Final Fantasy Retrospective: Final Fantasy V

 

The Prelude

Is Final Fantasy V a satire? Is it parody?

Satire is the use of exaggerated irony in order to criticize and is often applied in the context of politics and human behaviour, while a parody makes fun of a work by imitating the work and deliberately making it look silly.

One of the most famous satirical works is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, an essay whereupon he proposed that poor Irish children could be sold for food like cattle.

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.” -Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Clearly he wasn’t actually advocating that the Irish should allow their children to be sold at the butcher’s shop. In saying such things, he was attempting to shame the kinds of people who showed no kindness towards the poor, as well as shame the British into improving their attitude toward the Irish.

Modern satire often takes the form of sketch comedy, like the Royal Canadian Air Farce, or shows with occasional satirical segments like the Rick Mercer Report. Is Final Fantasy V a satire of RPGs? Maybe. Whatever commentary may exist in the game is far from biting, but you can find points in the game where it might be seen as mocking the behaviour of the main character a bit.

That said, it doesn’t make any kind of grand statement about RPG players, and the game plays itself straight for the most part. Like previous games in the series, something evil is trying to end the world and it’s up to the main characters to defeat this evil. At no point in the game does it stop and ask the player, “Hey, you do realize you’re just some nerd pretending to be a hero, right? You know you probably wouldn’t be able to succeed in saving the world in real life. You’re not the chosen one, you’re just Mark and you work in middle management. You’re not even a real manager, your job is to pretend to be one in order to feel important, and now you’re pretending to be a hero so you don’t have to face the reality of your failed life.”

If it’s not a satire, then is it a parody? Is it making fun of itself rather than the player?

What could it be making fun of, though? When the game came out, the JRPG genre could charitably be considered six years old and of all the early classics in the genre, the majority of them had either not been released yet or belonged to the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy franchises. Final Fantasy V was originally released in Japan on December 6, 1992. Both Lufia & The Fortress of Doom and Breath of Fire wouldn’t be released until 1993, and Chrono Trigger came out in 1995. The only prominent JRPG examples I can think of, off the top of my head, that were released before Final Fantasy V were the original Phantasy Star quartet, the early Fire Emblem games, the first game in the Mother series and Lunar: The Silver Star. I may have forgotten one or two, but I would argue that the JRPG explosion hadn’t happened yet, so there was barely anything to make fun of.

And yet the game seems to try. There’s an abundance of bosses that walk on screen and menace the party with no real preamble, they do their thing, the party defeats them and they are gone. The characters’ emotions are very over-the-top in places, often exaggerated for comedic effect. There’s even a recurring boss fight that doesn’t seem to always take itself seriously.

Is Gilgamesh a parody of recurring bosses? He could be. His theme song sounds like a professional wrestler’s theme and he has some of the most hammy lines that have ever been written for an RPG character. That said, he has a story arc and despite being a joke boss some of the time, he becomes friendly rivals with the party and he even helps them in the final dungeon.

The game could be making fun of the Final Fantasy series itself, considering what happens to the Crystals this time around. It could be making fun of how three of the first four Final Fantasy games plus Mystic Quest all required players to seek out the Crystals, but when they shatter one after another, the game gives players a taste of failure in order to make them more determined to succeed at saving the world. The shattering of the Crystals can also be seen as a morality play, we see the folly of overusing their power, and in failing to save them, this is one of the ways in which a good story increases the stakes for its characters.

We also see the death of one of the main characters, but they’re replaced right away by a character of easily comparable skill and who inherits all of the abilities that were unlocked by the original, so could Square have been making fun of Final Fantasy IV and its parade of character sacrifices, or Final Fantasy II and its lethal fourth slot? Maybe. Each time a character “killed” themselves in those games, they were replaced by other characters in order to continue the plot. Yet when the sacrifice happens in this game, it’s treated with much more gravity and respect than before and not with a wink and nod to the audience. If they were going to make fun of Final Fantasy IV, they would’ve introduced another party member and crushed them with a boulder right away. The only reason I even suspect that this could be a self-parody is because the character passes on their abilities to another character so that players don’t lose out on someone they’ve invested time with for the sake of a joke.

So is this game a parody? Is it satire? Maybe one, maybe the other, maybe both. Maybe neither. Hopefully by the end of this article, we’ll have a definitive answer, so won’t you join me on this journey through Final Fantasy V?

Like the second and third games before it, Final Fantasy V was passed over for localization in favour of other games in the series. It’s generally understood by fans that Square decided this game was far too difficult for Americans to appreciate, a sentiment which also led to the fourth game in the series being dumbed down, the so-called “Easytype” version, and to the development of Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. Mystic Quest contained features that were intended to ease players into the difficulty of the genre, although there were places in the game where they perhaps didn’t do enough. There’s only so much a retry system can do when enemies constantly use petrification and confusion spells on a party of two, and using them on a party of one is even worse. Final Fantasy IV changed how the game played by removing various skills the players would otherwise have had access to as well as dummying out items so that it would be easier to keep track of everything. Instead of needing Gold Needles, Echo Screens, Antidote and so on, players only needed a Remedy.

In order to make the fifth game easier, it would’ve required a huge overhaul. Many enemies would’ve needed their stats drastically reduced and their counter attacks removed, and several creative puzzle bosses would’ve been made easier in a similar manner. Characters might’ve also discussed the strategy of many of the fights as they began, like Cecil and Kain did when fighting the Mist Dragon.

This is likely why we got Final Fantasy VI instead, which was retitled Final Fantasy III, and why it took a PlayStation re-release before we were able to finally play the game legally.

I say legally, because although Square would provide its audience with a legally translated version of the game in 1999, fans beat them to the punch by over a year. It’s this 1998 translation that I’ve taken my screen shots from in order to provide illustrations for this article. Plus, I have some unfinished business from 2009 I’d like to do something about.

 

Opening Theme

Final Fantasy V opens with one of my favourite compositions in the entirety of video game history, one which its remakes sadly do not do justice. I don’t know if I can do it justice either, since I never studied music, but I’ll try.

It opens at dawn as a king prepares to investigate an abnormality with the wind. If there’s something wrong, the Wind Shrine should be able to tell him what’s up. As this scene plays out, the soundtrack begins gently, as if even musical instruments have to wake up from sleep. Everything starts nice and calm, teasing players with the main melody of the game, but as the King tells his daughter Lenna about what’s going on, an ominous and uneasy tone begins to creep into the music. As the King flies away on his Hiryuu, it feels like something’s about to go horribly wrong.

A single piano note begins to sound, over and over, like the chime of a bell, as Faris the pirate notices the wind stopping. We briefly meet Galuf for a moment. As the music gradually returns, Lenna worries that something might’ve happened to her father, and as it swells to a crescendo, we witness him arriving at the Shrine just in time to see the Wind Crystal shatter, his fate unknown.

The scene shifts, a pastoral-sounding version of “Four Hearts” begins to play and it really does sound like how I would think waking up after a night of camping should sound like. It’s morning, you’ve slept beneath the stars, perhaps in a tent, and you’re ready for a day of adventuring. Forget “Morning Mood” by Edvard Grieg, this is the music I associate with the dawning of a new day.

“Four Hearts” is basically the leitmotif of Final Fantasy V. It represents adventure and exploration for the sake of it. Bartz isn’t some mercenary that’s going to hire himself out to save the world. He’s not some destined warrior of prophecy. He doesn’t even seem to have any prior training in battle. He comes into the game at level 1. Cecil and Kain came into Final Fantasy IV at level 10.

He also might not actually be Bartz. In the original fan translation, he was given the name Butz and that’s a rather unfortunate name to be carrying around. Giving an accurate translation for names in Japanese can be rather difficult, thanks to how similar L and R sound in Japanese and also how similar U and A sound. As you can imagine, before the official translation of his name was settled upon, there was a bit of variation in how his name could’ve been spelled in English.

When a meteor slams into the world, Bartz and his trusty mount, the chocobo named Boco, clear their campsite and investigate, only to find a pair of goblins carrying away a girl. They attack and are dispatched easily as a means to introduce players to the battle system.

