying out. Even if it is just to get one of its abilities. Which leads me to the next improvement, learning and equipping new abilities.

Every Job has a primary ability that it always has access to. Like how Thief has the Steal ability or how Black Mages have, well Black Magic. You get the idea; the primary ability is the main thing the job has and what determines its playstyle. But every job can equip a secondary ability. Which can be any ability from one of the other jobs. Want to make a Knight that has White Magic like the first game? Just slap the White Magic ability on the Knight and you’re good to go. Want to make a Robin Hood style character? give a Ranger the Steal ability.

When you equip abilities, you will notice that some abilities have stars and some don’t. This is done to indicate what are supporting abilities and which ones are combat commands. The ones with stars are the latter and are the commands you use in combat. The former are the passive abilities and those are on all the time.

Most support abilities are innate to the Jobs associated with them and don’t need to be equipped if you are using it. But if you want to use these with other jobs you do need to equip them. For example, the Thief has an ability that lets it run faster on the overworld. While you’re a Thief this is on all the time, but if you don’t have a Thief in the party, you’ll need to equip that ability to one of the party members to use it.

But you don’t just start with all these abilities. Well for support abilities you do. Those will always be there if you use the Job associated with them. But if you want to use them for other Jobs you need to unlock them first and you do that by levelling the jobs up.

Like in III, Jobs earn their own type of Experience Points. In this case its Ability Points or ABP - this genre has a lot of anagrams doesn’t it - and when you earn enough, the Job gains a level and learns a new ability. For things like the Mages it just lets you use more powerful magic of that type outside of the Job the magic is tied to, but for a lot of other Jobs you earn a bunch of different abilities that let you customise them in some fun ways.

Now, each Job can only equip one additional ability. It’s a lot more restrictive than it would become in future titles, especially in Bravely Default, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come up with some interestingly busted combinations. Plus, there is a way you can give yourself way more, but that won’t come into play until the tail end of the game.

There’s also a bunch of different equipment and weapons for all the different jobs. So you have a lot of ways of tweaking the characters to fit your playstyle. As someone who loves RPGs with strong customisation, Final Fantasy V was right up my alley. It certainly made for a nice change of pace after Final Fantasy IV and it’s more structured design.

Now there is one flaw with the Job system and it’s actually in levelling the Jobs up. You don’t earn that much ABP from battles. For most of the game you’ll only earn a single point from fights. Not too bad early on when you only need a couple dozen points to earn a job level, but later levels need hundreds of points. So it can take a while to earn those levels.

Getting regular levels isn’t actually too bad, but those aren’t that important in this game. All you earn from that is some extra HP and MP. Useful to be sure, but not too big a get. It’s the Job Levels that are more important in building your stats.

See Jobs have a limit to how much they can level up. The maximum level for Jobs is 7, but some have fewer. When a job reaches its level cap, it’s considered mastered and you gain a permanent stat upgrade with each Job affecting one of the stats. Things like the Knight and Monk affect Strength, the Mages affect MP and Magic, and Thief and I think Ranger affect agility.

I’m not entirely certain what Job affects what, and to be honest it is a lot more complicated than what I’m making out to be. There is some stupid math going on with this that I do not fully understand. But to put it as succinctly as possible, when you master a Job, your stats go up. So you’re incentivised to master as many Jobs as you can.

Which means, you’re going to be doing a lot of grinding. At least if you want to get the most out of this system. I don’t think you necessarily need to grind out and master too many Jobs to beat the game. It certainly helps, but it’s not a requirement. If you only want to see the end credits, you do not need to master too many of these. But if you want to fully explore this system, you’re going to need to grind out Job Levels like a maniac.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I used the Pixel Remasters Boost feature to increase the APB gained from battles to speed things along. I have a feeling a lot of newer players will likely do the same since it can take hours to master some of these Jobs. But even then, it can take a lot of grinding to master all the Jobs you want.

It’s certainly the grindiest these games have gotten. It’s arguably more grindy than Final Fantasy II, and yet it’s still a lot less exhausting than that game. I think a big reason is that II required a lot more from the player. It wasn’t just about battling enemies; you had to keep using the same attacks over and over again just to level them up. It was far more tedious and mentally draining.

In V though, it’s dead easy. Just battle enemies and get stronger. So it’s easier to get into a rhythm and put things on autopilot for a bit. The Auto Battle was another feature of the Pixel Remaster I took advantage of for this. Final Fantasy V is what I like to call a podcast game. The kind of game where you put something on in the background while playing and just zone out to it.

It can be pretty relaxing, so I don’t find the grinding that bad in this so long as you get into the right head space. Then again, I am using modern day quality of life features to make things easier. If I was playing the original release this issue would be a lot worse. Suffice to say while there is a lot of depth to this system, it takes a lot of work to get the most out of it.

But one of the best parts about the Job System is that it’s as deep as you want it to be. You could try and master every job in the game and max out every character, or you can just focus on a handful of them. Really outside of a few Jobs it doesn’t take that long to master these things. So if a Job seems like a hassle to master, don’t. As I said earlier it’s entirely possible to beat this without mastering everything in the game.

That’s why I love games with strong customisation options. It gives the player options in how they want to play. You can choose to engage with or ignore whatever you want. All that matters is that you’re playing in a way that you’re comfortable with. So despite the grinding being an issue, it’s an issue that’s easy to work around.

I love the Job System. It is easy to compare it unfavourably to games that came after it which built on its systems, but on its own merits it’s fantastic. And even in those comparisons V does hold its own. It has the same kind of depth, and it’s own methods for making it broken as hell. That though I will have to save for later.

But let’s actually talk about those Jobs. You start with six and most of them are familiar. Knight, Monk, Thief, Black Mage and White Mage. The old faithful that have been here since the beginning. They mostly play the same, but there are some differences and changes that are worth covering.

The Knight is probably the least changed of them. It’s still the same tanky frontline class that can wield most of the heavier armours in the game. And I do mean heavy because Final Fantasy V introduces a Weight stat. It doesn’t do much though, it just has a negative effect on the characters Agility. Which makes you wonder why they didn’t just directly affect the Agility stat itself, but I guess they felt more numbers were better. To be fair the Weight stat would be expanded upon in future games, so while its debut is weak it was a neat innovation.

The Knight is still a very good class. It can still deal decent damage and has high defence on top of being able to protect weakened party members. A useful skill you can unlock for other jobs is the new Two-Handed ability. This let’s you forgo using a shield and instead wield a weapon in both hands to increase its attack power.

It’s not great for the Knight since you want the added defence, but it’s great for other melee focused classes. It’s honestly worth using the knight just to get that ability. Get used to that by the way. Because while the Knight is good regardless of the abilities you get from it, a lot of the Jobs are good just for unlocking an ability to use with other Jobs.

The Monk is one example of that. Don’t get me wrong it’s still a great damage dealing class, and its Kick ability is still a great option for crowd control, but it’s outclassed by other damage dealers and defensively it’s not that great. You really want to use this to get the Counter ability. This will cause characters to automatically counterattack when hit by a physical attack. A very useful ability for any frontline fighter to have.

The Thief meanwhile is a huge step up from its previous appearances. This is where the Thief finally became a legitimately good class. In combat it’s still the same fast, frail fighter it’s always been, and in terms of that it’s still only just ok. But it’s in its abilities where the Thief truly shines.

For one, Steal is far more useful. It’s not just Potions or the occasional Ether you can steal this time; you can steal much rarer and powerful items like weapons and armour. Some of which you can’t get anywhere else. It’s much more worth the effort to try and steal stuff in this game. On top of that, Final Fantasy V introduced the Mug ability. Which is a type of Steal that also does damage. So yeah, just try mugging every turn. Even if you don’t get anything you’ll still do something.

But it’s really the support abilities that make the Thief a top tier Job. Being able to run faster on the overworld, avoiding back attacks, being able to run from battles easier and finding secret passageways are extremely useful skills that make your life a lot easier. These passives make Thief a Job you want to master right away. You won’t be able to equip all of them, but there’s a workaround to that we will touch on near the end.

The White and Black Mages I don’t have has much to talk about because they pretty much do the same thing they’ve always done. They also don’t have any big support abilities to talk about either. They’re still good, you always want one of them in your party, but they’re pretty standard at this point.

The one interesting part about them is that their spell lists have changed since a lot of their buffing magic was removed. White Mage still has some defensive buffs but that’s about it. And the Black Mage is purely for offensive elemental magic. It has no buffing magic at all. Why? Because there’s more magic classes in the game and one of those is focused on buffing magic. But we won’t get to that until a little later.

But the last Job is a new Mage type, and it’s a pretty interesting one. It’s the Blue Mage and this one specialises in a different kind of magic. See the Blue Mage uses abilities used by enemies. When it’s hit with an attack it can learn, it can then use that technique. Think Taskmaster if they were a wizard.

The Blue Mage is also a decent frontline fighter too. So they’re kind of like the Red Mage, only with a more specialised type of magic. There are some very useful spells the Blue Mage can learn. It’s the only Job that learns the Aero family of spells, 1000 Needles is a great damage dealing spell with consistent damage, and White Wind is one of the best healing spells in the game.

The one issue with the Blue Mage is that it requires more long-term investment. While it doesn’t take long to master compared to other jobs, learning all the spells is going to take time and a bit of trial and error. I recommend looking up a guide on how to get Blue Magic because a lot of them require some set-up in order to learn.

