Final Fantasy V — It’s Just My Job, Five Days A Week

Why is it that the most difficult games in the Final Fantasy series never seemed to make it out of Japan?  Did they think we couldn’t handle them?  I mean, III was skipped over entirely because the NES became obsolete, so at least they had a little bit of an excuse.  But IV was toned down in difficulty and V was purposely skipped over in favour of VI.  Honestly, what were they thinking?

Just look at what happened with the Dragon Quest series.  We never got Dragon Quest VI and had to wait until earlier this year to get Dragon Quest V.  And how about the Mother series?  Out of three games, we only got one.  Fire Emblem?  We only started getting them when the seventh game came out.  They’re starting to wake up over there and send more games over the Pacific, but for a while there it seemed like getting good, difficult RPGs was like pulling teeth.

The trend in the Final Fantasy series is that if the game features the job system, it’s going to be a difficult game.  III was difficult, Tactics (which came out after V) was also pretty difficult and challenging at times (unless you knew what you were doing and could exploit the system).  X-2 is a more recent release and is possibly the only exception to this rule, and yet there is still a degree of difficulty to it.  You’ll die a horrible death if you’re not careful.

V is no exception.  It’s, in my opinion, the most difficult of the Final Fantasies to appear on the SNES.  If you have a lot of difficulty with IV and VI, they can be overcome with lots of leveling, but in those games, characters are rigid in their roles, unchanging.  You can’t stop them from being what they are.  In V, characters can be anything, and their stats reflect this.  Whereas in III, you kept all the HP you gained so far when you switched jobs, the developers of V chose to go a different route and make all the different jobs affect even the HP of your character, so you can’t even stockpile it to protect you while you’re a mage.

This time around, jobs were better defined, so it didn’t feel like the only thing each job had going for it was a different set of equipment.  You could level up a job and gain special skills which you could then add to your character whenever they wanted to change a job, but still do what they’d been doing before.  For instance, once they’ve learned the ability to cast up to level 3 white mage spells, they could equip that in their spare skill slot, change jobs, and become a Dragoon that can cast white magic.  Certain jobs let you learn how to equip certain pieces of equipment no matter which job you are, so that you could equip axes and shields when you’re a Black Mage, or you could equip spears as a spoony Bard.

The last time Square used the job system, the party required a wagon full of equipment, which had to be carried around, somehow, in your pockets.  This is once again the case, yet with skills such as the aforementioned Equip Spears, you don’t have to carry around a separate set of equipment if you don’t want to.  Also, inventory space has been expanded enough that you probably won’t run out of space for your stuff.  As such, the chubby chocobo does not make an appearance this time around (and won’t until the 7th game, as a random variation on the Chocobo summon).  Having to carry around a large inventory is no longer a problem as long as you have space in your deep pockets (which are obviously bigger on the inside than they appear on the outside).

Just like before, spells are bought in shops, but they won’t set you back too much, of course.  However, money seems to be harder to acquire in this game, as are experience points.  I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a difficult game.

Some things change, yet some things stay the same.  For instance, the Active Time Battle system is back and doesn’t go through any significant changes.  The only real difference is that this time around an ATB meter is present, to show you when your turn has come up.  The enemy’s bar is kept hidden, which is probably for the best, since two sets of ATB bars on the screen might be a little confusing for some players.

What struck me in the opening was that it was as close to a movie-style opening as I’d seen in a video game created up to that point.  Granted, pretty much every Final Fantasy to come after it would blow it out of the water (quite literally, with Final Fantasy X), but the combination of music and graphics in the beginning of V was amazing enough for me to consider it one of the best openings out of any game on the SNES.  Not only that, but the graphics in the game would continue to impress me, despite being not too much of an upgrade over IV’s graphics.  As for music, I loved some of the songs much better than the songs in IV, and some… not so much.  But the opening song and Dear Friends are some of my favourite Final Fantasy songs of all time.  Still, the music is a mixed bag.

The story itself relies on the old trope of a sealed away evil that must be stopped for good this time, because the seals keeping him at bay are breaking and sealing him away probably won’t work again this time.  As such, each of four crystals have begun to shatter.  Given that crystals have been present in the series from the very start, it’s like the developers themselves wanted to be free of the crystals, so in this game, they shattered them completely in a kind of symbolic gesture.  Anyway, the game follows sort of a linear story, but there are parts where you have to explore and find the next piece of story, kind of like in II and III.  Myself, I prefer both linear stories and worlds to explore, so it doesn’t matter which kind of game it is, but your own mileage may vary.

Unlike in IV, playable characters don’t come and go as they please.  In fact, there is only one roster change in the entire game, and it centers around a character sacrifice and death that easily outdoes Aeris’s in VII.  There has, in this series, only been one character who has managed to remain in battle after being reduced to 0 HP, and you meet them in this game.

I’ve probably played this the least out of all
the games in the series, and this is a shame, for it is one of the better ones (however, I say that about most of them, save for II).  I think I beat it only twice so far.  But anyway, it was at this point that the developers began to show that they were willing to push the envelope and take their games in directions that had never been seen before.

(Oh, and as a side note: I can’t think of a single princess that gets kidnapped in this game.  I wonder if Butz would’ve been a bad enough dude to rescue her.)

Other releases:
PlayStation – Final Fantasy V, 1998; Final Fantasy Collection (with Final Fantasy IV & Final Fantasy VI), 1999; Final Fantasy Anthology (with Final Fantasy VI), 1999
Game Boy Advance – Final Fantasy V Advance, 2006

To be continued…
Note: screen shots are from a fan translated version of the SNES release