Have you noticed that goblins have been the starting enemy in every Final Fantasy game so far? With the exception of Mystic Quest, the very first enemy you fight in every single game is going to be a goblin. In the first game, there are goblins outside of Cornelia. In the second game, goblins are potentially the first enemies you encounter outside of Altair. In the cave north of Ur at the start of the third game, there’s a goblin infestation. Outside of Baron in the fourth game, there are goblins who are so slow, they’ll never actually hit you during your journey to the Mist Cave. In the fifth game, the very first enemies encountered are a pair of goblins who are trying to kidnap Lenna for potentially questionable reasons. The game never really gets into why they’re carrying her off, but they are and it’s up to the main character to save her.

Once the goblins are vanquished, Bartz can be named and he meets Lenna. She’s on her way to the Wind Shrine to find out what happened to her father. The pair discover an old man who wakes up with amnesia thanks to the blow to the head he took when the meteor landed.

The use of meteors for travel between worlds is one of those off-the-wall types of Final Fantasy ideas that the series is famous for. Why use meteors? Why not? Admittedly, the meteor makes for an interesting land barrier. Now Bartz can’t travel to the castle that’s practically right there in front of him and must take another route.

The old man remembers two things: his name is Galuf and he needs to get to the Wind Shrine for some reason. Naturally, the trio head off to figure out why the wind has stopped.

Just kidding, Bartz decides he doesn’t want to. In a surprise twist, and a first for the series, the main character refuses the call to adventure and instead rides off on his chocobo. Boco is having none of this and after a brief scene between the two of them where Boco practically browbeats Bartz into helping, he rides through a gauntlet of goblins and meets back up with Lenna and Galuf.

In the end, Bartz does decide to accompany them on their journey to save the world. It takes no more than fifteen or so minutes to bring his initially reluctant butz on board, and thus we have three of our four warriors.

 

Pirates Ahoy

At this point, with the meteor blocking the way, there’s only one direction for Bartz and the rest of the party to go. There’s a cave to the north that looks like it might be dangerous, so Tyger protects Boco by leaving him outside while the party explores within.

When the party sees a pirate ship sailing without wind, they decide that they need to commandeer it in order to get to the Wind Shrine. It’s the typical hero entitlement you see in video games, where the main character thinks they can take whatever they want in the name of saving the world. Granted, up until now, main characters have usually had to earn their ships, but since heroes take everything else that isn’t nailed down, this game takes that kind of attitude to its logical conclusion and has Galuf suggest that they steal the ship. It makes me wonder if the game is making fun of RPG treasure hunting tropes.

One of the major differences between the beginning of Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V is that the starting enemies here are faster than they are in the fourth game and actually get some hits in before they die. Presumably, players should be comfortable enough with the Active Time Battle system that they can start in the deep end, so to speak.

If there’s something that Final Fantasy loves, it’s pirates. After a brief hiatus since Final Fantasy II, they make their triumphant return here. They also aren’t stupid, and the party is caught pretty much as soon as they sneak aboard. The captain of the pirates, a man named Faris, has a change of heart when he sees Lenna’s necklace and realizes his is exactly the same. There’s something oddly compelling about this and he decides suddenly to help the party on their mission to go to the Wind Shrine. This is where we find out just how his ship can travel without wind. It’s not thanks to any kind of machinery; Faris has a childhood friend named Syldra who pulls his ship.

Along the way, they can stock up at the nearby town of Tule before setting sail for the Wind Shrine. From there, it’s a fairly simple matter of climbing up a few floors and defeating a boss. This is probably the only time in the game where the developers could balance the game according to what they were absolutely certain players would have at the time.

Unfortunately, when they reach the top floor of the shrine, the party finds the Crystal shattered, and Lenna’s father is nowhere to be found. To their surprise, the Crystal’s shards begin to speak to them and bestow the party with new powers to aid them in the coming battles. They were doing alright with just their basic weapons, but soon those weapons are not going to be enough on their own. Each party member also embodies qualities associated with one of the four elements, although this has no effect on how the game is played.

These new powers consist of one of the staples of the RPG genre, classes (which the Final Fantasy series usually calls “jobs”). The Wind Crystal’s jobs consist of several of the classics that the series is known for, and they’re all quite useful for how early they’re granted to the party:

Knight – Not only can this class wield a sword pretty effectively, it can also guard the party and take hits for those who are near death. It’s essentially a tank class.

Monk – High physical attack, hits twice, plus you don’t have to buy any weapons? Yes, please! The Monk also has very high health, higher than the Knight, and regularly counters when attacked. At this point, this early in the game, the only reason to bring a Knight instead of a second Monk is for party protection, and the only reason not to bring a Monk in the first place is if you’re worried that he’s going to counterattack an enemy you’re trying to steal something from. Speaking of…

Thief – Later games in the series allowed players the option to walk faster from the start, but in this game, dashing is an ability that is only unlocked with the Thief job. Thieves can also steal during battle, and it’s much more successful here than it was in Final Fantasy IV, especially once the right accessory is equipped. They also have the ability to see secret passages that would otherwise be hidden, and those could very well lead to more treasure. There doesn’t seem to be too much of a downside to having a Thief in the party.

White Mage – Healing is important! I don’t think I need to spell out why players should take one of these. This is a skill set that will potentially always be equipped, either with a White Mage in the party or a character with !White equipped.

Black Mage – I main Black Mage in Final Fantasy XIV, so I have a bit of a loyalty to this job. As the character from 8-Bit Theatre once said, this job casts the spells that makes the peoples fall down. Powerful elemental magic is available right away for a cheap amount of MP.

Blue Mage – This is the game where Blue Magic makes its debut. It might be a bit difficult to use if you’re not used to how they work, but Blue Mages learn many powerful enemy attacks, although admittedly some of them have limited utility. The biggest downside, to me, is that if you’re not using a Blue Mage right away, it feels like you shouldn’t bother due to how much backtracking you’ll need to do to fill up the job’s spell list. Still, players who spend time with the Blue Mage are usually satisfied with what they end up with.

Unfortunately, players can only choose four of these, one each for the four warriors. However, jobs level up just like characters do, and each new level brings with it a new ability. Mages gain access to more powerful spells with each new job level, and physical attackers gain new abilities. These abilities can be equipped in a second ability slot, allowing for Thieves to sling fire and ice on enemies, or Knights to heal. Essentially, it makes it possible to play all six jobs at once and see how valuable they all are, or figure out which ones fit your play-style the most.

One of the best changes between the job system of Final Fantasy III and the job system in this game is that players are free to swap around without spending any kind of currency. Capacity is removed entirely from the series going forward, proving just how dumb an idea it was. Another job system change is that every job is viable in nearly every situation. There might be one or two very specialized situations to look out for but for the most part, the party isn’t forced to equip specific jobs to get through specific areas or boss fights. There are no bosses that are specifically weak to something that is only available to one class and buffed against everything else. Many bosses do come with elemental weaknesses, which means certain magic is helpful, but magical elements are available to more than just one class at a time.

At this early stage in the game, though, elements like fire and ice really are only available to the Black Mage, but as has been noted earlier, if a character gains a couple levels of Black Mage and switches to Knight, they can still contribute fire magic against enemies weak to it. Not only that, but enemies weak to fire aren’t automatically strong to physical attacks, especially this early in the game, and that’s a good thing because back in Tule – and by the way, I’m using the fan translation’s names in this article for the most part since that’s the version I played, but the names of major characters will reflect their official translations – the party finds out that there is an enemy in the Torna Canal that was sealed away with the power of the Wind Crystal, but now that the crystal is shattered, it’s out for blood, but only aims at women.

There’s several bits of foreshadowing here if you’re paying attention.

 

 

Deception

Lenna has a friend in Tule who possesses the key to unlock the Torna Canal, but who wasn’t there if they stopped by on their way to the Wind Shrine. This is likely because skipping the Wind Shrine would’ve denied the party their first set of jobs and made things a bit harder for them. At first, Lenna’s friend refuses to hand over the key, wanting to protect the party from the dangers within, but has a change of heart literally overnight.

On the way out of Tule, Faris tells his crew to stay behind and take care of the pirate hideout. From here on in, it’s just the four of them. Faris, Lenna, Galuf and Bartz.

The boss of the canal is unusually strong for so early in the game. It features a “down to 1” type ability, which knocks a character down to single digit HP no matter how much they have, rare for the first hour or so of a game. Final Fantasy V isn’t messing around. Attacking enough times and using Cure spells where appropriate are enough to take it down, especially when using thunder attacks. In revenge, it mortally wounds Syldra before dying to its own injuries. The ship is left to drift until it arrives at the ship graveyard.