One upside though is that once a spell is learned everyone can use it. Which is the same for every other type of magic in the game. We’re back to buying magic, but instead of characters having to learn spells you’ve purchased, now they can all just cast it if they have the right Job. No more learning or unlearning shit, no more limited spell lists, you just buy a spell, and you can use that spell. Much better.

Blue Mage is another Job that became a series staple and a pretty big fan favourite. I got a lot of use out of some of its magic, and while it is a pain in the ass to get some of it, the results are worth the effort. Plus it makes everyone look like a superhero and that makes me smile.

That’s one last thing I love about the Job System. Every character has a unique design for each Job. It’s a small thing but it gives the game a lot of charm. Even if the designs are similar across the party there’s usually little differences that give each design their own unique flair.

But that’s enough about the Job System for now. We’ll be returning to it as we get new Jobs, but this starting line-up is already pretty solid. I’m at least glad the Blue Mage is given to you early so you can start getting Blue Magic as early as possible. It really helps the usability of that job.

But let us return to the story. With the new goal of saving the crystals now set, the party decides to head to Walse to check on the Water Crystal since it’s the closest. To do that though they need to go through a nearby canal. But doing this leads to our heroes being besieged by a whirlpool that tries to suck them in. Ok, is every Final Fantasy going to have this happen. Because this is like the third or fourth game where this scenario occurs. It’s getting a little ridiculous.

They’re able to defeat the monster that caused the whirlpool and break the ship free, but sadly Syldra is trapped and pulled under the water. Faris is devastated by this but there’s nothing they can do. With their only form of transport gone, the party is forced to travel through a ship graveyard.

While there the party make camp to try and dry their clothes. During this the gang finds out that Faris is actually a woman. Something that was hinted at earlier in an optional comedic scene where Bartz and Galuf check on her while she sleeps. Because the Japanese think perverseness is funny for some reason.

But yeah, Faris is a girl. She was pretending to be a man because of the whole pirate thing. She got lost at sea when she was younger and was taken in by some pirates and pretended to be a man to fit in with them. Which makes sense considering all the, ahem, inappropriate behaviour pirates get up to.

The thing is though, Faris doesn’t feel comfortable being a girly girl. We see later she isn’t comfortable wearing dresses or things like that. She’s more comfortable being a pirate and wearing what she’s used to, and the game doesn’t make a big deal of this. It’s simply who she is, and everyone just accepts her as that.

I don’t think it’s meant to be a transgender thing. This game out in the 90’s and we weren’t socially cognizant of that issue at the time, at least not in a widespread manner. It’s portrayed more in a tomboy sense. But I can see others viewing Faris as transcoded at the very least.

Honestly with how the trans community likes to co-opt certain characters as theirs for very surface level reasons, I’m surprised Faris has never been given the same treatment when there’s far more of an argument to be made for her. Or maybe she has. I don’t follow in those circles, so I have no earthly idea.

This is a good little moment. Like in IV the game has a bunch of little character moments that help flesh out the characters and the relationships more. I’d love to go over more of them, but sad to say I needed to cut them because this review wound up being way longer than I thought. If I don’t start giving more general summaries these reviews are just going to get longer and longer until I’m writing the War and Piece of game reviews.

But another reason is that there isn’t much to really talk about. While a lot of the smaller scenes are there for character development, most are there simply to be funny. Final Fantasy V has a lot more comedy which gives the game a much lighter tone than previous games. That’s not to say the game doesn’t have serious moments, it does as we saw with the death of Syldra, but it’s definitely not as serious or as dramatic as some of the other games in the franchise.

Because of that, Final Fantasy V is often criticised for having one of the weaker stories in the series and I can honestly see why. It’s a very by the number’s kind of plot. I mean we’re doing the whole save the crystals of the elements for the fourth time now. Sure, it’s a little different with the crystals being destroyed, but it’s still the same basic premise rehashed all over again.

All that being the case I still really like the story. It may not be groundbreaking, but I do find it entertaining. The comedy is legitimately funny, and the lighter tone actually works in making the dramatic turns feel all the more impactful. I will say the humour does occasionally rely on distracting pop-culture references, but it doesn’t happen frequently enough to become irritating.

I’ll even say the story here doesn’t fall apart at the end. It doesn’t have any dumb twists that ruin it’s thematic core like IV did, but by that same token it doesn’t reach the same dramatic highs either. To put it simply, V’s story doesn’t reach the high points that a lot of the other games do, but it also doesn’t reach the lows a lot of them do either. It sits perfectly in the middle.

But it definitely has its moments. Which we will get to as we continue on the adventure. Speaking of which, the group runs into a Siren who tries to entice our heroes with visions of their loved ones. Bartz sees his mother, Lenna and Faris see King Tycoon, which is a pretty big hint at Faris’ identity, and Galuf sees a little blonde girl. But since Galuf has no memories, it doesn’t work and he’s able to snap everyone out of it to kick the Sirens ass.

After getting past that, the town makes it to the town of Carwen and its catchy upbeat jingle. In keeping with the tone of the game the soundtrack is a little bit more upbeat and to the surprise of no one it’s pretty fantastic. That’s the one thing you have to give this series; it never fails when it comes to the music.

I don’t think it’s as good as IV’s soundtrack though. It’s great but IV’s OST felt a lot more memorable. I suppose in a series as stacked with good music as Final Fantasy this was bound to happen. Even if the music is universally good, some soundtracks are just going to stick in your head more. It’s kind of unavoidable.

Looking around Carwen the team hears word that a wind drake was spotted on some nearby mountains. After climbing up there they find Lenna’s own wind drake Hiryu at the summit. That’s a very Japanese sounding name for a western styled dragon. I mean I like it, sounds like a futuristic ninja name, but it just seems out of place in this setting.

Anyway, now that we have Hiryu we can actually fly him around. So long as there are no mountains in the way. Yeah, we’re back to this shit of flying at different altitudes. But we’re flying on a dragon, which is cool, so I can easily forgive this.

You’re supposed to go to Walse, but you can also go to Castle Tycoon at this point too. Doing so will get you a scene where Lenna confronts Faris on them being siblings. Faris denies it, but only because she herself can’t actually believe it.

In any case, it’s pretty easy to figure out that Faris and Lenna are siblings. I mean the pendants are the big give away, but both also have pink hair on the overworld. Well, Lenna has pink hair while Faris has purple hair, but those are in the same general area on the colour spectrum.

I’m not entirely sure why the game keeps it a secret for so long when it’s so blatantly obvious. But to their credit they kind of know that. Even when it is revealed it isn’t treated as a big thing. I think the game trusts the audience is smart enough to have put the pieces together by that point. I like that the game doesn’t treat the audience like it’s stupid.

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The thing is this scene is entirely optional. There isn’t really a reason to come back to the castle until much later. So it’s very possible to miss this scene. Final Fantasy V has a few scenes like this. There’s a ton of side content in this game and a lot of it is actually story focused. There are entire character beats that can be easily missed if you don’t look out for them.

I’m not a fan of this. I don’t mind having side content that gives a bit more worldbuilding and lore. That’s fine since most of that is a bonus. It isn’t important to the story but extra information to flesh out the setting. But character moments, in my opinion, should be part of the main story since the characters are where the emotional core of a story comes from.

Granted these scenes aren’t exactly hidden. You are likely to stumble upon a lot of them as you try to figure out where to go next, but you’re just as likely to miss them. It just feels wrong to have moments that develop the characters be optional. It’s kind of like how the Lord of the Rings movies had to cut a lot of character related scenes out and put them in the directors cut. Except they at least had the excuse of needing to trim down the running time for a theatrical release. Here I don’t see how you can’t integrate a lot of these scenes into the main story in some way.

But the next destination is Walse, and this is where we get a bit of an explanation on what is going on. See the Crystals are hooked up to devices designed to amplify their power, but use of those machines has caused the Crystals to overload and start breaking apart. The party requests the Walse King to shut down the machine, but he refuses since the city is dependent on the crystal for its prosperity.

Before anything can happen though another meteorite lands near Walse Tower where the Crystal resides. King Walse mobilises some troops to check on the Water Crystal but heading after them they find they were wiped out by a monster called a Garula. Which is weird because they’re a docile monster who doesn’t do anything. And that’s not just a story thing, you can actually fight them in the overworld and they don’t do anything. A nice bit of storytelling through gameplay.

The Garula is trying to break the Crystal. After defeating the creature, a soldier appears that seems to recognise Galuf. He refers to him as Sir Galuf but dies before he can reveal anything. Despite stopping the attack, it’s too late. The Crystal Shatters which causes the tower to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Our heroes are left floating in the ocean before Syldra shows up and brings them to shore. The reunion is bittersweet, it took all of Syldra’s remaining energy to do this and she dies, for real this time. It’s the moments that give you the briefest glimpses of hope and then rip your heart out that hurt the most isn’t it.

So bad news, the Water Crystal is gone. Good news, we got some new Jobs. Although there was one Job we couldn’t get. There was a crystal shard that landed out of our reach. Not that we can’t get it, it’s just going to take us a while to do so.

But about the Jobs we did get. The first is the Red Mage, and sadly it’s probably the worst version of it yet. While it’s a decently versatile class, it can only learn spells up to level 3. Which granted at this point in the game is fine since level 4 or higher spells don’t appear until later. But as the game progresses it quickly becomes outclassed in pretty much all aspects.

