Weiss
Unwise
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My mad craving for RPGs remains unfulfilled, and so after being sufficiently peer pressured by my regular discord hangout, I finally got around to Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster. 32 hours later (remember when these games had a reasonable length???) I am now watching the credits roll as I begin typing my latest pseudobrainy essay.
I've never given FFV a deep dive before, nor was I interested in trying. I've played a few of its descendants such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Bravely Default and wasn't all that impressed with how the Job system is snapped in half with the slightest effort. For sure those games are fun, but to me a good RPG isn't just a toybox made of stuff to do and I've yet to play any RPG with that kind of character customization that doesn't end up a junkyard of mechanics the developers hoped would contribute to a well-balanced combat system.
Turns out my problem was in playing the runty offspring instead of going straight to the source. FFV totally whips so hard that by the end of my playthrough I had to declare it the all-time best game in the series, because it is an absolute masterclass in quality gameplay and I'd even go so far as to say it's the best playing RPG on the SNES.
(Me and the gang on our way to be more fun than Chrono Trigger)
When talking FFV the most common comparison I got was to FFIII, and it's easy to see why. III introduced the Job system and V heavily expanded on it with the subclass system, but I don't really think it's the most apt comparison. III's Jobs are essentially swappable characters who do one thing really well and don't impart any permanent change to your party, and that's not really the case here. If you have Bartz as a Knight for so long he learns the passive Cover ability, that's an incentive to take him down other physical tank jobs who can further use that ability instead of discarding the Knight and its signature power once newer and better jobs come along.
No, I think of FFV as the evolution of FFII's maligned character growth system where the ultimate endpoint was that your cast's preferred playstyle decided their stat growths. What FFV takes from III is the Job system's flexibility, creating an oceanic trench of depth for character customization that's laid out to the player as simply and elegantly as it possibly could be, a perfect fusion of expansive freedom for player choice that leads to a unique setup for your party members every playthrough.
When I got the first loadout of Jobs I had Bartz as a Knight, Lenna as a White Mage, Galuf as a Black Mage and Faris as a Thief. Once I unlocked more jobs I switched Bartz over to the Berserker, who benefited from the Knight's Two-Handed skill to do massive axe damage in a way that, had I done so for Galuf, he wouldn't have gotten the same perk. At the end of the game Bartz's maxed out Ranger Job gave him the absurdly broken Rapid Fire ability which I passed back to the Knight, whose equippable Blood Sword nulls the damage penalty and would swing for 2000 damage a turn and completely healing Bartz, turning him into a self-sufficient DPS machine. That'd be good enough, but I also had him dabble in Chemist for a while to acquire the Pharmacology skill which double the effects of restorative items and made the almost useless Hi-Potions and Ethers into turbocharged tools that could save me in a pinch during battle. Krile was my offensive caster through Black Mage and Summoner and dabbled in White/Time support magic, so I could make a custom Sage or White Summoner teammate out of her when needed while Lenna avoided offensive spellcasting in favour of maxed out White/Time Mage focus on top of maxing out the Bard, culminating in her being my ultimate support unit as a Mime with White/Time/Sing abilities.
The most important part of this, however, is simple: I can't do all of that at once. Do I want Bartz to do massive damage and heal himself? Then he has to be a Knight with Rapid Fire and the Blood Sword. He can't two-hand for even more damage, he can't dual-wield, and he cannot use Pharmacology to boost all those items. Bartz is good at specific roles I built him for and those roles can be changed, and that's ultimately why FFV is so perfectly designed: you can make some real broken combos, but you can't use all of them at once. In a normal playthrough you will outright ignore certain Jobs and perks because there just isn't enough time in the day to max all of them out, the Blue Mage went entirely unused in my playthrough because I couldn't begin to guess what monsters were carrying the good moves and didn't want to. Faris was my defacto Ninja and once the endgame rolled around there was no time to get Rapid Fire on her, so instead her maxed out Mystic Knight job let her spread extra damage and status effects on top of throwing screen-clearing elemental scrolls and shurikens. Would she have done better with Rapid Fire? Was Ninja/Mystic Knight the best combo I could work with? I dunno, I didn't try all of them. That's for next playthrough.