The ship graveyard is a very eventful place for the party. It’s where Bartz and the rest of the group learn that Faris is actually a woman pretending to be a man, but up until now, the clues have been piling up. Bartz and Galuf had already broken into her inn room and seen her presumably either in her night clothing or in the nude, we don’t know. The boss of the canal would’ve also attacked Faris, blowing her cover. Faris finally confesses while resting at a convenient camp spot within the ship graveyard, and now I don’t have to force myself to call her a male, which has honestly been incredibly hard for me to type. Muscle memory has been defaulting to using her actual pronouns, but players aren’t supposed to know this fact about her yet. Thankfully, it takes less than two hours to get to this point in the game; a game like Final Fantasy VIII might’ve waited until disc two.

I don’t know if this plot point is supposed to be played straight or if this is a parody of something common in JRPGs, the whole “someone in the party has a secret (and sometimes even they don’t know it)” trope. Given how much of the genre has stayed in Japan, especially back when this game was released, it feels to a North American audience that Final Fantasy V originated a lot of these tropes in games. If there have been several games prior to this one where a party member keeps something about themselves a secret, like they’re an enemy spy or a secret dragon or some other revelation, we never got them. Final Fantasy rarely kept secrets like this from the player until after the fifth game. Terra’s status as a half esper happened in the sixth game, Cait Sith being a member of Shinra happened in the seventh game, Irvine deliberately not telling everyone he knew them when they were young happened in the eighth game, Zidane being an alien from another planet happened in the ninth game, and so on. Cecil being the brother of Golbez in the fourth game counts as a secret, but it seems like it’s far too soon in the series to be parodying that.

The ship graveyard is where players are given access to the world map, although it still requires them to pick up an item available in a somewhat hidden location. Later games would just make the world map available from the start, a welcome quality of life upgrade.

Up until now, Galuf’s amnesia has been played for laughs and one might think it’s a parody of Tellah’s amnesia, but it actually saves everyone’s lives during the boss fight with Siren in the ship graveyard. Siren begins by conjuring illusions that each party member is emotionally attached to and thus entrancing them. Bartz sees his mother and is hypnotized. Lenna finds herself hypnotized by the illusion of her father, the missing king, and perhaps surprisingly, Faris finds herself wrapped in this illusion as well.

Galuf, however, can’t remember the girl who Siren conjures for him. Because of this, he’s able to see what’s happening and slaps some sense into everyone, and the next boss fight begins.

Siren doesn’t have anything that can be stolen, but she drops an armour upgrade, so it’s kind of like getting your next piece of equipment for free. I like free stuff, but there’s so much that can be stolen or found that I won’t comment on all of it. If your favourite piece of stealable (or winnable) loot doesn’t get mentioned in this article, it’s just because there’s so much of it. Thieves are certainly well supported in this game.

Another thing to note is that the ship graveyard is full of the undead, which gives White Mages additional utility in the party, since their basic Cure spell is able to harm them. This is sort of like the first game all over again, with White Mages being given more to do than healing thanks to the types of enemies being fought.

 

 

Music Box

Finally out of the ship graveyard and having made it to land, the bedraggled party eventually stumble across a welcome sight: the town of Carwen, apparently the official home of the Irish jig. It’s actually used in a few more towns in the game, which is great because it’s such a fun tune. Seriously, this is the most upbeat town theme in the entire franchise.

This is also where we, the player, find out about the country of Worus, where the power of the Water Crystal is being used and some of the most painful dialogue in the game happens as Bartz pretends to puzzle out how to get across the sea without a ship. Is this supposed to be a parody of these kinds of “puzzles”?

Worus also prepares us to deal with lizard enemies by telling us they hate the cold and having a free Ice Rod hidden in a box for a Black Mage to equip.

The party learns that a Hiryuu flew to the mountain in the north and Lenna recognizes it as the dragon that belonged to her father, the one he rode away on during the opening scene in the game. Unfortunately, she has reason to believe the Hiryuu injured itself somewhere, so time is short. Her father’s Hiryuu solves the problem of getting to Worus, but only if they hurry.

The North Mountain is home to a plant that can heal the Hiryuu’s wounds but is also covered by plants that poison the entire party if they walk on them and requires everyone to take an Antidote or have the White Magic spell Heal cast on them to cure it.

The soundtrack of the North Mountain is also rock-inspired, with a driving beat that motivates players to move forward.

Having a Thief during the climb is great because they can steal an accessory here that not only protects from blindness but also adds an additional point of defense and magic defense to a character’s stats when equipped. It’s small but welcome at this early stage in the game.

Partway up the mountain, and conveniently right after finding a save point, Lenna discovers her father’s helmet and is shot by a poisoned arrow. Suddenly, part of the mountain collapses, separating Lenna from the rest of the party. A poacher has arrived to claim the Hiryuu as a trophy and attempts to take advantage of an inconveniently timed minor earthquake to kidnap the princess of Tycoon.

When Faris tries to jump across and save Lenna, more of the mountain collapses, but she climbs back up, creates a makeshift bridge and helps Lenna recover. If this scene is meant to be a parody, then it’s making fun of helpless parties in RPGs by showing what capable adventurers should be able to do. Cecil, why are you standing there and letting Golbez’s arm slowly crawl towards the Crystal?! Man, you’re an idiot.

What’s interesting about this boss fight is that she drops a Whip when defeated, but no one can equip that kind of weapon yet. At least it’s a lot better than dropping equipment that the party surpassed twenty hours ago like what sometimes happens during encounters in the Dragon Quest series.

 

 

Spreading Grand Wings

With the Hiryuu saved, it’s time to fly south to try to save the Water Crystal, but not before the rest of the party make fun of Bartz for being afraid of heights. That’s not funny, guys. Phobias might not always seem to make sense, since you might be okay with butterflies but your friend freaks out around them, but everyone has a reason to be afraid of something. Certain spiders are poisonous and harmful and it’s easier to just be afraid of all of them. Snakes can be the same way, you can’t just assume they’re all harmless just because they’re small. If you fall from a great height, you can and often will die. You can drown in water. I could go on, but you get the point. Being afraid makes one hundred percent sense to the person who’s scared and the best thing you can do is to try to understand. It can sometimes be possible to help someone overcome their fears, but that’s not always going to work.

Lenna, Faris, Galuf? The three of you are assholes and no, I’m not sorry for saying this. I can see Lenna not understanding how someone can be afraid of heights since she likely grew up riding Hiryuus. Galuf wouldn’t be afraid of heights either, although at this point he doesn’t remember why, and I guess Faris wouldn’t be afraid, depending on what duties she had on her pirate ship before she became the captain. None of these are excuses for treating Bartz like his fears are unjustified.

Now that the world map is a bit more open thanks to the acquisition of the Hiryuu, the world’s mountains come into play. The Hiryuu can’t fly above them, so the party might as well head to Worus, south of Carwen. That said, Castle Tycoon is now also accessible since the Hiryuu can fly above the crashed meteor.

While staying the night at Castle Tycoon, Lenna reveals to Faris her suspicions that the leader of the pirates is her sister but Faris laughs at the very notion. Are the characters just going to laugh at every serious plot point that comes along?

The castle’s treasure room makes it clear that the party isn’t supposed to show up at the castle until after the Water Crystal since none of the equipment they pick up can be used right now with the exception of the Healing Staff. Or maybe they should show up and take the treasure first so that they have something to wear when they receive their new jobs.

With that in mind, the party heads to Worus. The only other place they can go is the Worus Tower, but they must have permission from the King of Worus before they can actually enter.

There are Time Magic spells available to buy in Worus, as well as the first three summons. Three guesses what jobs the Water Crystal is going to unlock.

Lenna is able to get an audience with the king immediately, but when asked to stop amplifying the power of the Water Crystal, the king refuses. Thanks to the power of the crystal, the kingdom of Worus will remain prosperous and its economy will keep going, so of course he’s reluctant to stop using it.

At the time the game was released, it seemed like the king was being cartoonishly stupid and greedy. No one in their right mind would willingly doom their own kingdom like this in the real world, right? Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. When news broke that politicians were advocating that we reopen the economy as quickly as possible and that they thought we should sacrifice the elderly to the virus in order to maintain the profits of big corporations, suddenly a lot of the selfish stupidity we saw in movies, on television and in video games seemed a lot more realistic.