However, it’s also a class worth mastering for any spell caster thanks to its final ability, Dualcast. This allows you to cast two spells in one turn. While it innately works on the same magic a Red Mage can use, if you equip any other Magic it can work on those too, and it works with every spell from basic elemental spells, healing magic, or even summons.

It’s an insanely busted ability to have, and the game knows it. If you want this you need to work for it. While the Red Mage only has five levels, that last level requires 999 JP. Unless you stick with this for a good chunk of the game you aren’t mastering this. You could try brute forcing it with the Boost function, but this would still take you hours. It’d be like that South Park scene where they kept killing boars to level up in World of Warcraft.

You aren’t getting that ability until the end game. For the best though because it is stupidly good. It would break the game if you got it too early. See this is what I was talking about with Final Fantasy II. You could argue that Final Fantasy V is more broken than II. There are certainly Job combinations in this that are bucking fusted beyond belief. But unlike in II where it was so easy to break you could do it by accident, here you have to earn it.

But while the Red Mage is only useful for it’s one ability, the newly added Time Mage is just a useful Job entirely. This, if the name didn’t make it obvious, focuses on Time Magic. So stuff like Haste, Slow and Stop. This is why Black Mage didn’t have those, they have their own mage now. It’s a job all about buffing and debuffing, a job it does extremely well.

Being able to buff party members is very good in this game since buffs have reverted to being permanent. They also have spells like Hastega and Slowga that affect entire groups, so it’s very easy to get set up. He can even deal powerful neutral magic damage with its Comet spell, and he can cast Regen to add a passive healing buff to the party.

I think Time Mage is a good class on its own, but it becomes great when combined with another mage class. Combine it with a White Mage and its support is unparalleled, add a Black Mage and it’s got insane damage and versatility. As a base class it gets the job done, but as a secondary class it’s top tier.

What isn’t top tier is the Berserker. This thing does one thing and one thing only. Hit really fucking hard. It does a lot of physical damage, which is good, but it comes at a dumb cost. You can’t control the Berserker; it kind of just hits whatever it wants. It won’t use other abilities even if you equip one. It really does just hit things, really hard.

It’s as one note as a class can get. It doesn’t even have many abilities because it only has two levels. I mean it’s easy to see why. This is a job you only master for the stat boost and with how simple it is there’s no reason to stick with it for long. One of the weaker classes in the game in my opinion.

If you want a better physical attacking class, you’re better off with the Mystic Knight. This is essentially a Knight that can use magic. It can’t actually cast magic like the mages, but it can bless its weapons with it. Adding elemental properties to it’s attacks to take advantage of weaknesses.

It’s not as tanky as a regular Knight, but it makes up for that with better offense. It can deal much more damage, and some of the spells it can add are busted. Add Break and they can pretty much one-shot most enemies in the game. This is a great class either on its own or as a secondary to other melee classes.

The last Job we get from the Water Crystal, at least for the time being, is the Summoner. There isn’t much to say about it since it works exactly as it did in previous games. But it did receive some upgrades. There are now more summons to pick from, and more that provide support capabilities that give it a bit more variety.

It’s also one of the Jobs that benefit from the changes to the Job System. Being able to have multiple abilities really helps with the Summoners versatility issue and allows it to be a great secondary to other magic based classes. I should mention that magic in general was buffed a lot in V. Spells hit harder even when multi-cast and summons themselves do massive damage to entire enemy groups. Making it one of the best jobs for crowd control.

Speaking of summons, the way you get them is interesting. In previous games you either had to buy them or just naturally had them. With the most powerful ones having to be obtained via optional boss battles. In V though, all but the three weakest summons, which are bought, have to be obtained from either an optional boss or side quest.

I like that. For one it gives you a little bit more to do and gives a better incentive to explore the world. The only one that is mandatory is Ifrit, with the rest being tucked away somewhere that you need to search for. With how powerful a lot of the summons are it makes sense to make them a little more hidden. Luckily most aren’t too hard to find, and with some rare exceptions I don’t find the quests to get them too difficult either.

As for the summons themselves, most are returning from previous games. Chocobo, Sylph, Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh, Titan, Leviathan, Odin and Bahamut all return and do the same things they’ve always done. Although Chocobo will now occasionally become Fat Chocobo, making this the first time that appeared as a summon, and Odin got a new attack which means he won’t just do nothing half the time.

As for new summons we have a few. There’s Caroblepas and Golem who have made appearances as enemies in past games, but this marks the first time they were summonable. I should also mention that Golem in particular is gotten through a unique fight where you have to save him from other monsters. V was where they started to introduce more puzzle-based fights and they make for an interesting change of pace.

Golem is a defensive summon. He’ll create a wall that will absorb a certain amount of damage before it goes away. Caroblepas meanwhile turns enemies to stone, which sounds good but I actually missed him in my playthrough, so I can’t comment on that. I really should just use guides at this point because this keeps happening.

Syldra is also a summon you can use. To be clear, she is still dead, but you can find her spirit in the Pirate Cave way later. She essentially acts as the wind elemental summon in the same way that Shiva, Ifrit and Ramuh are the ice, fire and thunder summons respectively.

Then there’s the adorable little Carbuncle. This is the first appearance of this guy, and he would become a mainstay of the series. Both because he’s primo plushy material, and also because his Ruby Light ability casts Reflect on the entire party. An extremely useful spell, unless you need a healing spell in which case it kind of fucks you over. Best save this for spell casting enemies.

Quick aside, while I was doing some research for this, I decided to look up the appearances of the different summons across the various games. Just to get an idea of which ones became mainstays, which became one and done and those in between. While doing this, I found that in the manual for Final Fantasy Anthology, Carbuncle looked like this…

What the fuck am I looking at? Just to be clear, this is not what Carbuncle normally looks like. He usually looks like a cute bunny/dog thing, not the green love child of ET and a Xenomorph. Why did they make him look like that? And why, oh why, is he wearing trainers? They big on trainers in the dimension that summons are from. You think he’s a Nike or an Adidas fan? It’s just so stupid, it’s like those bad NES covers that look nothing like the game. I fucking love shit like this.

The last summon is Phoenix. Another one that became a series mainstay. It’s also one of the best spells in the game, summon or otherwise. Not only does it do massive fire damage to all enemies, but it will also resurrect a fallen ally at full HP. It’s expensive at 99 MP, but the price is worth it.

So yeah, the Summoner is a great class. I should note that it’s final ability Call will let it summon creatures for free, but it’s completely random and not all that useful. The Job is great without it although I think it works better as a secondary Job rather than a primary one.

That’s all the Water Crystal Jobs. A pretty decent selection, although one question you will run into with this game is whether to swap jobs right away or stick with the ones you have until you master them. I went with the latter, but there’s not a right or wrong solution, it’s just about picking which method suits you.

Returning to Walse, the now gravely injured king admits we were right and implores us to head to Karnak. Since, get this, another damn meteorite landed nearby. Ok this is just getting re-goddamn-diculous. How many more of these are going to show up.

When they head to the Walse Meteorite and look inside it, the party finds a warp pad that teleports them to Karnak. And it’s here where I have to address my biggest issue with this game. It doesn’t do a very good job of telling you where to go half the time.

You know how it works in these old RPGs. In order to progress through them you need to talk to NPCs; you need to ask around and figure out where to go next. That’s the case here, but sometimes the game doesn’t give me proper direction, or it only vaguely hints at where to go next. The king mentions the meteor, but I had no idea to actually check the Walse Meteor itself.

How would I know the meteor had a teleporter in it. It’s never been established that was a thing, and the previous meteor we visited didn’t let us enter it. There was nothing in the game to indicate anything was in these things, so I didn’t think to check them. I don’t need the game to hold my hand, I just want better instruction so I don’t wander aimlessly for twenty minutes.

I don’t know. It’s possible the game does tell you this and I’m just a fucking idiot who missed it. That’s a very likely scenario. But I’m the kind of guy who likes talking to every NPC. If I missed something it had to have been very well hidden, or I wasn’t paying attention. That is a very distinct possibility.

Look, my point is the game isn’t the best at giving you directions. You kind of have to wander around and figure out what to do next. Nothing new for this series, but it’s much worse here. Don’t be ashamed if you need to look up a guide for this, they are there to help after all.

Once you do figure out where to go, you head over to Karnak. Naturally you do what you always do when you reach a new town and hit the shops. But when you do that here, you get arrested. Alright, who shoplifted? Faris I’m looking at you.

No, it’s not for anything we did, it’s because of where we came from. See they saw a werewolf come out of the meteor, and with all the monster attacks going on they’ve come to the conclusion the werewolf is responsible. Since we also just walked out of the meteor they assume we’re in league with him. Hence why we’re now behind bars.

We aren’t alone though. In the cell next door is an inventor named, you guessed it, Cid. You know those machines that are amping the Crystals while also destroying them. Cid invented them. He’s a scholar from a place called the Library of the Ancients who read that the Crystals shone brighter years ago, and he invented the amplifying devices to help them regain their past glories.

But with news of the Crystals shattering, he’s come to the same conclusion we have that the machines are to blame. He went to the Queen of Karnak to ask her to stop and was then thrown in jail for it. Because like Walse, Karnak needs the Crystal and isn’t willing to stop. You’ve probably picked up the games underlying message by now, but I’ll go over that later.