Final Fantasy V is the all-too rare kind of JRPG: one that is fun to play. Combat isn't a pitstop for the next cutscene, it's the main course of this fun-filled fantasy adventure with brisk pacing and a constant stream of new stuff to do. Furthermore, because gameplay is king in this role-playing game, the bosses get to be absolute freaks. Atomos will OHKO party members with Comet and only stop as long as one member is dead so they can be slowly absorbed and permanently removed from the fight. The Nereid trio are pathetically weak but will swiftly revive if they're not all dead at the same time, forcing some quick thinking and math as they pummel you to death with their sweeping spell attacks. Odin gives you a minute to take him down and there's no reason you have to abide by that, the party just does it because styling on this loser is more fun than beating him up normally.
And Gilgamesh? Gilgamesh will pause the fight so he can rapidly cast a bunch of buffs. This is because Gilgamesh has more personality than every single game released after FFX combined.
As for the story, well it's certainly not bad, but I'm willing to admit that I was left wanting more with the caveat that I wanted more because the existing character beats were a lot of fun. Bartz displays a surprising level of ennui and melancholy, most apparent upon his return to his hometown, and it contrasts well with his repeat instances of being the butz of the joke. Galuf, Krile and Faris all maintain a strong personality through the game as well, really it's only Lenna who suffers here even if the game still lands her overwhelming kindness as her main feature.
The real star, though, is main villain Exdeath. Literally a big tree used as a dumping ground for demons until they all mashed together into this suave Amano design. Exdeath is about kicking ass and taking names, and that he has no reason to be anything but a wicked dark lord means he goes all-in, repeatedly making a mess of the heroes whenever he arrives until he acquires the power he's been seeking and begins messing with entire chunks of the planet at a time. Is he deep? Lemme ask a better question, what benefit does it have to be "deep" in a game that works this well with an angry tree as its ultimate threat, and what does it say for those "deep" villains that this angry tree, commonly depicted as a sprite the size of a single tile, is way cooler than throes of later FF villains?
(better villain than your fave, don't @ me)
And if you can name one moment in Final Fantasy history cooler than Galuf taking on Exdeath by himself, successfully driving the unstoppable juggernaut back for the first time in the whole game so far while fighting at 0HP and dying so hard that a Phoenix Down won't work on him, I'd name you a liar. Don't bother with plotline deaths if they aren't going to be even half as metal as this was.
FFV doesn't emphasize the narrative that much and maybe it could have pushed some more, but if I finish dozens of hours with a cast and think of how I wish I could have spent more time with them, then FFV had to be doing something right there amidst all its other good decisions.
I've never given FFV a deep dive before, nor was I interested in trying. I've played a few of its descendants such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Bravely Default and wasn't all that impressed with how the Job system is snapped in half with the slightest effort. For sure those games are fun, but to me a good RPG isn't just a toybox made of stuff to do and I've yet to play any RPG with that kind of character customization that doesn't end up a junkyard of mechanics the developers hoped would contribute to a well-balanced combat system.
Turns out my problem was in playing the runty offspring instead of going straight to the source. FFV totally whips so hard that by the end of my playthrough I had to declare it the all-time best game in the series, because it is an absolute masterclass in quality gameplay and I'd even go so far as to say it's the best playing RPG on the SNES.
(Me and the gang on our way to be more fun than Chrono Trigger)
When talking FFV the most common comparison I got was to FFIII, and it's easy to see why. III introduced the Job system and V heavily expanded on it with the subclass system, but I don't really think it's the most apt comparison. III's Jobs are essentially swappable characters who do one thing really well and don't impart any permanent change to your party, and that's not really the case here. If you have Bartz as a Knight for so long he learns the passive Cover ability, that's an incentive to take him down other physical tank jobs who can further use that ability instead of discarding the Knight and its signature power once newer and better jobs come along.
No, I think of FFV as the evolution of FFII's maligned character growth system where the ultimate endpoint was that your cast's preferred playstyle decided their stat growths. What FFV takes from III is the Job system's flexibility, creating an oceanic trench of depth for character customization that's laid out to the player as simply and elegantly as it possibly could be, a perfect fusion of expansive freedom for player choice that leads to a unique setup for your party members every playthrough.