The king of Worus had heard about the shattering of the Wind Crystal, but just because the Wind Crystal is gone, there’s no way the Water Crystal’s going to shatter. There’s no way our kingdom is going to face hardship! We’re the best kingdom in the world! Why should we stop amplifying the power of the Water Crystal, just because someone claims the world’s climate is changing? Who’s going to cut my hair and do my nails if we shut down the Water Crystal?! I’m young and healthy, there’s no way I’m going to catch the virus, I can go on with my life like nothing’s happening. It doesn’t matter that everyone else is dropping like flies around me. It’s not going to happen to me! You can’t make me wear a mask, I know my rights!

Actually, hold that thought, there’s another meteor coming.

The meteor lands beside the Worus Tower, prompting the king to assemble all the troops to defend their Crystal. Bartz can choose to go to the tower or search around the castle to loot it first. That said, enemies in the basement of the castle are tougher than the party can currently handle, so this may be a castle the party returns to at a later time. There’s also a summon that the party can fight to win hidden in the castle, giving them a fourth in advance of unlocking the Summoner job.

The Wyvern in the tower is great to steal from, as it carries a Mythril Dagger. Thieves will be able to increase their attack power significantly and it’s a slightly stronger weapon than even the RegalCut that Bartz is likely equipped with, if players made him their Knight. It’s not the only equipment that can be acquired the Robin Hood way in this part of the game. Bartz the Knight can also be equipped with the Mythril Sword that Ice Soldiers carry and that’s a significant upgrade for him.

This is the brilliance of Final Fantasy V‘s design. Unlike Final Fantasy III, where the job system acted more like puzzles the player needed to solve, leading to one specific way to progress through the game, Final Fantasy V is designed so every job is and continues to be significant. There’s often a decent piece of gear to be stolen or a Blue Magic spell to be learned, and as players will find out later in the game, the Wind Crystal’s jobs never stop being supported.

When the party arrives at the tower, they find out that a pet Galura that was being kept in the nearby town went berserk after the meteor hit and ran rampage through the tower. Upon reaching the top of the tower, a mysterious warrior is there defending the Crystal. Galura, it turns out, is being controlled by an evil force that intends to destroy the Crystal.

The warrior is no match for Galura, but four warriors take care of this problem easily. The bad news is that the Water Crystal is doomed anyway, due to overuse by the kingdom of Worus. Just as soon as Bartz saves it from the Galura, it shatters. The good news is that this means the Crystal’s shards can deliver new jobs to the party, increasing the scope of the skills available to them. Newly acquired are, in the order that I picked them up:

Time Mage – A master of manipulating the flow of battle, the Time Mage was invented as a direct result of the invention of the Active Time Battle system. With the ability to slow enemies, speed up allies, and perform other similar effects depending on the situation, having a character that can cast time magic would seem to be essential for some of the tougher battles.

Mystic Knight – This job can cast black magic on their own weapon, turning it into a potentially lethal instrument. Imagine fighting something vulnerable to ice and not only having a Black Mage casting Blizzard, but also having a knight wielding an ice elemental weapon. Such a weapon might not be available or might be too weak to make that much of a difference. This is where the Mystic Knight comes in. Suddenly, the strongest weapon currently available to the party, like the Mythril Sword that the Thief just stole, can become an ice elemental weapon and is suddenly hitting for crazy damage.

Berserker – His love for you is like a truck. He also hits like a truck, but the downside is that he can’t be controlled. Essentially, this is the Berserk status in job form. If you need to grind enemies and you don’t have to worry about survival, take a Berserker with you and he’ll automatically hit as soon as his turn is up. It’ll speed up grinding a little bit, but I can’t honestly think of very much else it would help with.

The biggest downside to the Berserker is its inability to be controlled. It’ll attack seemingly at random, so sometimes it’ll hit the enemy in front and deal a decent amount of damage, and sometimes it’ll hit an enemy in the back for a pitiful amount instead.

Red Mage – What’s black and white and red all over? I really get the feeling this joke has been used so many times already when describing the Red Mage, but I don’t care because it fits. The Red Mage casts both White and Black Magic and while it can’t cast them as well as the actual job, the trade off this early in the game is that Red Magic takes up only one command slot where Black and White Magic take up two. This frees up the party a bit more in order to build the perfect team. That said, Red Mages can never cast above level three White or Black Magic, so this is the rare job that does get outclassed by other, better jobs after a while.

In my opinion, they could’ve gotten away with opening up the Red Mage to the fourth and fifth levels of both White and Black Magic so that they could keep up with the other jobs but not completely overshadow either of them. This would allow the Red Mage access to spells like Bio, Fire 3 and Cure 3, but leave the important spells like Life 2 and iconic spells like Holy and Flare to their White and Black Mage counterparts. Players could then be free to choose between Red Magic, White Magic and Black Magic without feeling like the choice is made for them.

Summoner – Remember how Rydia was your favourite character from Final Fantasy IV? Don’t lie, she was totally your favourite character. Along with Mystic Knight and Black Mage, imagine having a Red Mage and Summoner, too. Then imagine fighting Shiva and being able to cast Fire with half the party, slice into her with a fire elemental sword and summon Ifrit. (This is assuming you went and got Ifrit first, then came back.) Shiva will literally melt! At the cost of a bit more MP than a Black Mage would use, Summoners can conjure spirits to aid in battle and those spirits deal significant damage. Next to nothing will be able to stand in their way.

 

 

Fire Ship

The mysterious warrior, with his dying words, pleads with “Sir Galuf” to protect the Fire Crystal, suggesting that he knows who Galuf is, but he passes away before the amnesiac old man can get any answers.

He also blocks the exit. Inconsiderate asshole.

Anyway, there’s one Crystal shard that lands in a spot inaccessible to the party, for now. The game seems to like doing that, teasing the player by making things either too difficult to get through or impossible to achieve right away, in order to get them to come back for things later. Giving players incentive to recheck old areas is something that games have been doing more and more frequently, and while the Dragon Quest series has long made use of such a trope thanks to its habit of including several different kinds of locked doors in each game, Final Fantasy puts its own spin on things with little secrets like the Crystal shard that sinks with the tower.

Yeah, the Worus Tower, thanks to the destruction of the Water Crystal, sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Just when it looks like the party might drown, who should appear to save them but Syldra, Faris’s childhood friend. Syldra unfortunately uses the last of his power to rescue the party and passes away, too weak to keep going. I got to hand it to whoever designed the sound for this game, they managed to come up with a sound effect for Syldra’s voice that actually sounded like a dying… whatever Syldra was. It’s a suitably melancholy moment that players feel deeply.

Back in Worus, the party finds out that a soldier from Karnak, a kingdom far to the west and farther than the Hiryuu can fly thanks to all the mountains getting in the way, was found near the meteor. This is worth investigating, and it turns out that the meteor is somehow connected to another meteor that fell near Karnak. Unfortunately, traveling to Karnak means the party must once again journey on foot, for they lose access to the Hiryuu until they can return to Worus.

Karnak is a kingdom that relies pretty heavily on the overuse of their Fire Crystal and honestly, talking to the people of the kingdom feels like trying to explain climate change to someone who doesn’t want to hear it. The climate deniers will swear up and down that bad things won’t happen, and when bad things start to happen, like wildfire seasons that are worse than anything we have on record and mind-frying heat waves that melt your infrastructure, the climate deniers double down on their denial.

Upon reaching Karnak and likely gaining enough experience on the trip to level up at least once, the party finds out there have been monsters coming out of the meteor and attacking the castle. The random encounters around Karnak are tougher than the ones around Worus, so I don’t know what monsters they claim the meteor is responsible for.

There’s also a wall erected preventing progress beyond Karnak, and it turns out that the selfish Queen built it to prevent anyone from the Ancient Library from going to Karnak and pleading with them to stop using the power of the Fire Crystal. I wonder if the Queen promised the people of Karnak that she would make the Ancient Library pay for the wall.

The weapons and armour are super cheap at Karnak, but before the party can buy any of them, security shows up to arrest them for being suspicious but without proof of wrongdoing.

If the sprites weren’t coloured white, I’d start thinking that these are the first black characters in Final Fantasy history, with how Karnak’s law enforcement treats them.