We aren’t in jail for long though. The chancellor of Karnak comes to bust us out since, surprise surprise, the Fire Crystal is starting to crack, and they need Cid to shut off the machine. The crystal is in Karnak Castle, but since they can’t exactly go through the front door they need to sneak in through the Fire Powered ship. I’m not sure of the geography here, but they go through it and find the Queen there. It’s clear that she isn’t acting of her own accord though.

She summons a living fire being to fight us, or becomes it I’m not sure, and we defeat it. It’s a pretty fun fight too with the monster taking different forms. It’s nothing too hard, but it provides a decent challenge. You know at this point I should probably address the big question with this game. Is it actually that hard?

I mean the game wasn’t translated originally because of the difficulty, so this thing must be a real bitch right? Well yes and no. It is harder than the previous games, but not by that much. Granted I am not playing the original Super Famicom release. So I have no idea if that version was indeed harder, but this Pixel Remaster I did play isn’t that bad.

Even ignoring a lot of the quality-of-life improvements and just looking at the base design I don’t see why this was considered that difficult. The high random encounter rate? I mean I guess it’s a little high but it’s not like the previous games didn’t have that issue. The fights and bosses aren’t too bad, and even if they do pose a challenge, often times a change of Jobs is all you need.

It’s only in the final third that things truly get tough. There are a lot of challenges in the final part of the game that will put you to the test. Although a lot of that comes from beginner’s traps. Remember how IV had moments that weren’t too hard except for how they took you by surprise? V has a similar but worse issue. There are moments where you absolutely will lose at least once before you beat it.

I think that’s where the games reputation for challenge comes from. The Pixel Remaster Autosave definitely came in handy here because there are moments where if you die you can lose a lot of progress. It can be very demoralising when that happens. But no, I don’t think the game is that hard. It’s a challenging game, but not so challenging that it isn’t beginner friendly. Anyone can get through this with some planning, patience, and by actually engaging with the mechanics.

After defeating the fiery fiend, the queen reveals that she was being possessed by something. Something that is the purest evil and is trying to destroy the crystals in an effort to resurrect itself. Reaching the Fire Crystal, the party runs into the werewolf that was mentioned earlier. He recognises Galuf just like the soldier from the Water Crystal, but Galuf is still oblivious.

Before anything can be explained, a soldier possessed by the same force that controlled the queen puts the amplification device into overdrive and the Fire Crystal shatters. This also causes the castle to go haywire, and the werewolf dies during the chaos.

What follows is a sequence where you need to escape the castle under a time limit. This part isn’t that bad if you just make a beeline for the exit, but for kleptomaniacs like me this part is intense. Trying to get out while going for all the treasure is panic inducing, mainly because a lot of the chests are monsters in a box that eat up more time. You are constantly on the clock so it is a very intense sequence. Fun but very stressful.

After escaping the castle, the Fire Crystals shards are sent flying out, with three conveniently landing next to our heroes. Which means we have three more jobs to go over.

The first is a new job, the Beastmaster. This Job is all about controlling enemies. You can capture weakened enemies and use them on others or even control them directly and use their attacks yourself. It sounds cooler than it is. Capturing enemies is an interesting idea, but you only get one attack out of it and most of them aren’t worth the hassle. Control is more useful but only for a few select fights, and even then you’re better off using your own abilities.

Honestly the only reason to use Beastmaster is to help the Blue Mage. There are a few Blue Magic spells that you can only learn by controlling enemies and using them yourself, and some are among the best Blue Magic in the game so it’s well worth the effort. Aside from that though, the Beastmaster is an awesome concept that needed a lot more fleshing out. Suffice to say if you want to capture creatures and use them against others, just go play Pokémon.

Next is the Geomancer. Like in III this is a Mage who casts a random free spell that differs depending on the environment. It isn’t as good as it was in III. Its magic is outclassed by others in terms of damage, and while the magic being free is a benefit, the MP system means it’s not as useful a boon as it was in III where the magic charges were far more restrictive. Even as a secondary job it isn’t great.

That said it’s still a job worth mastering. Its passive abilities make hazards in dungeons a non-issue, and it doesn’t take long to master it at all. So it’s still worth trying out even if the job itself isn’t all that great.

What is great is the final job, the Ninja. Ninja was objectively the best melee class in III and it remains incredibly strong in V. It’s still an incredibly fast class with amazing damage output, but defensively it is a lot weaker. The Ninja in general is more focused on being a glass cannon and at that task it does tremendously.

It’s the only job in the game that can naturally dual wield weapons, which is also an ability it can unlock for other jobs. This makes the Ninja worth mastering for any melee fighters since dual wielding is insanely powerful much like in past games. Although this being an unlockable ability rather than something you can just do helps make the game significantly more balanced.

The Ninja’s Throw command also remains very powerful. More so since it not only kept the ability to throw any weapon that was given to Edge, but it now has special scrolls that serve as elemental attacks. Which works much better for Ninja than giving it magic like previous games did.

It has a few more command abilities, but I never used these. Honestly all you really need from it is the Throw and Dual Wield abilities. Those two alone make the Ninja one of the best jobs in the game. it is one of those that takes a lot of time to master, but it is well worth the effort.

After we return to Karnak, Cid goes into a slump. He feels responsible for the Crystals shattering, which isn’t entirely incorrect based on what we know, so he does what every man does when they’re depressed, hit the tavern. Although he doesn’t quite drink his problems away so much as he just sulks in his room. That’s not as much fun.

Unfortunately, the party cannot do much of anything. The Earth Crystal which they need to get next is not accessible at this point. So with nothing else to do they decide to head to the Library of Ancients to figure out what to do next.

While there they find out that one of the scholars there is Cid’s grandson, Mid. A name that has sadly aged very poorly, but I will not delve into that here. Mid is missing deep within the library and all the magic books there are going out of control due to a demon sealed within the place. So the party fights through the books, defeat the demon and find Mid who was just kind of chilling down there and studying. Kid was fully engaged too because he didn’t even realise we were fighting the demon despite it happening right behind him.

Upon hearing about his grandfather’s funk, Mid goes with us back to Karnak to cheer him up. Which he does, by beating him senseless. I’m not kidding, Mid just hits him a lot and tells him to man the fuck up. Which surprisingly works. I wish real depression was this easy to fix.

Seeing the sight of grandchild and grandparent help each other triggers a flashback for Galuf of his own granddaughter Krile. The blonde girl that Siren tried to tempt him with. This in turn makes him remember who he is and why he’s here. Mostly, a lot of it is still a bit fuzzy to him right now.

But here’s the skivvy. Galuf is from another world, and thirty years prior he came to this one to seal away a powerful sorcerer from his world the power of the Crystal. That sorcerer is called Exdeath, which is the most metal name for a villain ever, and he’s been the evil force trying to break the Crystals and get free.

Galuf came here from this world in the meteorite we found him at, as did the soldier and the werewolf, in order to prevent that from happening. Obviously, things haven’t exactly gone to plan. There is still hope left since the Earth Crystal remains, and after Cid and Mid fix up the Fire Powered Ship you can start hunting for it.

The next stop is the crescent island in the southeast. But on arriving an earthquake causes the ship to sink into the ocean. Why does this series keep giving me ships only to take them away five minutes later? It’s really starting to get annoying now. I mean in all fairness, there are a lot of optional towns you can visit at this point, but still.

Fortunately, there’s a forest on the crescent isle that has a Black Chocobo in it. So you can still get off the island at least. I just find it weird that the ship only existed just to get the Black Chocobo. I mean the ship does come back later in a sense, I just wish we had more time to use it.

But we have a Black Chocobo now. While it can still only land in forests it has much better flight capabilities than the wind drake did. Actually, speaking of Chocobo’s, whatever happened to Boko? You know Bartz’ Chocobo from the beginning of the game. Where the hell did he go? He just kind of vanished after we left him outside the Pirate Cave. I hope he’s ok, I’m genuinely worried about him.

But the Black Chocobo isn’t all we find in the forest. We also find the last two shards from the Fire Crystal. Again, very convenient that they both landed here, but we got two new jobs so you know the drill by now.

The first is the Bard which uses songs to buff the party. Same as in previous games, only in V the buffs only last as long as the bard performs the song. I think anyway, that’s what the internet tells me and it seems that way in gameplay but it’s one of those things where I’m not one hundred percent clear on how it works.

The Bard is an underrated support class. I say underrated because it can be very effective, but it requires a bit more work than some other classes, and most of those are a bit easier to grasp. It doesn’t help that many of the songs have to be found by talking to other bards in the overworld which aren’t always the easiest to find. It’s certainly not a bad class. It can be a great secondary Job for other support classes like the White Mage, but it’s not a Job that I personally used that much.

The Ranger on the other hand is one I got use out of. Not because the job is great because honestly, it’s just kind of ok. The Ranger is all about the bow, and it has good speed and attack which makes it a decent back row fighter. But its damage output isn’t as good as others, and it doesn’t offer much in the way of support.

So why should you bother with it? Two words, Rapid Fire. This is the final ability you get from Ranger, and it is amazing. It makes whoever uses it go ape shit and rapidly strike enemies multiple times. If you’re against a group it’s a good way to spread damage out, and in single battles or boss fights it absolutely shreds them to pieces.

