Growing up I was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series. Imagine my surprise when, as a teenager, I was reading a retrospective on the franchise in Electronic Gaming Monthly and discovered I had missed out on one of the games! To be fair it wasn’t my fault; Final Fantasy V was deemed too difficult for North American audiences by the publisher. We never saw it in English until years later. The magazine I saw the game in had a single screen shot and I used to sit there staring at it. I wondered what the game sandwiched in between IV and VI (both some of my favorite games of all time) would be like. Today playing it is as easy as ever, and I’m here to review the Super Famicom version.
Final Fantasy V starts off slow introducing us to a young nomadic youth named Bartz. He and his chocobo named Boco live together in this medieval style fantasy world. They move from place to place with nothing to anchor them down. Things change for the duo one day when they encounter a young pink haired girl and old amnesiac man being attacked by goblins near the site of a meteor strike. Bartz joins their cause to find why the wind has stopped blowing. The trio are eventually joined by the dastardly pirate Faris. The world’s crystals, the source of elemental power in this world, are being destroyed and the four must fight to stop the force behind this.
It’s a pretty typical outline for an RPG story, but the scenario here isn’t a huge focus. Yes, you have a crew of unlikely heroes but the main cast is small (just five characters) and there aren’t really any huge plot twists or revelations concerning them. They have the bare minimum of personality. That’s okay because they’re just there to push the plot forward. The real focus of the scenario is in building up this elaborate fantasy world full of lore and history. It works, but don’t go in expecting your typical Final Fantasy level of flare.
The 16-bit era was not one where Squaresoft experimented with the Final Fantasy franchise. FFV is a real testament to this. The game re-uses the graphical engine from the previous release. From a distance the two can easily be mistaken for each other. It’s a two dimensional game set up with a world map containing on it all of the town areas and dungeons in the game. You wander from place to place to advance the story fighting random encounters all the live long day. It’s pretty standard fare, but Final Fantasy V has some tricks up its sleeve.
Final Fantasy V is a traditional role playing game. You wander around the aforementioned world map and dungeons engaging enemies at random. Battles are turn based, but the game uses the active time battle system allowing for some real-time elements. This is standard Final Fantasy fare. Your party holds up to four characters at once, and you’re pretty much stuck with the same games from start to finish with the exception of just one of them. Town areas serve as hubs wherein you can get clues about how to proceed and purchase items/equipment. It’s a pretty basic Japanese RPG at heart.
Remember the job system that Squaresoft introduced in the third installment of the series? Well it’s back in V, and this time it’s much more detailed. As you get to certain points in the story you’ll receive crystal shards. Each of these contains the powers of one job in them, and you’ll gain the ability to change your character’s class with them. They all start out normal with no special abilities and only special moves and abilities through the job system. While set as a specific job each character earns ability points and reaching certain milestones with these will cause them to learn these abilities permanently.
Where the game gets complicated is in the number of options you have. You can set a character to a primary job which dictates their stats, equipment, and abilities. What makes this system interesting is that you have a free slot that you can set an ability learned from another job. Want a knight that can cast white magic? That’s easy. How about a sword wielding monk? That too is not complicated. Creating the best combinations takes some real work, and you’ll need to experiment quite a bit.
Final Fantasy V is one of the more difficult installments in the series. It’s harder than most Japanese RPGs, that’s for sure. The game has big difficulty spikes especially with the boss battles. You’ll need to constantly switch up your strategy to be successful. There’s a whole lot going on here. Some of the more difficult boss fights can be won just by tinkering with the jobs of your party. In this sense Final Fantasy V can feel a bit like a puzzle game to be honest. Finding the piece that fits is rewarding.
The first three quarters of the game is entirely linear. There are a few side-quests you can do but these are mostly related to gaining new spells for the summoner job. At a specific part of the story the game branches out a little and gives you some options. You can choose to complete dungeons to gain the best weapons for each of the job classes. These are completely optional, but the final boss is a real doozy so it definitely won’t hurt. This feels like a precursor to the world of ruin from Final Fantasy VI. In some ways it’s a superior concept in this game.
This isn’t the best looking RPG on the Super Nintendo. It re-uses a lot of assets from Final Fantasy IV which isn’t a bad thing, but considering this was a later release you would expect more. In-battle the sprites are bigger and have slightly more animation. The spell effects are a definite upgrade, as are the monster designs, but the game as a whole just doesn’t feel like a huge upgrade.
Unfortunately I think Nobuo Uematsu used all his best compositions in the prior game. Final Fantasy V has a pretty weak soundtrack in my opinion. It fits the franchise perfectly, but there are few standouts. The main theme and Gilgamesh’s music are just about the only ones that come to mind. The rest is all generic Final Fantasy fare that fits, but won’t get you jazzed.
Final Fantasy V may be the worst of the 16-bit Final Fantasy games but by no means is it a bad game. It’s actually one of the best role playing titles of all time, and that title doesn’t come easy. The story, graphics and soundtrack take a real backseat here but the gameplay and job system more than make up for it. It’s very unique among its peers. It’s easily one of the most addictive FF titles because of the sheer number of options.This one will chew up and spit out those who find the modern Final Fantasy games difficult.