In the prison cell, the party meets Cid, who tells them that it’s his fault the Crystals are shattering. He invented the technology to amplify them, having been inspired by research conducted at the Ancient Library, and now he feels responsible for the world’s crisis, since the machines he built have been pushing the crystals beyond their limit.

To his credit, Cid realized what was happening and tried to stop their destruction, although he was too late to save the Wind and Water Crystals, and he got thrown in prison trying to interfere with the machine amplifying the Fire Crystal.

His tragic story is a little bit similar to the story of Thomas Midgley Jr. Midgley was trying to solve a problem with gasoline in cars by adding lead to the formula and he did indeed solve the problem he set out to fix, but with the increased amount of lead in the atmosphere, his solution created more problems than it solved. He followed up his invention of leaded gasoline by inventing CFCs, which ultimately led to a gradual destruction of the ozone layer protecting our planet from getting fried by the sun. We were able to reverse the damage to the ozone layer, but there’s nothing like being the man that destroyed the atmosphere twice.

For his final act, Midgley started suffering from polio, so he invented some pulleys and ropes to help him get out of bed easier… and he got tangled in his contraption and strangled to death. Midgley was literally the worst inventor ever.

Cid may be his planet’s Thomas Midgley Jr., and he’ll do anything to make up for it. There’s not much to do while being stuck in the jail cell, but then everything changed when the Fire Crystal a-cracked.

After Cid manages to negotiate a pardon for the party, the player will notice a lot of treasure sitting around, but the chests are guarded, in a way, by open flame. Meanwhile, the tyrant Queen is missing.

If the party heads back to the weapon and armour shops, the crooks running the stores have suddenly raised their prices. Highway robbery, honestly, to wait until warriors show up in town and distract them with trumped up charges and throw them in jail in order to sneakily raise the prices to extract more money from their wallet.

Once equipped with new gear and hopefully with enough money left over to buy a new spell or two, especially since stronger versions of the basic elemental spells are available as well as a stronger Cure spell and a Life spell, the party ventures onto the Steamship docked outside Karnak. The ship’s engine is drinking up the Fire Crystal’s power and Cid hopes that by stopping the ship’s engine, it’ll save the Crystal.

I feel like I need to mention how inspired the game’s dungeons are. For example, the Steamship is home to a couple puzzles, the first of which is a chute puzzle, where the proper chute brings the party closer to the engine but the other chutes allow access to treasure, including items beneficial to the Thief job like the Thief’s Glove, an accessory that boosts the rate of stealing. There’s a save point far enough in the Steamship to restore the MP of the team’s healer right before it runs out. Beyond the save point is a lever puzzle where the party must manipulate the platforms in order to move forward.

Speaking of, it’s possible for a Thief to reach job level four in the Steamship without grinding, which grants the Steal ability to other classes. Unfortunately, the Thief’s Glove is only able to be equipped by a Thief, so other classes won’t be able to benefit from its increased success rate.

It turns out the Queen of Karnak is being controlled like Galura was, and this time the malevolent force is able to communicate its intent. “You people are standing in the way of my revival!” Defeating the living flame boss (which is, of course, very vulnerable to ice elemental attacks) brings the Queen back to her senses. From what she was able to feel, the spirit controlling her seeks darkness. Unfortunately, there’s no time to dwell on this, for the Queen also reveals that it actually isn’t Cid’s fault that the Crystals are shattering. The evil spirit has been working at breaking them, one at a time. What started out as a tale of man’s technological hubris exploiting the planet’s resources for their own short term gain has turned into a supernatural tale of ancient malevolence, and the banding together of four warriors to try to prevent the planet’s destruction.

The party immediately goes from fighting the flames in the Steamship to racing against the clock to escape a castle that is about to explode for no good reason. If this is supposed to be a parody of imminent doom tropes, it ends up having the opposite effect since future games in the Final Fantasy series adopt the ticking clock mechanic and very much play it straight. It’s a literal race against the clock, for if the player takes too long, the game is over and they have retry from their last save.

Prior to the timed sequence, the party meets a “werewolf” in the Fire Crystal’s room, and the wolf knows Galuf! The reunion is cut short because the malevolent being has taken control of another weak-willed person and activates a lever to increase the strain on the Fire Crystal, breaks the lever so it can’t be stopped, then kills the hapless human once he’s no longer useful. The wolf tries his best to hold the mechanisms back, but it’s no use and the Crystal shatters, killing the wolf. Now only the Earth Crystal is left…

The timing of the castle escape is a little tight, given that some players might want to hit all of the treasure chests along the way. The fire that was preventing the looting of the castle is no longer keeping Bartz from approaching the chests, but several of them contain enemy encounters. This is a great sequence for Thieves, since Mage Mashers and extra Elixirs are available to be stolen. Gaia Gear can also be stolen, but it’s a very rare steal and unfortunately, the enemy it’s stolen from is only fought here.

It’s probably also a good idea to not bother trying to equip anything picked up and/or stolen during the escape from Karnak Castle until after successfully getting out, otherwise it’ll eat up time. It should be noted that it’s actually possible to avoid a boss fight here if players kill enemies in the final, scripted fight in a specific order.

Upon escaping the castle, the shards of the Fire Crystal land near the party and grant access to several more jobs:

Mediator – This is how the job was translated by the team of fans who came up with the first English version, but those playing an official translation likely know it as the Beastmaster job. It’s the only job that’s able to equip whips, so the one that the poacher dropped a few hours prior is now useful. The job can also take control of enemies somewhat like how the malevolent spirit is taking control of humans, and can also capture weakened enemies to use in battle later. They have to be weakened enough, though, something the game will often gleefully tell players when the skill fails. On the plus side, this job pairs well with Blue Mages, since some enemy skills by definition usually won’t be cast on the party.

Geomancer – This job has a focus on terrain, and is the only one to equip bells. Unfortunately, it’s harder to control what a Geomancer will do in battle, considering their skills depend fully on where the battle takes place. When the terrain cooperates, it’s great and entire parties can be decimated, but this isn’t always going to work out for the group. Some terrain skills are useless and all of them activate at random, the player has no control over which one gets used. Sometimes a single target attack would work better, but the Geomancer will randomly use one meant for an entire group of enemies, and vice versa.

As if to make up for this, a Geomancer prevents the party from falling into pits and keeps damage tiles from hurting the player. If you remember my least favourite parts of games like Dragon Quest II, then you know how much I dislike pits, so any job that allows me to avoid having to climb back up to the floor I’m trying to explore, over and over again, is a plus in my book.

Ninja – This is a job that can wield two weapons at once without needing to equip anything extra to grant them the ability. Ninjas can also throw weapons and shuriken, dealing a decent amount of damage. Just like how Thieves can prevent back attacks, Ninjas can increase the chance of a pre-emptive attack, further supporting the party in battle.

One thing I haven’t been focusing a lot on is Final Fantasy V‘s actual balance. That’s because this game is a bit unusual in that the developers had to be mindful that there’s a lot of customization available to the player and instead had to balance around an assumption of power at any particular moment, based solely on the player’s assumed level and not on what else they might have unlocked. There are many ways to break this game, ways which didn’t exist in prior games, but the challenges can’t be too difficult or else the only way forward is to look for exploits.

The first five games each have different ways of achieving balance. Due to how Final Fantasy II limited player power, many early boss fights were balanced around players having specific spells that buffed their strength, and players who didn’t have those spells yet and didn’t realize they needed them basically had to keep swinging their weapons, hoping for a critical hit to shave off another sliver of health. Final Fantasy III‘s railroad made it easier to balance boss fights by removing player choice entirely. Final Fantasy IV used its story to strictly control who was in the player’s party and although it was a railroad worthy of the third game, it didn’t feel like it. Cecil and Kain would always be the starting characters, then Cecil would always take Rydia with him into the desert, after which he would always meet up with Tellah, and so on. Characters came and went at the exact same points in the story, which not only prevented having to guess at what characters and jobs were going to be used at any particular moment, it also prevented the player from enjoying the benefits of grinding. Bye bye level 62 Palom and Porom, hello someone else at a much lower level. Cecil was the only consistent party member throughout the game, and he got knocked down to level 1 on Mount Ordeals, so even he didn’t get to benefit from grinding!