On its own Rapid Fire is really good, but if you combine it with Ninja’s Dual Wield it becomes one of the most broken abilities in the game. I’m not joking. Rapid Fire basically just makes you attack multiple times in a row, and since dual wielding makes you attack twice, well you can do the math yourself here.

This combination is absurd. I only gave it to one of my characters, but I should have done it more because the character who had it became the best damage dealer on the team. Rapid Fire is an absolute must for frontline warriors and makes the Ranger one of the best classes to master.

Now that you have the Black Chocobo the game opens up a little bit. There are a few optional towns you can visit for magic and equipment, but one town you’ll want to visit is Lix. This is Bartz’ hometown and visiting it gives us a bit more of his backstory. His mother died when he was very young and he then travelled around the world with his father after, with his father dying five years before the start of the game.

Interestingly there is a scene of this earlier where it’s revealed that Bartz’ dad often would travel in order to check on the Crystals. Isn’t that an interesting detail. This whole sequence is very good and helps develop Bartz a bit more, and I have to ask again why it wasn’t part of the main story. This scene is entirely optional, and yet it provides important backstory for the main fucking character.

I don’t get this. Even if you keep Lix optional which is perfectly fine, you could at least try to integrate Bartz backstory into the main narrative. There is one little bit of it as I mentioned, but it doesn’t give us that much detail. This is why having story content be optional is dumb. It makes the story appear less interesting to those that miss it.

Anyway, this is another part of the game where I got lost. You’re supposed to go back to the Library of the Ancients and speak to Cid and Mid again. But nothing tells you to do that, so get ready to wander. When you do return there, you find out that King Tycoon was spotted flying to the ruins of the town of Gohn.

You can’t actually fly to Gohn though. You can only get there by crossing the Desert of Shifting Sands. It’s nearly impossible to cross though due to said shifting sands, but after playing whack a mole with a giant sandworm you use its corpse as a makeshift bridge. That’s a bit morbid but it gets the job done.

Going to Gohn the group do indeed find the king. Who is just kind of wandering around acting creepy. Oh yeah, that’s not suspicious at all. They eventually corner him and Faris does indeed recognise him as her father. Confirming that she and Lenna are sisters, before the party falls through a massive trap door that was just there for some reason.

With their familial connection now out in the open the two sisters embrace as siblings. It would be a sweet moment, and it is, but it’s kind of undercut by Galuf. He was separated from the group and you can see him in the corner trying to get to everyone. They eventually decide to move on without him, only for him to climb under the ruins and surprise them.

This scene, despite it cutting into an emotional moment, is one of my favourites in the entire game. Simply for how funny it is. It almost feels like a direct riff on Final Fantasy IV which was constantly splitting up the party for varying reasons. It makes you think that it’s going to do the same thing, only for Galuf to force his way back into the party. If you want a good example of how to subvert expectations the right way, this is one to look at.

Not only is the writing funny, but the way the characters are animated really helps with the comedy of the scene. This game continues the Sprite Pantomime thing I talked about in IV. You know where the sprites on the world will move around to act out a scene. In V they’ve further improved on it with more expressive animations. This not only helps with the comedy it also helps give the game a little more personality.

The whole game looks really good. It might just be me, but it looks a bit more colourful. Granted that could just be because the games lighter tone is messing with me, but I can’t help but feel the game’s colour palette is a touch more vibrant overall.

What I can say for certain is that the game definitely uses more special effects. Even if I am playing the Pixel Remaster I can still see the original Super Famicom version used a lot more of the systems capabilities. It even opens with an awesome title screen that has a transparent logo showing Bartz and Boko running. It really sets up that the game is pushing the series graphical fidelity forward.

After making their way through the ruins, and dealing with an explosive warp panel, the party finds the Fire Powered Ship alongside an airship. They also find a lever that opens a trap door that sends Cid and Mid down to them. After you left them back in the desert the two took the Black Chocobo back to the Chocobo Forest and it was there that the trap door opened.

Now that they’re here though, Cid and Mid are able to fix up the airship. Because of course they would; Airships are this family’s bread and butter after all. Now that the party have an airship they can make their way back to Gohn. Only to witness the Ronka Ruins flying into the sky as a flying fortress.

You can’t just fly into the ruins though. First you need to fit the airship with some adamantite. Which is just blatant filler but remember this for later. Then you have to deal with it’s defence turrets by going up and whacking the shit out of them. I like this part if for no other reason than it’s just cool to fight a giant fortress.

After making their way into the fortress, the party finds Tycoon. He claims to be on their side and tells them to defeat a monster who is blocking the way to the Earth Crystal. But upon defeating it, it turns out it was the guardian of the Earth Crystal and that the king was possessed. Something that should have been obvious if our heroes were paying attention, but then the plot wouldn’t be allowed to happen so I guess we have to accept their momentary idiocy.

Lenna and Faris won’t let anyone attack the king, so he basically has free reign to kill everyone and destroy the Crystal. I know he’s you’re dad guys, but this is kind of fucking important. Fortunately, another meteor just so happens to land nearby which brings Krile with it. Who then proceeds to cast a spell that frees the king from Exdeath’s control.

Ok this part is just ridiculous. Not only is the timing too convenient, but how in the fuck did she land the meteor in just the right location without it knocking the Ronka Ruins out of the sky? I’m sorry but the more I think about it the less sense it makes. It’s just fucking dumb.

This does lead to a nice moment where we get a family reunion between Tycoon and his daughters, and Galuf reuniting with Krile and regaining all of his memories. We even get a humorous moment where he tosses aways his confused speech bubble. I’m not sure how that works, but it’s cartoony bullshit and I live for that sort of thing.

This reunion is unfortunately cut short as the Earth Crystal shatters. Exdeath is released and he makes his presence known. Right away the game makes it clear what kind of villain he is. He does not fuck around with big speeches or try to mess with the heroes; he just forces the crystals to attack. The man is all business and I love that.

Tycoon manages to save everyone by taking the damage. Sacrificing himself so that the others can continue their journey to save the world. Again, the game gives you a brief moment of hope, rips it away and tears it to shreds. I love it, it’s emotionally devastating, but I love it.

With that we get our final four Jobs until the endgame. I should note that the GBA version actually had four additional jobs, but since I never played that I can’t opine on them. It’s a shame because they actually look cool. I hope those GBA ports of the classic Final Fantasy games get added to Switch Online at some point because I’d really like to play them.

The first Earth Crystal Job is the Dragoon and it actually got an upgrade. It’s still the same melee class that has Jump we’ve come to know and love, but it now has a new command in Lance which drains the HP and MP from enemies. A very useful ability to have and it helps make them feel less like a one trick pony.

The next is Chemist and this is where I need to confess something. In my playthrough I tried using and mastering every Job in the game. Not for every character mind you, I’m not a lifeless loser or anything, but I did try to master them all across the four party members. That way I could properly talk about them in the review. The Chemist is the sole exception to that. I never really used this thing.

It’s not that the class is bad. The main gimmick with Chemist is that it can mix together items to create different effects. Like mixing two potions together to get a better potion, that kind of thing. There are tons of different effects it can create and even items made exclusively for it. These can be rather helpful from what I can gather, and it seems to be a decent support class.

The problem is that there are so many combinations that it is very hard to keep track of them all. It requires not only a lot of experimentation, but also a lot of memorisation. Since there is no in game glossary to keep track of all the different things you can make.

This is a problem for me because I’m not the best when it comes to memorising this kind of stuff. When there are as many options as the game gives you, I get confused on what does what. I could take notes or just look up a guide but that makes it feel like homework, and games should not feel like homework.

So I can’t really opine on the Chemist. For what it’s worth it is considered a very strong Job when you learn it, but it was sadly one I just couldn’t get into. It’s bound to happen. There’s always at least one thing in these games you won’t jive with, and that’s going to be different for every player.

Then there’s the Dancer. A Job all about the groove, the rhythm and the jive. Its main gimmick is using dances to debilitate enemies. It’s not very good unfortunately. It isn’t very strong in combat, and the dances are completely random so it’s hard to get it to do what you want. But like the Red Mage it’s worth mastering due to its final support ability letting you equip Ribbons. Which is the best head armour in the game next to the Gold Hairpin. It also doesn’t take long to master so you don’t have to deal with it for long.

The last Job is one I like though, the Samurai. Because why have one far east themed job that feels out of place in a western fantasy themed world when you can have two. All jokes aside the Samurai is a good one. It’s another sword wielding class with a few unique command abilities.

Most of these are fine, but not spectacular. It’s default command Zeninage though is a very powerful crowd control option. It costs money to use so you can’t spam it, but it does so much damage it can end most fights in one shot. Really though the main reason to use it is its support ability, Shirahadori. Which gives a 25% chance of evading an attack. A great ability to have for any class. Add on strong attack and stamina, and the Samurai is a good melee class. Not the best, but very good.

But with the Earth Crystal gone, the Ronka Ruins begins to fall out of the sky, and so our heroes make a daring escape. It’s here where Galuf finally gives us the full idea of who he is. As said Galuf is from another world, and Exdeath came from his world to destroy the crystals for unknown reasons.

