3.5/5 ★ – NiGHTS108's review of Final Fantasy V.

So, as the pendulum swings once more, we find ourselves back at another odd numbered Final Fantasy game. We’ve already seen Final Fantasy I and III, largely simpler games plot wise with a deeper focus on gameplay, and Final Fantasy II and IV, which have much more of a narrative to sink your teeth into. Here we are again with Final Fantasy V, the first of the lighthearted style to appear beyond the NES. Just like how I discussed FF3’s evolutions over FF1’s concepts, a lot of that can be applied here. FF5 largely feels like a direct sequel to FF3. Funny enough, despite this entry’s deeper approach to gameplay than FF4, I find the story and general tone to be one of the most interesting things about FF5 in the context of this evolutionary journey. FF5 is one of the lightest and uninhibited games in the entire series, they really go all out with the tone here surprisingly, creating an experience plot wise that’s at least more interesting than walking around and encountering fantasy tropes haphazardly, like in FF1 and especially FF3. This game is a very Saturday morning cartoon-y approach to the Final Fantasy formula so far. Okay, that might be pushing it, it still feels like Final Fantasy, it is still largely the same thing we’ve seen so far with a new coat of paint, but there’s a greater heir of whimsy to this one. What surprised me about this one especially is just how funny it was, there’s so many small interactions, like the main character Bartz searching “ass” in a library and being disappointed to find a book about donkeys, or a sage character (who is a turtle at the time of saying this, wink wink) claiming they “didn’t spend the last 7 million years munching on pizza”. Adult magazines and pizza canonically exist in the world of FF5, who’d have thought? Let me demonstrate this shift in tone by comparing my favourite character from FF4 and 5 respectively. In FF4 we had Cecil, the main character. A dead serious yet passionate dark knight became paladin, on his journey of grief and despair to save the kingdom he’s from and protect what he believes is right. Badass. In FF5 we have Gilgamesh! He’s the villain’s (Exdeath’s) goofy sidekick dude with a randomly very great theme who constantly appears to taunt you throughout the game, I love it! There’s like 4 battles with this dude over the course of the game, none of them are even hard, and he always ends up running away at the end so you never actually kill him. I loved the encounter pretty close to the end of the game especially, it’s completely optional and only triggers if you open a chest with nothing in it in a huge empty room, Gilgamesh will appear and taunt you claiming he took what was inside, the legendary sword of Excalibur! Then you start fighting, and he laments he was ripped off because it wasn’t the true Excalibur. Then Exdeath sends him to another dimension because he’s just sick of his shit, and Gilgamesh drops… “Excalipoor”. I could talk about this dude all day, he’s so goddamn funny. This game in general is so goddamn funny, there’s stuff I haven’t even mentioned the random miniboss who fights you just as you’re about to leave a crumbling castle, after a few hits he’ll “reveal his true form”... and then die instantly. Delightful! Okay look I’m saying all this like this game is JUST a goof but it’s not, we are still post FF4 and the story does attempt to have emotional moments. It’s not… the MOST discordant tonally, like generally it has good pacing and scenes like Galuf’s death are some of my favourite moments in the series so far, but it is a little thin sometimes, this is best seen in the character of Faris, a captain of a pirate crew. She’s introduced as a male at first as you invade her cove and try to steal their ship, but she joins the party permanently after seeing Lenna’s (the princess’) pendant and noticing it’s the same as her own, her most valuable possession given to her by her father before leaving. Only a bit later the party finds she’s actually female, and the only explanation for her changing her identity while she was with the pirates across the whole game “A female pirate would just get laughed at”. Faris is conceptually the most interesting of the 4 party members, yet as is, she just remains as evidence of FF5’s shortcuts it takes in the story sometimes. By the end of the game, 3 of the 4 party members are female, (doing a good job building things up for Terra in the next game) and yes I get this game is light hearted, but I really think Faris as a character is a missed opportunity. They barely go into her past or relationships with her royal sister. Maybe it’s just a me thing, but it kind of