Final Fantasy V, owing to how very customizable it is, must have had to be programmed and balanced somewhat blindly. Would players be bringing along a White Mage for healing or would they be using a Red Mage so that they wouldn’t have to give up two slots for Black and White Magic? Would players have a Mystic Knight along in order to take advantage of Ifrit’s elemental weakness? But if Ifrit gets buffed in order to deal with that strategy, a team that doesn’t exploit his elemental weakness would be at a disadvantage. And what about bosses sensitive to wind and water damage? Should they be buffed or nerfed depending on whether or not the party is reasonably expected to have a Blue Mage and/or the appropriate weapon?

I think this must’ve been a reason why there are spots in the game that are far beyond what a player can be reasonably expected to deal with, seemingly at random. The tough chimera that lives in the desert between Karnak and the Ancient Library. A fish that hits like a truck in the outer ocean, likely too difficult to face when players first set sail around the world and are presumably supposed to go to Crescent Island. There’s also the basement of Worus Castle, which contains an enemy that has such strong defense that it’s simply impossible for a level 15 party to even hit it without finding some way to augment their attack power greatly during battle. I don’t think these are balance issues, these are more likely to be tough but optional obstacles thrown in to give players a challenge and test their abilities. If players find them too difficult for now, they can return later to take care of these enemies from a better position of power in order to reap the rewards.

This might also be the design philosophy behind the game’s optional bosses but I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

 

 

Reminiscence

With everything that’s happened so far, it will likely come as a surprise to find out that it’s only been five hours since the start of the game and already three Crystals have shattered. The Earth Crystal must be protected at all costs. Fortunately, the Queen’s wall has been destroyed by the exploding castle, which goes to show that the kingdom should’ve spent its money on education, health care and housing instead. Border walls for political reasons are simply a waste of money.

Since the wall is gone, the party can head to the Ancient Library. Along the way, a very strong chimera enemy can appear in deserts. It could be just the way the game is designed, but it’s also possible the developers are making fun of Final Fantasy II, where much stronger enemies were easily found not far from the starting area and without warning.

The chimeras carry a weapon for Dragoons, but that’s a job that has yet to be unlocked. That, coupled with how strong they are – a chimera can kill a party member that’s only five hours strong in just one hit – clearly indicate that they’re not supposed to be fought this early. They also possess a Blue Magic spell if you’re patient and have the time to reload the game every time the party dies.

Upon arriving at the Ancient Library, it’s as infested with enemies as the castle in Karnak and the Wind Shrine were. Even the bookshelves are not immune, purposely blocking Bartz from progressing. That said, most of the “puzzles” in the game can be solved just by progressing in a somewhat linear fashion, like the lever puzzle in the Steamship. There’s usually only one way forward and getting to the end of that will remove the obstacle preventing Bartz from confronting the boss responsible for all the problems.

Case in point, Ifrit has been sealed away in a book and once he’s found, he’ll force the bookcase to let Bartz through.

Once the bookcase problem is solved, Bartz can seek out Byblos in order to defeat it. Well, actually, he’s trying to find Cid’s grandson Mid and he happens to find Byblos. Mid, meanwhile, wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy reading.

His research has uncovered a means to make the now inoperable Steamship operable again, and between himself and his grandfather Cid, the ship is repaired and Bartz can set sail once again.

While Cid and Mid are repairing the Steamship, Galuf’s memories begin to return and he reveals to the party that he is not from their world. He’s an alien from another planet who has arrived to Bartz’s world in order to prevent an ancient evil from returning, an evil known as Exdeath. He had already sealed the evil force away thirty years prior. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this in regards to a game in the series, but I’d love to play out that adventure, maybe as a prequel.

Galuf has also remembered his granddaughter, Cara…

Okay. At the time this game’s translation patch was released, there were no official English versions of any of these names. Interestingly, the PS1 translation didn’t end up being the official translation going forward, with some of the names being retranslated for the Game Boy Advance. There were some names that the fan translation got right from the start (Lenna on the SNES and GBA as opposed to Reina on the PS1), but it wouldn’t be until the GBA that Square settled upon Krile as the official translation of Galuf’s granddaughter, who was originally translated as Cara by the fans and then initially as Kururu by Square. A version of Krile would eventually show up as a Lalafel in Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward.

In a flashback, much younger versions of the four warriors from thirty years ago, including Galuf, use the power of the four Crystals to seal Exdeath away. It’s possible that simply doing this was enough to doom the Crystals, but it’s much more likely that Exdeath was gradually working at them over the course of thirty years in order to shatter them and completely devastate the world.

Now that Bartz has the ability to sail around the world, he can visit towns like Istory and attempt to fight Ramuh, who easily defeats an approximately level 16 party. Add that to the list. On the plus side, Bartz is now strong enough to grab Shiva from Castle Worus, if he hasn’t already.

If there’s something I find interesting about the game, it’s that teleporting between the Worus and Karnak meteors pans the camera past a forest which gradually loses its stone pillars as Crystals shatter.

Talking to Mid and Cid at the library, Bartz hears about a crescent-shaped island. If Bartz were to check the map, he’d find such an island. Naturally, this sounds like where the player should direct the party next, but when they arrive, an earthquake sinks their ship, trapping them on the island.

On the plus side, there are enemies on the island that carry Silver Bows for Thieves to steal, so a party feeling tricked by Mid and Cid at least have a consolation prize.

The only other thing is to find a black chocobo in the nearby chocobo forest, then fly around. It’s currently the only way off the island.

Not only does catching a black chocobo grant the party the ability to fly around the world with a limited capacity to land (forests only), the chocobo coughs up a couple more shards of Crystal:

Bard – Although they have relatively low stats, Bards can buff the party through song, and debuff the enemy as well. Bards are also the only job that can equip harps.

There’s unfortunately not a lot to say about Bards. I personally find it hard to recommend playing one.

Hunter – Also known as Ranger in official translations, the Hunter equips bows, another weapon exclusive to one job. This is great because of the Silver Bows available in this portion of the game, and also elemental bows that can be purchased. Bows can deal full damage from the back row, something which can come in handy against physically powerful enemies, since this can reduce the damage taken and not reduce the damage dealt.

The nearby village happens to sell weapons for the Hunter and Bard, in case players want to try these jobs out right away. Otherwise, the world tour can continue. The remote town of Jacule is home to some very good weapons and armour, and this is something I really do appreciate about Final Fantasy V‘s iteration of the job system that Final Fantasy III didn’t really have. Jobs from the very first Crystal in this game continue to be supported with weapons and armour long after other jobs have been unlocked, which speaks to the continued viability of jobs like the Knight, Thief and Black Mage. There’s no new job that does exactly what an old job does but better, so players don’t feel the need to ditch old jobs.

This may be intended by the developers as a spot for adventurers to grind and try out their latest acquisitions. In the past, when the going got rough, one of the best ways to get through Final Fantasy games had been through grinding for levels. Final Fantasy II figured out a way around this by limiting how much a player’s stats could grow in any given area of the game, forcing them to move on. Final Fantasy V figured out a way around this by making only HP and MP grow upon each level up. Some damage and healing formulas use the character’s level in their calculations, but for the most part, the only way to gain significant power in the game is by upgrading gear.

Some might feel like this screws players over who might want to try to gain some levels in order to overcome the game’s many dangers or increase their survivability against challenges that might be too tough for them, and yet in a game where the object is to grind out ability points, this is probably the best way to keep players from finding themselves too overpowered.

It’s possible that the abundance of jobs in the game (and it could be argued there’s an overabundance of them, since some can be frustrating to use, and one or two feel exceedingly useless) is to blame for needing to limit how much actual power the player can achieve while grinding for job abilities. It certainly does feel like gaining levels significantly improves an early game’s character’s ability to deal damage, but late in the game, one’s power doesn’t grow substantially enough to notice. A specific summon, for example, seemed to do the same amount of damage for me even after gaining several levels.

Eventually, Bartz returns to the Ancient Library and Cid finds out what happened to the ship. No problem, they say, they’re just going to build another one. I can’t help but wonder if this makes fun of what happened to all the airships in Final Fantasy III. Even in this game, the longevity of ships isn’t guaranteed, given what happened to Faris’s.

 

 

 

The Airship

Cid also reveals that King Tycoon has somehow survived the destruction of the Wind Crystal, so Bartz and party have to go and investigate. I suppose this will give Cid and Mid time to build another airship from scratch.