Galuf and three other warriors, called the Dawn Warriors, came to Bartz’ world to seal him away, but then just left him in Bartz’ world after doing so because I guess they couldn’t be bothered to move him. For thirty years things seemed like they were over, but then Galuf sensed there was something wrong with the crystals and came here to save them. So it’s mostly stuff we already knew just with some added details.

Now that Exdeath is free and destroyed the crystals, he returns to Galuf’s world to continue his plans. Meaning Galuf needs to return home and try to stop him there. Galuf says goodbye to his friends and uses Krile’s meteor as a portal home. While they offer to come and help, the meteorite only has enough power for a one-way trip, and they won’t be able to come back if they do.

Despite saying their goodbyes though, Bartz and the others realise that it just isn’t right to leave Galuf to do this on his own since he is their friend. With Lenna and Faris having the extra motivation of wanting to take down Exdeath to avenge their father. With everyone in agreement they set off for Galuf’s world.

But in order to create a portal to that world they need to find adamantite from the meteors. And this part kind of pissed me off. You need to find Cid and Mid first since they’re the ones who know how to use the stuff, but the game doesn’t tell you where they are.

I looked in every location I thought they might be. I looked where they found the airship, I looked in Karnak, I looked in the library of Ancients, and I couldn’t find them. Turns out, they’re already at one of the meteors, and from what I can tell nothing in the game tells you about this. I wandered around looking for them for thirty minutes to an hour and I didn’t think to look in the meteors.

Yes, the game tells you to get adamantite which is found in the meteors. You’re obviously going to look in them at some point. But the game tells you that you need to find Cid and Mid first, so naturally that’s what I did. I don’t know, maybe this is just an example of me being a dumbass, but when I complain about the game not giving proper direction this is what I’m talking about.

After you retrieve it though, it’s time to enter Galuf’s world. This begins the second act of the game. Yeah, all of that shit we went over was just the first act. This is much longer than any of the previous games, but I’ll go over that in detail at the end.

After going through the portal, the party finds themselves trapped on an island in the middle of nowhere and are promptly captured by Exdeath’s forces when they camp out for the night. It actually gets worse. See the gang is captured right when Galuf and his men were planning an assault on Castle Exdeath, and Exdeath uses them as hostages to force Galuf to retreat.

Wow, this was a complete and utter fail. Absolutely nothing went right here. It’s kind of amazing how much they screwed up. I mean it’s not so bad since Galuf does mount a rescue attempt, but they really screwed the pooch on this one.

Galuf does rescue his friends but in the process runs into Exdeath’s second in command, Gilgamesh. And boy is this guy a weird one. Despite speaking and putting on the appearance of a noble warrior, Gilgamesh is a fucking goofball. He’s a complete idiot who constantly makes mistakes and when you get him to a low enough health value he just kind of fucks off and says he’ll try again later.

The dude is a joke, and he’s one of the best characters in the game. He’s so goofy that you can’t take him seriously, but he takes himself so seriously that there’s something admirable about him. He’s one of the best joke villains I’ve seen. I love this guy.

After dealing with him the party is able to escape the castle. But while crossing over the bridge that leads away from it, Exdeath activates a magical barrier that sends the group flying across the world to another continent.

While looking for some way back, they find a Moogle being attacked by a monster and rescue it. Nice to see these little guys return, although strangely they don’t talk in this one. Despite being shown to be capable of speech in their last appearance, and in all subsequent appearances for that matter, here they don’t talk at all. They can only say Kupo and are portrayed as more animal like.

After saving it, the Moogle takes them back to its village where the other Moogles use some kind of shared telepathy to contact Krile’s own Moogle with a message on their location so she can send her own wind drake to pick them up. I didn’t know the Moogle race was psychic, but there you go.

Upon arriving at Galuf’s home the party finds out that Galuf is actually a king. He asks not to be treated any differently though, so this revelation doesn’t really go anywhere. At this point the game ventures into a bit of a side quest. Krile’s wind drake is dying and the only thing that can cure it is dragon weed found in Drakenvale. If you have deja-vu it’s because we’ve already done something like this before.

Final Fantasy V doesn’t have the best pacing. While I wouldn’t call the pacing terribly slow or even outright bad, it can often feel like the game is spinning its wheels a little bit. I wouldn’t say it wastes time though. Every part does have something important in it, either having good character moments or world building. It’s just that some parts feel like unnecessary filler and this is one such example.

I did say that every part has something important in it though and this is no exception. In order to make it to Drakenvale the group needs to pass through the town of Quelb. Which is a town inhabited entirely by werewolves. To do this they need permission from the town leader, Kelger. Kelger is a friend of Galuf and was one of the Dawn Warriors.

But Kelger isn’t the most trusting of Bartz and the others over them letting Exdeath escape. Even though he was with the group responsible for leaving Exdeath there in the first place. I’m just saying these guys are just as culpable in the whole thing. Regardless Kelger won’t let them through unless Bartz tests himself against him. Blade to blade, mano a wolfmano.

You don’t actually fight him it just plays out in a cutscene. This kind of makes me wish this game would get a proper remake so we could see an actual animation of the fight. Instead they just nudge each other before Kelger uses his Lupine attack and spins around Bartz really fast. It’s cool for what it is, but it’s such an anime moment I need to see it with more detailed animation.

Bartz is able to overcome the Lupine Attack with a counter of his own. But he does it a little too hard and Kelger is badly injured by it. He’s not mad though, like any good warrior he’s impressed by his performance. Bartz explains that it was just a trick learned by his dad, Dorgann. A name which shocks Galuf and Kelger because Dorgann was one of the Dawn Warriors.

Yeah, Bartz’ dad was from Galuf’s world, and was the only one that objected to leaving Exdeath behind. So to make up for that he stayed behind to keep an eye on the seal. Something that’s foreshadowed in an earlier flashback where Dorgann tried to leave his family to check on the crystals.

I like this reveal. For one there are actual hints at it throughout the game, so it doesn’t feel like it comes out of nowhere. Plus, it gives Bartz an actual reason to be the main character. Prior to this point Bartz has only been on this journey because he accidentally got roped into it. He only helped out before because it was the right thing to do, and because he may or may not have wanted to get with Lenna although that never really went anywhere.

But now he does have a personal reason for doing this. He’s finishing his father’s work and given how close the two were shown to be, it makes perfect sense why Bartz would want to do this. Plus, since Bartz father is from Galuf’s world and his mother from the original world, that means Bartz is a child of both. And in a story involving two worlds in peril that makes him the perfect protagonist.

What I like most about this is that, because we don’t get this reveal until much later on, it actually winds up making Bartz a much more likable character. Since he went on the journey both because he wanted to help, and also because he loves adventure and felt like it would be fun. While that is slightly selfish, it’s also very relatable. Despite Bartz being ultimately a good guy at heart, he doesn’t feel like a generic goody two shoes. He feels very human.

A lot of the characters feel that way. Lenna is a total sweetheart but often puts herself in harms way, Faris is very strong willed and independent but has trouble opening up to others, and Galuf is a wise man but is somewhat crotchety in his old age. While the cast lack the same depth found in others in the series, they still feel like fully fleshed out and likable characters.

After this, Kelger fully trusts in the team and lets us through. They head up to Drakenvale, and find the dragon grass to heal Krile’s wind drake. Krile then gets a migraine after getting a psychic distress call from the sage Ghido. Which is just there to tell you where to go next.

You head over there, only for Exdeath to sink the island Ghido is on. What a dick. So now what do you do. Well flying around you find a fleet of ships in the ocean where you run into another Dawn Warrior. King Xezat of Surgate.

As for what they’re doing out here, they’re trying to deal with the barrier around Castle Exdeath. The barrier is coming from a tower nearby and Xezat is heading there to disable it. The plan is to sneak in through a submarine and attack the tower from above and below. The party climb to the top and deal with the antennae while Xezat deals with the generator at the bottom.

When the party reaches the top, they then have to deal with the monster Atomos. This is one of the more memorable bosses in the game. The idea is that he will try to keep knocking the party out with the Comet spell and then try to suck them into his body. If they get sucked in you lose them for the remainder of the fight, so you have to keep resurrecting them and keeping the party to prevent that from happening. Hope you brought plenty of Phoenix Downs cause you’re going to need them.

It’s not too difficult, but it is intense and a lot of fun. I also love Atomos design too. He’s like a giant gaping mouth with a black hole inside of it, it’s fucking awesome. Final Fantasy V’s entire bestiary is awesome actually. The monsters all look like something out of a heavy metal album cover. There’s one monster that’s a floating head that is sticking it’s tongue out so hard it rips its entire fucking face off. There is no need to go that hard, but my god am I glad it does.

Tetsuya Nomura is a creative I’m mixed on. As a storyteller I think he’s bad unless he has some help. His stories are often too simplistic, overly convoluted, or in Kingdom Hearts case both. His human character designs are fine, but they all look too similar to one another. Which is exacerbated by him being stuck in the same Visual Kei style he’s been using since the mid 2000’s.

But his monster designs are absolutely top tier. Nomura has said that Yoshitaka Amano is one of his biggest inspirations, and you can tell that in his monsters. They’re so richly detailed and so close to Amano’s own style you wouldn’t be mistaken for getting the two mixed up. But Nomura has his own stylistic touches that make his designs uniquely his.

In fact, a lot of iconic Final Fantasy monsters were created by Nomura. While we won’t see some for a few games, there is one enemy introduced in V that would go on to terrorize the series. A creature so fowl, so cruel, that few men can face it and live. A being of pure darkness that spreads chaos wherever it roams. The Tonberry.