just highlights the gaps in the narrative in my eyes. I actually didn’t think I’d have this much to say about the story, looks like FF5 has surprised me once more. On the gameplay side of things, we have… largely a similar system as FF3. You gain classes slowly over the course of the game, of which each of them provide their own perks you may want to consider for your 4 party members, who are no longer in a fixed class like in FF4 and almost never leave the party. There’s a different spin on it here though, if I had to describe it I’d say FF5 has more of a balanced approach to the job system. The core thing this game adds is the ability to gain “ABP” for each of your classes. Once this reaches a certain level, you’ll gain an ability which you can use on whatever class you’d like! Almost every class has one unchanging slot and another slot you can use for any ability you may have gained from another class. The cool thing about this is no class ever feels invalidated, unlike FF3 in which you’d get new jobs and then just upgrade over from the jobs you already had. You get almost every job only around halfway through the game, which also saves from the slow start I was complaining about with FF3, where that game’s entire first section kinda just feels like more FF1. It’s a fine piece of work! Matching the depth and weight of FF2’s gameplay with the fast and loose job system from FF3. Funny enough though, this makes the Freelancer (FF5’s version of FF3’s Onion Knight) one of the most useful classes, since it doesn’t have that fixed slot and you can just match anything. Where this all *kinda* falls apart though is in regards to how these abilities are obtained. Yes, we have ourselves another FF2 problem, as if you want to obtain a certain ability for a specific character, you’ll just have to grind your way there. This isn’t as bad as how FF2 does it, as you’ll certainly amass plenty of skills across the game if you’re actively changing classes when you find new ones, but if you want to actually max out a class and get a lot of super OP abilities, it’ll take you way longer than it really should. If you’re on the console ports of FF5’s Pixel Remaster, do yourself a favour, go into the menu -> configuration -> boost and set ABP to x4 and never look back. Additionally this isn’t helped by the fact that great abilities are kind of awkwardly dispersed, for some reason, like Zeninage is absolutely broken when you get it and is consistently an amazing ability through the entire game, and it just comes with the Shinobi class! Additionally it takes a super long time to actually max out classes, and some of them have super great rewards at the end, which you’d only really know if you spent way too long actually getting them. I don’t think I’d have even tried to do this without the modern privilege of the internet. Like the story, FF5’s gameplay kind of comes with an asterisk. Honestly in general I unfortunately think that's kind of an accurate way of describing FF5, This is kind of the “Yeah, but…” game in the FF series for me so far. The wonderful job system returns, but it’s dialled up about 20% more obnoxious. It balances it’s tone really well, yet the most potentially interesting character is just completely ignored by the narrative. There’s a small part of me that misses the broad emotional story of FF4 when I’m playing FF5, over the course of this game I kinda thought to myself that it’s just a toned down version of FF4, with worse music and characters and just generally a step down. However, I stopped myself, because saying that is just ignorant of all the wonderful quirks of FF5 itself. It was never gonna step out of FF4’s shadow with its voice, but why would it need to? Isn’t the point of the Final Fantasy series that all the games are different? It may not be my favourite, but I can certainly stand back and appreciate FF5 on the merits of its own style, sensability and above all, personality. Keeping to a specific style would put Final Fantasy in a rut, Overall I really admire this game for its bold and creative direction, even if it never quite hits all the marks. It’s a swashbuckling adventure, and one of the most simply fun loving and charming games in the Final Fantasy series for me. If anything, knowing generally the three games coming after this, it’s almost melancholic how simply nice it is, kind of like the Final Fantasy series waving goodbye to its childhood. Sorry for getting all sentimental out of nowhere, I’m writing this at 6 AM. It’s just what happens. Nonetheless, Final Fantasy V has flaws for sure, but is just one of the most pleasant games in the series, and for that I give it my respect. Grade: B+ Difficulty: D+