2/5 ★ – Elesh's review of FINAL FANTASY V.

Final Fantasy V was very clearly a product of its time. You can tell they were trying to execute big ideas fighting against technical limitations... and sometimes those are the cases where you get the best games. But other times, you get Final Fantasy V - a game with a few conceptually great ideas that just didn't work. There are really two major drawbacks I want to take time to fully discuss: The job system and the enemy design. At its core, the job system was ahead of its time. 20-something jobs and 70-something abilities you can mix and match should lead to a ton of interesting combos. Unfortunately, whatever the reason, they decided that the jobs don't get access to their full kit innately and, if you want to use all of a job's abilities, you give up the option to engage with the 'mix and match' portion entirely. This led to the system feeling overly restrictive and, to be frank, just not fun to engage with. I found myself falling back on a few staples constantly because I felt too weak if I tried to explore beyond that. And there were some job abilities I looked and just thought to myself "this would be a really cool perk to choosing to play as this job, but there's no way I'm taking it if it takes a full slot on its own." Another minor related issue is that it kind of felt crappy to master a job. You really felt pressured to swap jobs to keep using the ability points that were your sole reward for bosses, so you either lose all the benefits you'd worked hard to master or waste AP. This kind of ties into the issues with having not enough ability slots, because it wouldn't have felt so bad if you had one or two extra ability slots to mix and match further. I'm not going to mince words here: the game's fight design was infuriating. A gradually escalating barrage of punishing counters, awkward gimmick fights, and excessive status ailments made the game get less and less fun as time went on. I pushed myself to finish the game one day because I had reached a point where I knew that if I stopped, I would genuinely dread picking the game back up because the final few hours of the game were just miserable. High encounter rates are a staple of older SNES era RPGs, but I can't recall any other time I have felt so miserable getting encounter after encounter as I did at the end of Final Fantasy V. It also didn't help that the game's menus - at least in the pixel remaster version I played - were a bit stiff and unresponsive. Its not all bad though. The game isn't terrible. It has a good sense of humour, pretty good writing, a fantastic soundtrack, and - arguably most important - cute baby chocobo chicks. Aside from a few parts where they did the absolute worst job giving any indication of what they expected me to do next, I overall enjoyed the first ~80% of the game. But this was definitely a game that got less fun as time went on. The deeper I got, the more the cracks started to show.