Oh you may laugh now, but those who have played this series know what a menace this little bastard is. It’s entire gameplan is to just move slowly towards you, then it will proceed to one shot any member of the party. Add on an absurd HP pool and this guy can quickly fuck up your team. I love the little guy though. it might be my favourite monster in the series. I love how it’s unassuming presence masks how stupidly strong it is. This is the kind of fantastically silly shit I love in this series.

After dealing with Atomos the party is successful is disabling the antennae. Xezat isn’t so lucky. He does deal with the generator, but he winds up trapped in there and goes down with the tower. Something that Galuf suspects was part of the plan. It was a suicide mission to give Galuf an opening to deal with Exdeath.

I will say that while the game is far more light-hearted and comedic, when the game has an emotional moment, they are effective. Even if we’ve only known Xezat for like five minutes, there is a shown history between him and Galuf. So seeing Galuf wait in the submarine in the vein hope his friend will come back is easy to sympathise with.

But now that they have a submarine they can finally go and meet Ghido. Who as it turns out is a turtle. Think something like Oogway or the turtle from IT. It’s weird, but it’s the kind of weird I like.

This is where we get Exdeath’s backstory, which is weird but also kind of cool. Exdeath is a tree. Or to be more accurate he started as a tree. Five hundred years prior, there was a tree used to seal away evil spirits, and eventually the concentration of evil was so great that it became a sentient being hellbent on destroying the world. Ghido was able to keep him sealed away for four hundred and seventy years, but then he broke out and, well you know the rest.

If you hadn’t gathered by now, Final Fantasy V has a clear environmental theme to its story. The main villain is a world destroying tree that was born from the evil of man, and the Crystals were destroyed from overuse of them. It’s not hard to figure it out. This isn’t too surprising though. Environmentalism was a common theme in a lot of 90’s media. Captain Planet, Ferngully, even Japanese stuff like Princess Mononoke tackled it.

So of course videogames were going to do it too. Final Fantasy V is one of the first examples of this, and while it isn’t especially deep it also doesn’t beat you over the head with it like so many other environmental stories did at the time. It’s a nice subtle message and that’s all it needs to be. Although this isn’t the only Final Fantasy to deal with this issue, but that’s for another day.

Ghido says that Exdeath is returning to his home, the Forest of Moore, for unknown reasons. But whatever they are they can’t be good. So it’s off to stop him, and this is where the games navigation gets worse. Since we now have a submarine that means we now have to go underwater to pass through the mountains to reach Moore.

But since there’s nothing much under the sea, I wound up going in circle for like an hour trying to figure out what to do. Admittedly, it’s not actually that hard to figure out, but having to basically traverse two different overworlds (since the underwater map is technically considered different) makes navigation from this point a bit more convoluted.

 After they make their way through the forest and its many annoying enemies that love to inflict status ailments on you, the party finds the Guardian Tree that protects the forest. When they enter, they’re attacked by four mysterious crystalline entities that use one of the four elements.

If this wasn’t too obvious, these are actually this worlds version of the elemental crystals. Exdeath planned to destroy these too, and you did it for him. Sort of, it’s more like you weakened them enough for Exdeath to take control of them.

Now that he has them under his power, Exdeath uses them to try and destroy the party. But before he can do that, Krile shows up and knocks his ass down with a spell. I’d like to point that Krile is a little kid, and she had enough power to knock the world ending sorcerer tree on his ass. Someone’s been eating her magic Wheeties.

As for what Krile is doing here, she apparently sensed we were in trouble and came after us. I’m going to assume she sensed this way earlier than shown otherwise how she got here so fast is mindboggling. She must have been booking it like the Flash on a cocaine bender.

Despite the save, all Krile did was piss Exdeath off. He turns his attention to her, and the sight of his granddaughter in peril causes Galuf to enter full-blooded grandpa mode. He pushes through Exdeath’s attack and proceeds to beat the ever-loving shit out of him. I’m not kidding. The man goes Super Saiyan or something because he’s goddamn unstoppable. Even when at no HP he still keeps going. He’s like Guts at this point; he’s man too angry to die. Yeah I made two anime references in one paragraph. Big whoop, want to fight about it.

This scene is awesome. It’s cheesy and anime as all hell, but it’s awesome. Galuf is able to do enough damage that Exdeath is forced to flee. Sadly, the fight was too much for the old man. He’s far too injured afterwards for any healing magic to work, and he dies.

This is a bit of a big deal. Oh we’ve had party members die before but they were always temporary party members, not any of the main cast. Having someone that was set-up as one of the four leads die at the halfway point is a pretty ballsy move. I find it funny that VII is praised for doing this when V did it first. Then again most did play VII first so it makes sense that would have the bigger impact.

But now that Galuf is gone, who will take his place. We can’t exactly go around with three Warriors of Light. That would just be silly. Well after passing away, Galuf is able to send Krile all of his powers and abilities, making her the fourth party member. So you don’t need to worry about losing any of his progress.

He also relays a message to Krile that Exdeath is planning on destroying the crystals. So it’s finally time to head back to Castle Exdeath. Things go ok until they reach a dead end. They’re stuck until Krile senses that the castle they’re in is an illusion.

Then Kelger on hearing of Galuf’s death, somehow sends the last of his magic to the castle and breaks the illusion. Sure, fuck it, why not. I think they just did this to kill him off so you’d have the poetry of the Warriors of Light being the successors of the Dawn Warriors. Because he’s dead now. Pretty anti-climactic compared to the others.

But this does allow us to continue. It also reveals that Castle Exdeath is a skull palace. You know Exdeath is not a very interesting villain. Honestly, he’s less a character than he is a force of nature. Literally in this case since he’s a living tree. He’s not complex, but he is so over the top evil that he is pretty damn entertaining. Living in a castle of skulls is metal as fuck. How can you not love a bad guy who goes this hard.

We run into Gilgamesh again during the climb. He claims to have found the legendary Excalibur and proceeds to fight us in his powered-up form. Only to discover that he got Excalipoor, a joke weapon that has high attack but only does one hit point worth of damage. Upon realising his fuck up, Exdeath decides he’s had enough and banishes Gilgamesh to another dimension. Which raises the question why he doesn’t just do that with everyone, but villains are stupid like that.

But now it’s time to face Exdeath himself. This can be a tough fight, but by this point you should have more than enough Jobs mastered to handle this. It takes a bit, but soon enough he goes down for the count.

But Exdeath is still able to break the crystals so… yeah that ain’t good. This causes the party to pass out and somehow wake up near Castle Tycoon. That’s weird, wasn’t that in Bartz’ world. Well, no time to question it because it’s party time. The residents of the castle are so stoked to have both princesses back that they throw a giant ball to celebrate.

While Lenna and Faris are caught up in that, Krile and Bartz sneak off to find out what the hell is going on. Before heading out proper though Bartz wants to go back to the Cave from way back in the beginning of the game to check on Boko. Oh, now you decide to address that. It’s only been, what, 20 hours since she last showed up.

But what did happen to him? Well while we’ve been doing all this saving the world shit, he went off and got himself a wife and kids. You know what good for him. But now that we’re back together, he decides to come with us. Because even if you’re married the universal rule applies, Chocobros before Chocohoes.

With Boko’s help you can start traversing the world and it becomes apparent that something is different. Like it’s still the same world, but the landmass is different in places. You find Tule, but it’s clearly not in the same place it was before. I like this part because it let’s you gradually realise something has happened through just exploring the world. I don’t know if I would call it environmental storytelling, but it’s in a similar vein to that.

Faris does join up with them again after a bit. She didn’t like the whole princess thing and is more comfortable being a pirate, so she decided to follow after us. No Lenna though, in fact we won’t see her for a little while. Which is odd considering how long they’ve kept the main party together. They even had a bit where they teased splitting them up only to not go through with it. Feels weird to do it now.

But there are much bigger questions to answer. Like why Ghido’s Cave in Bartz’ world, and on the surface again. The fuck is actually going on. Well Ghido provides some answers. Turns out, a thousand years ago the two worlds were originally one. But then an evil wizard called Enuo created a powerful magic known as the Void.

Enuo was eventually defeated, but the Void was too powerful for anyone to control. So in order to seal it the people split the elemental crystals into two, which also split the world into two and the Void sealed in the space between them known as the Interdimensional Rift. The Void has been what Exdeath has been after this entire time. He was destroying the Crystals to not just free himself, but to merge the worlds back together so he could access the Voids power.

But Exdeath is dead right, so no need to worry. WRONG! Krile got a splinter earlier, and it turns out it was Exdeath in disguise, and I don’t know why he did this. It is never explained why he needed to do any of this. He says it was just to reveal his plan, but why did he need to do that? I legit think he did this just to be a dick.

He then proceeds to up his dickishness by sending several towns into the Rift, including Tycoon. It’s like what the Emperor did in Final Fantasy II, only it’s effective since I actually remember these locations. I can’t help dunking on II at this point can I. Don’t worry about Lenna by the way, they wouldn’t kill a main character in such an anti-climactic way. Hope that doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass.