To the west, Bartz finds a desert he needs to cross, but since King Tycoon was discovered floating above it, the party have to figure out how to navigate the sand. If only Bartz could levitate himself.

Instead of levitation, Cid and Mid offer to disturb the SandWorm that lives in the desert in order to kill it and use its dead body as a bridge.

Recklessly destroying a natural inhabitant of the desert, suggested to be the only one living there, seems a bit too environmentally reckless for my taste but sure, let’s murder it and then disrespect its corpse. To be fair, there aren’t a lot of options and right now Bartz needs to favour speed over ecology, so sacrifices must be made.

At least Bartz isn’t Ryu from Breath of Fire. Ryu is actually a bit of a dick, maybe I’ll tell you all about it sometime.

Across the desert is a ruined city. Along the way, there’s a small desert with more chimera, but at this point, the party is likely to be close to level twenty and if they’ve scoured the world for better gear, chimera should be a lot easier to defeat. Bartz should be able to reach the ruined city without a lot of issue.

Reports that the King of Tycoon has been hanging around the area appear at first glance to be true. Further investigation is prevented when the party falls into a trap, but Faris does finally confront her relationship with Lenna, her sister. One thing I appreciate about roaming the ruined city is that there are no random encounters, and that’s also true of the area beneath the city, presumably ancient ruins from a previous civilization, one which was capable of teleporting between its locations.

Despite the tense sounding, technology-inspired soundtrack of these underground ruins, I always expect there to be random encounters but just like in the city above, these ruins are free from encounters. What does happen is that there’s a scavenger hunt style quest where Bartz finds a lever to pull in order to gain access to treasure. The lever won’t budge and there’s instructions to check some flowers, then he finds further instructions that has him scouring the entire room for the next clue until finally the last clue takes him right back to the lever, which suddenly works now. I don’t really know for sure if this is meant to make fun of treasure hunting or if the developers genuinely thought players would enjoy it.

The save point in these ruins is also a little suspicious and I always expect a boss fight to be lurking nearby. Instead, there’s an airship randomly underground. Cid and Mid also show up for rather questionable plot reasons. You’ll recall that not too long ago, they were going to build another Steamship, but instead they’ve brought the black chocobo back to the forest he was caught in. I don’t know what they thought they were going to do after, since then they wouldn’t have a way off the island except by the very same black chocobo, but it seems to have worked out for them because now they don’t have to create a second Steamship.

Come to think of it, maybe the game actually isn’t a parody or satire. Maybe it’s just a mess.

The airship that may or may not be a parody launches and is dragged down by the spontaneous boss battle I was worried about. It’s over very quickly and if the player wants, there’s a sword that can be stolen, especially if the party went directly to Crescent Island and didn’t already buy the sword in Jacole.

The acquisition of the airship renders the rest of the world accessible now, including Bartz’s hometown of Lix. Various scenes will play out here, helping to establish a bit more of Bartz’s backstory, including a scene which establishes that his father, Dorgan, was an adventurer.

Now that Bartz has access to the airship and can fly over every obstacle, it makes sense to approach the ruined city again to see if the King of Tycoon is waiting there, but as soon as the airship approaches, the city turns into an airship of its own with a sinister colouring and overall mean look to it. With no way to reach it, the party has no choice but to consult with Cid.

It turns out that the city is floating thanks to the magic of the Earth Crystal, and in order to reach the Crystal, Cid modifies the airship.

The ruins are quite a dungeon to navigate, and at this point in the game, players should likely level up a few times just through natural progression, assuming they haven’t already grinded on the surface. The King of Tycoon is being uncharacteristically belligerent and demands the party defeat the guardian of the ruins, upon which he charges ahead to the Earth Crystal.

If you suspect the King of Tycoon is not himself, then you know your gaming tropes. Sure enough, something’s controlling him, but Faris and Lenna refuse to let Bartz fight him. The King forces the issue, but before the battle can begin, a meteor crashes into the ruins!

In an act of desperation, Galuf’s granddaughter Krile has arrived and subdues the King of Tycoon. Her arrival completely restores Galuf’s memory.

However, after only ten hours of gameplay, it’s already too late for the Crystals. Despite their best efforts, the Earth Crystal shatters, and Exdeath is released.

It’s not all bad for the party, despite that Exdeath now directly threatens Galuf’s world. The shattering of the Earth Crystal releases the next four jobs:

Samurai – What makes the Samurai different from the Ninja? Different Asian-inspired weapons, I guess. They can also sometimes deflect attacks like you see Asian warriors do in kung fu movies, even before considering the evasion a shield can impart. The Samurai also carries a move that literally throws money at problems to make them go away, using gil to hurt enemies. This can come in handy near the end of the game when the player accumulates more gil than they can reasonably use. I typically have millions of gil at the end of a Final Fantasy game and I have no other use for it, especially since a lot of it falls into my wallet in the final dungeon, long after the last shop has been patronized. With that in mind, why not toss it at enemies? One of the first times I played this game, I killed the final boss by using three Mimes to mimic Gil Toss and I basically kept throwing money until I ran out. If you want to test your skill, though, try killing the final boss without throwing gil. There are a lot of other ways to do an area of effect attack.

Dragoon – An increasingly iconic job in the series, the Dragoon finally shows up in this game as a shard of the Earth Crystal, whereas it was playable right away in Final Fantasy IV thanks to Kain. Dragoons have their Jump ability, which lets them avoid attacks for a bit like a Bard’s Hide ability, but with the added benefit of dealing roughly two hits worth of damage to an enemy each time. Dragoons also learn an ability that steals HP and MP from an enemy, but this only really has utility for caster jobs or when borrowing a caster ability, and can’t steal MP if there isn’t any available to take.

Dancer – This is another example of the game’s random number generator at its worst. Those who pair Dancer with an ability like !White or !Black and who count on being able to restore MP with the Mystery Waltz are likely going to tear their hair out in frustration when the Dancer randomly uses something like Sword Dance or Tempting Tango instead, then will use Mystery Waltz just after the character swallows a bunch of Ether. The only reason to even level Dancer is because of the ability to equip Ribbons, nothing else. Having a Dancer in the party is like having only three characters available.

Chemist – Do you want an alternate White Mage which handles perhaps a little awkwardly? Do you want an alternate Black Mage which definitely handles very awkwardly? Do you like the magic system from Secret of Evermore? A Chemist is the job for you, then. Free revival is good to have, but figuring out what a Chemist’s Mixes can do for you requires trial and error if you don’t already have a guide pulled up from the Internet. You also need to scroll through all of your items to find what you’re looking for if you haven’t gone to the bother of organizing them, and if you want everyone to benefit from the game’s stat-boosting drinks, everyone needs to have the appropriate ability equipped until late in the game when the Mimic is found.

With the Earth Crystal gone, the ruins explode and crash conveniently right back where they started, and this time the King of Tycoon really does die.

Since Exdeath has returned, Galuf makes the decision to return to his world. It turns out that Exdeath is an evil wizard from Galuf’s world who tried to destroy the Crystals in Bartz’s world thirty years ago. Although Exdeath was sealed away, the evil wizard bided his time and eventually, thirty years later, he has now succeeded in his mission. As a result, Galuf returns with Krile back to his world. As he goes, he insists that Bartz can’t come with him because Galuf’s world is fresh out of meteors to throw and it would be a one way trip.

However, with Exdeath threatening Galuf’s world, Bartz and company have nothing better to do but pass that point of no return. After dealing with a bit of unfinished business, of course. The downside to mopping up the last of the side quests now is that Galuf misses out on the ability points and the party must figure out how to get through with only three members.

Speaking of accomplishing things with one less party member, there’s a boss rush right before leaving Bartz’s world, as if the forces of Exdeath knew what they were planning and were trying to stop them. If side quests are a bit more difficult with one less party member, bosses are doubly so. Hopefully this will be the last time the game takes Galuf away from the player.

 

 

Unknown Lands

Upon arriving in Galuf’s world, the trio find themselves on a deserted island with random encounters against single enemies that only drop one ability point for their jobs and no experience. I’d say that this would be a great place to grind, but the party won’t be getting any stronger, it’s only a single ability point at a time and Galuf would still be missing out. It would be easier to continue the story and let the party get captured.