When I got the first loadout of Jobs I had Bartz as a Knight, Lenna as a White Mage, Galuf as a Black Mage and Faris as a Thief. Once I unlocked more jobs I switched Bartz over to the Berserker, who benefited from the Knight's Two-Handed skill to do massive axe damage in a way that, had I done so for Galuf, he wouldn't have gotten the same perk. At the end of the game Bartz's maxed out Ranger Job gave him the absurdly broken Rapid Fire ability which I passed back to the Knight, whose equippable Blood Sword nulls the damage penalty and would swing for 2000 damage a turn and completely healing Bartz, turning him into a self-sufficient DPS machine. That'd be good enough, but I also had him dabble in Chemist for a while to acquire the Pharmacology skill which double the effects of restorative items and made the almost useless Hi-Potions and Ethers into turbocharged tools that could save me in a pinch during battle. Krile was my offensive caster through Black Mage and Summoner and dabbled in White/Time support magic, so I could make a custom Sage or White Summoner teammate out of her when needed while Lenna avoided offensive spellcasting in favour of maxed out White/Time Mage focus on top of maxing out the Bard, culminating in her being my ultimate support unit as a Mime with White/Time/Sing abilities.
The most important part of this, however, is simple: I can't do all of that at once. Do I want Bartz to do massive damage and heal himself? Then he has to be a Knight with Rapid Fire and the Blood Sword. He can't two-hand for even more damage, he can't dual-wield, and he cannot use Pharmacology to boost all those items. Bartz is good at specific roles I built him for and those roles can be changed, and that's ultimately why FFV is so perfectly designed: you can make some real broken combos, but you can't use all of them at once. In a normal playthrough you will outright ignore certain Jobs and perks because there just isn't enough time in the day to max all of them out, the Blue Mage went entirely unused in my playthrough because I couldn't begin to guess what monsters were carrying the good moves and didn't want to. Faris was my defacto Ninja and once the endgame rolled around there was no time to get Rapid Fire on her, so instead her maxed out Mystic Knight job let her spread extra damage and status effects on top of throwing screen-clearing elemental scrolls and shurikens. Would she have done better with Rapid Fire? Was Ninja/Mystic Knight the best combo I could work with? I dunno, I didn't try all of them. That's for next playthrough.
Final Fantasy V is the all-too rare kind of JRPG: one that is fun to play. Combat isn't a pitstop for the next cutscene, it's the main course of this fun-filled fantasy adventure with brisk pacing and a constant stream of new stuff to do. Furthermore, because gameplay is king in this role-playing game, the bosses get to be absolute freaks. Atomos will OHKO party members with Comet and only stop as long as one member is dead so they can be slowly absorbed and permanently removed from the fight. The Nereid trio are pathetically weak but will swiftly revive if they're not all dead at the same time, forcing some quick thinking and math as they pummel you to death with their sweeping spell attacks. Odin gives you a minute to take him down and there's no reason you have to abide by that, the party just does it because styling on this loser is more fun than beating him up normally.
And Gilgamesh? Gilgamesh will pause the fight so he can rapidly cast a bunch of buffs. This is because Gilgamesh has more personality than every single game released after FFX combined.
As for the story, well it's certainly not bad, but I'm willing to admit that I was left wanting more with the caveat that I wanted more because the existing character beats were a lot of fun. Bartz displays a surprising level of ennui and melancholy, most apparent upon his return to his hometown, and it contrasts well with his repeat instances of being the butz of the joke. Galuf, Krile and Faris all maintain a strong personality through the game as well, really it's only Lenna who suffers here even if the game still lands her overwhelming kindness as her main feature.
The real star, though, is main villain Exdeath. Literally a big tree used as a dumping ground for demons until they all mashed together into this suave Amano design. Exdeath is about kicking ass and taking names, and that he has no reason to be anything but a wicked dark lord means he goes all-in, repeatedly making a mess of the heroes whenever he arrives until he acquires the power he's been seeking and begins messing with entire chunks of the planet at a time. Is he deep? Lemme ask a better question, what benefit does it have to be "deep" in a game that works this well with an angry tree as its ultimate threat, and what does it say for those "deep" villains that this angry tree, commonly depicted as a sprite the size of a single tile, is way cooler than throes of later FF villains?
(better villain than your fave, don't @ me)
And if you can name one moment in Final Fantasy history cooler than Galuf taking on Exdeath by himself, successfully driving the unstoppable juggernaut back for the first time in the whole game so far while fighting at 0HP and dying so hard that a Phoenix Down won't work on him, I'd name you a liar. Don't bother with plotline deaths if they aren't going to be even half as metal as this was.
FFV doesn't emphasize the narrative that much and maybe it could have pushed some more, but if I finish dozens of hours with a cast and think of how I wish I could have spent more time with them, then FFV had to be doing something right there amidst all its other good decisions.
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