Exdeath then proceeds to fight Ghido like he’s in an episode of Dragon Ball Z. I love this game. The fight ends in a stalemate and Ghido teleports everyone out. They land near the Library of the Ancients and going in the find the scholars have discovered the two halves of the Sealed Tome. This was something hinted at way earlier by some NPCs, so this isn’t just something they pulled out of their ass.

The tome tells the party that to defeat Exdeath they need to get the twelve Legendary Weapons by finding four stone tablets and taking them to the Sealed Castle. The only one they can get right now is in the one in the Pyramid of Moore. So they go get that and find that someone went and got the airship back. That was nice of them.

On the walk back to get it though, they run into Lenna who is possessed by one of Exdeath’s minions. Her wind drake sacrifices itself to free her, and the party proceeds to kill the demon. And I’m just going to show you her because, well just look.

I am amazed they got away with this. Now obviously this would have been heavily censored if it had come westward originally, but even in Japan I’m surprised they were allowed to have this. I’m not a prude or anything, but Jesus Christ that’s a lewd sprite.

But with that, Lenna returns to the party, and they get the airship back. At this point you can actually finish the game. You can go right to the Interdimensional Rift to try and fight Exdeath if you want. It’s not recommended though. You really want to master as many Jobs as you can and get the strongest magic and weapons to make things easier. But technically everything from this point on is a side quest. You don’t need to do it to beat the game.

You don’t even need all four tablets to get the weapons. With one tablet you can unlock three of the Legendary Weapons. So you won’t even need all of them since, let’s be honest, you’ll only end up using a handful of them anyway. In my case I only needed five of them, so once I got the second tablet, I didn’t need the others. Or at least that’s what I found out. I thought you needed to get all four tablets to access any of the weapons so that’s what I did first. I didn’t know I could get them in increments.

But if you made it this far, you might as well go for broke and get them all. If you do want them all though you first need to go to the Fork Tower. This is an interesting dungeon because it forces you to split the party into teams of two. With each team having to climb up one of its two towers.

Take my advice, make sure you have the magic users climb up the left tower and your physical fighters climb the right. The bosses for those are designed around those kinds of classes, and in one instance you can wind up in an unwinnable situation if you have no magic users. There’s that beginner’s trap bullshit again.

Beating Fork Tower rewards you with Flare and Holy, which are some of the strongest magic in the game, but more importantly it lets you meet back up with Cid and Mid who fit the airship with a submarine mode. With that you can get the final tablets and get the last summons and magic. Basically anything you have left to do. I won’t go over those because this review is long enough as is, but there’s one I need to cover.

Remember that one Job we couldn’t get back in Walse Tower way earlier in the game? Well now you can. With the submarine you can get back into the tower where you can find the final crystal shard. But it is being guarded by Famed Mimic Gogo, a colourful mime who will not give us the shard unless we battle him for it.

You can’t actually defeat Gogo. No matter how powerful you are he will always nuke the crap out of you. To beat him you need to mimic him. But the only way to do that is to do nothing. Yeah you just have to wait, and he gets so impressed on how you were able to mimic him that he gives you the shard.

This gives you the last Job, Mime. Mime is very unique. It’s the only Job in the game that cannot attack or use items, instead its main gimmick is the Mimic command which will copy a move done by another party member. I’ve heard it’s possible to create some fun chains with this, but I never really figured out how. It’s a little unwieldly for my taste.

This makes the Mime sound kind of gimmicky, which it kind of is, but it has some major advantages. It’s the only Job that can equip three abilities. This makes it the best Job for spellcasters since it allows you to equip two magic types and the Red Mages Dualcast ability. Which makes it especially effective for support spells.

You don’t even need to waste a slot on support abilities because the Mime inherently knows all support abilities of the Jobs you’ve mastered. This is why you want to master all the Jobs you can. Since, the more you master, the more inherent abilities the Mime has.

The Mime is one of the strongest Jobs in the game, but it’s skillset makes it best suited for magic. For physical fighters it’s nowhere near as potent due to the lack of a standard attack. Here’s the thing though, you’ve had the best job for those since the very beginning.

The Freelancer is the Job you start with and at first it seems weak. It has no major advantages, doesn’t level-up, and it will likely be something you forget about once you get other Jobs. But the Freelancer, much like the Mime, inherently knows all the support abilities of mastered jobs, and while it can only equip two abilities as opposed to three, it keeps the attack and item commands and it can equip any weapon in the game.

This makes the Freelancer the best Job for physical fighters, while the Mime is best for magic users. By the end these should be the only two Jobs you will need. This does have a similar issue to Final Fantasy III where the Ninja and Sage classes were the only ones worth using by the end, but the increased customisation provided in V means the party ends up being a lot more diverse.

But after you’ve gotten everything you need, it’s time for the final dungeon. After making their way to where Tycoon once stood, the party is sucked into the Interdimensional Rift. This leads to a really cool sequence where they travel through various rooms based on places they’ve already visited. Implying the rift is starting to compress reality into a single point.

But after fighting their way through many demons and having another run-in with Gilgamesh - which is really funny by the way, it’s the best part of the game in my opinion – they finally make it to Exdeath. Which begins the long, long final battle. Emphasis on long.

This final fight is a slog. The previous games final battles could certainly be a bit lengthy compared to the rest of the game, but this one really started to drag. That doesn’t mean it’s bad though. It’s a very challenging fight that puts your character builds to the test. He has an attack that can one shot and petrify you, and if you don’t keep up the offensive he can easily overwhelm you.

It’s a cool looking boss too. He starts out transforming into his original tree form, but after lowering his health, he’s consumed by the void and becomes Neo-Exdeath. A horrifying amalgamation of Exdeath and his demon spawn that just wants to turn the world to nothingness. In a game of metal as fuck monster designs, Neo-Exdeath is a fittingly awesome looking final boss.

But after a while, you finally bring the bastard down. After which the Void does not vanish but instead the essences of the crystal within the party imbue themselves with the crystal shards, and with the power of the Void the Elemental Crystals are remade. Thus restoring balance to the world.

This is actually kind of interesting. Was the Void destroyed by restoring balance to the world or did it simply become sealed away again. Did the void always exist and the Crystals come from it? Or was it simply that the power of our heroes was great enough that they could control the Void to recreate them. It’s not entirely clear, and I think that makes it more interesting to think about.

With that, the day is saved. Our heroes return home to their normal lives. Bartz continues on his adventures, Lenna goes back to lead her people, Faris goes back to pirating, and Krile just goes back to being a kid, I guess. One year later they all meet again and agree to stick together to keep the world safe, and they all ride off in an awesome looking credit sequence. Fin.

Final Fantasy V is a game I greatly enjoyed. The gameplay is easily the best so far. The battle system remains superb, and the improved Job System provides excellent customisation. It might be very grindy, but it is a very fun game to play and is my favourite in the series so far.

Story wise it is also decent. It’s a simple story and a lot of it is derivative of past games, but aside from a few stupid moments it is told well. The characters are extremely likable, it has plenty of memorable scenes, and despite the lighter tone it still manages to have powerful emotional moments.

The lighter tone won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but it makes for a fun adventure that stands out from the darker games that preceded and succeeded it. I will say that it is the funniest game in the series so far. Not all of the jokes landed, but the ones that did were really funny. If you want a more easy-going Final Fantasy story that still retains the drama this is a good one to check out.

The big problems with the game are its navigation and pacing. While the world is still fun to explore, the lack of direction in places makes getting lost easy, and this can be frustrating when you just want to get a move on. A problem made even worse with the underwater maps making navigation more convoluted than it needs to be.

But this is an issue easily overcome with a walkthrough. The pacing is far harder to work around.  Yes the Pixel Remaster features make grinding less of a chore, but even with that Final Fantasy V can still drag. It is the longest game in the series yet and you can really feel it.

Admittedly the extra length is somewhat justified. Coming largely from the increased amount of side content. That’s fine, especially since most of that is fun and doesn’t take too long to complete. But it’s still a long game for it’s time, and while the grinding is a big reason for that, another is that the game is padded.

There’s a lot of filler in this. It has parts that could have been cut out and not lose much. I will say the game never feels like it is wasting its time, but it does feel like a good 5-10 hours could have been trimmed. Compared to the breezy adventures of the previous games, this one is a bit more of a time sink and it did start to wear out its welcome by the end.

Still I really liked this one. This is the Final Fantasy I would recommend for those who value gameplay over everything else. Not that everything else is bad, it’s just the gameplay is the true highlight. It’s just a fun game to play. It’s a bit long in the tooth but you’ll enjoy almost every minute of it. As for the ranking, I think this placement should be obvious.

1.      Final Fantasy V

2.      Final Fantasy III

3.      Final Fantasy IV

4.      Final Fantasy

5.      Final Fantasy II

What else would you expect. V is essentially an improved version of III, and since III was my favourite so far V is obviously going at the top. This is one of the better 16-bit RPG’s I’ve played, and if you happen to be a Bravely Default fan then this one is absolutely worth checking out since it basically serves as the progenitor of that series.

But that brings us to the end. If you read this whole thing, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. This was a beast to put together, and I think I need a break from this retrospective for a little bit. I have some other things I want to work on and these reviews are getting exhausting.

When we do return to this series though, we are talking about a big one. Final Fantasy IV, one of the most beloved RPGs of the 16-bit era and a massive fan favourite. Will it live up to the hype? Only one way to find out.

Final Fantasy V – 1992 Developer Interview - shmuplations.com