Having been away from his castle for thirty years, Exdeath tasks his general, Gilgamesh, with guarding Bartz and company and if that name sounds familiar to you, this is the game where he debuted. If you don’t know the significance of Gilgamesh to the Final Fantasy series, this is something I’m looking forward to covering as we progress, as well as revealing the origin of his Greg nickname.

It’s rescue time! Galuf easily defeats Gilgamesh and he frees the party while the general retreats. Upon reaching the Big Bridge meant to connect Exdeath’s castle with the rest of the continent, the wrestler’s theme that I mentioned at the start of this article plays. It’s the iconic Battle on the Big Bridge.

Several scripted battles play out on the bridge including a rematch with Gilgamesh where he pretends he can’t fight the party, then confesses that he’s lying and starts using stronger attacks. Continuing to beat up on him causes him to remember urgent business elsewhere and he flees again.

I can’t wait until I get to Final Fantasy XIV since the Gilgamesh battles are fully voice acted and the man who plays him sounds like he has a lot of fun.

Exdeath puts a barrier up around his castle and the force blasts the party away onto a nearby continent, home of the town of Rugor. There’s some much stronger gear available for purchase as well as the next tier of magic, and the good news for players who have been chomping at the bit to buy new weapons and armour is that they probably won’t have to grind for money.

Something occurred to me as I was playing the game this time around, which I didn’t think about before. The biggest reason why the game likely has a steep experience curve is because of the job grinding players are expected to do. That’s why, after the first ten hours or so, experience received doesn’t seem to increase at the same rate it did in previous games in the series. Most of the times I’ve played the game in the past, my level barely rose above 40, whereas in other games in the series, my level usually reaches between 60 and 80, depending on how thorough I am with treasure hunting. One side effect of the grind for ability points is that players will likely have a lot of money, too. Even with that in mind, the weapons, armour and magic in Rugor should still be affordable before any grinding occurs.

The design philosophy of Final Fantasy V is very much “come back later” since there’s a castle to the south of Rugor that is full of enemies that can easily kill the party at this point in time. It’s also full of legendary weapons meant to power up the game’s various jobs, but players also need to acquire key items before they can take those weapons, so there’s no point in exploring the castle at this time.

As far as I can tell, this design philosophy hasn’t come up again in the main Final Fantasy series. If something is accessible to the player, it’s usually balanced for the party’s current power level. Final Fantasy V just loves to kill unprepared players, I guess.

Bartz and company instead venture past the tempting castle full of treasure and follow the land as it curves around and the lone path available eventually brings them to a forest with a Moogle. Moogles were previously seen in Final Fantasy III, and they’ve returned for the fifth game in the series.

The land between Rugor and the forest reminds me of the land between Mysidia and Mount Ordeals in Final Fantasy IV in that it’s a winding path and yet there aren’t any secret side areas to go to (the castle here isn’t meant to be raided yet) and the path doesn’t fork. It’s just one relatively long journey between points.

The Moogle requires help, and after navigating an underground passage and defeating a physically strong enemy, the Moogle shows the group a way across the desert so that they can avoid fighting the Sand Crawl, a tough enemy with an attack that will reduce the party to single digit HP no matter how much they have, like the early boss fought in Torna Canal, and which also possesses an unfair amount of HP. With all the various spots that unfairly powerful enemies hang out, it’s as if the game is deliberately trying to convey to the player that they’re not powerful at all and that anything can kill them at any time.

Once Bartz and company have reached the Moogle Village, they telepathically convey to Krile’s Moogle that they’ve found her grandfather and with the help of her grandfather’s Hiryuu, the party are returned to Galuf’s castle. There, they find out that the Hiryuu has overextended its strength and is dying.

The good news is that there is some Hiryuu Plant in this world, too, but the bad news is that it can only be found in the Valley of the Hiryuu. No one has ever come back from the Valley of the Hiryuu. Man, if I had a gil for every place I’ve been to that no one has ever come back from, I’d probably be able to equip my party pretty decently.

On the way to the Valley of the Hiryuu, which looks more like a mountain but whatever, Galuf reunites with Kelgar in the village of Kelb. Kelgar happens to be one of the four Warriors of Dawn who sealed away Exdeath and it’s here that Bartz mentions his father’s name to the party for the first time. Galuf and Kelgar can’t believe it, Bartz is the son of their friend Dorgan, another of the Warriors of Dawn! A fourth Warrior named Zeza accompanied them. I really do wish that this adventure we keep hearing about was playable. Final Fantasy V-0, anyone?

In the Valley of the Hiryuu, the Hiryuu Plant has turned into a monster! Of course it has. On the way, the party keeps on being attacked by a Golem which constantly runs away after throwing a single physical attack. Eventually, the party finds themselves in a back attack with the Golem plus two other enemies, but the enemies turn on the Golem and start attacking. If these enemies can be defeated, Golem will be grateful and join the party as a summon.

Golem was one of my favourite summons when I first played this game. Summoning him often meant that physical attacks did absolutely nothing to me. Golem got me through many tough battles.

The fight with the Hiryuu Plant contains a lot of additional enemies that can use debilitating status ailments on the party including a charm status that resets the ATB bar every time it’s used on the party member. This is especially annoying if it happens to the healer over and over and over again. They get hit twice and there goes their turn, then they get hit twice again, keeping them from ever healing the party but taunting the player with their growing ATB bar before the enemies charm and uncharm them again. It becomes player bullying after a while.

After retrieving the Hiryuu Plant, the great sage Guido extends an invitation to the party, for his research – which I’m assuming he’s been doing for years and years – has turned up a potential method for defeating Exdeath once and for all.

Exdeath isn’t a passive enemy, though, and he sinks the island before the party is able to talk to Guido.

The party had attempted to fly over to Guido’s island on the Hiryuu, and although this destination is no longer available, there are plenty of other places to see, even landmarks that are currently unavailable, but as with everything else in the game, these are there for players to check out later.

It can be a little difficult to figure out what to do here. It’s possible to accidentally stumble upon the next plot point without talking to Kelgar in Kelb. One of the four Warriors of Dawn, Zeza, is leading an armada of ships in an attempt to bring down the barrier protecting Exdeath’s castle. It’s possible to just find the ships and attempt to land on them while flying the Hiryuu around looking for adventure.

The party are encouraged to rest once they’ve arrived, but monsters attack and a familiar song plays. One that sounds like a wrestler’s theme. It’s the return of Gilgamesh! Here’s why I don’t think he’s a parody of recurring bosses: the encounter is played extremely straight. He tries to kill the party here and there’s no over-the-top banter this time. We’re introduced to his partner Enkidu and the pair give Bartz and company a real tough time, but with a decent set up with good damage output, Gilgamesh doesn’t stand a chance, even with Enkidu’s White Wind ability. Thanks to its use as soon as he arrives, it telegraphs that he only has 4000 HP.

It turns out that the ships are a decoy and once the monsters are driven off, Zeza reveals to Bartz and company that there’s a submarine they can use to infiltrate the barrier tower from beneath the surface of the sea. It’s up to the party to climb up to the antenna in order to help sabotage the barrier.

The bosses in this game continue to be designed creatively. Atomos is waiting at the top of the tower and tries to prevent the party from destroying the antenna. It will throw comets at the party until one dies and then start sucking the dead party member towards it until it consumes the character, taking them out of the fight. If the party member is revived, it’ll throw more comets until someone else dies. This is a boss fight that must be won by only three party members, and technically within a time limit. Players have to choose which character doesn’t get the ability points for winning.

The good news is that it’s not too difficult to defeat Atomos. The bad news is that it gets too dangerous for Zeza to escape from the engine room of the tower and he sacrifices himself for the good of the world. He knew it was going to happen, too. Can we maybe play a Final Fantasy game without a high death count, please? Fewer character sacrifices, more non-lethal heroics?

At this point, two of the four Warriors of Dawn have died in the pursuit of defeating Exdeath, leaving just Galuf and Kelgar. A depressed Galuf rests for a bit while Faris gets the bright idea of visiting Guido in the submarine, since now they can venture to the cave where it lies beneath the ocean.

The party finally meets Guido and are surprised to see that the wise sage is a turtle. Surprisingly, the cave still has a lot of air in it despite being underwater. Guido is even able to tell the party about his research. Exdeath could not have failed harder if he was trying.

Bartz and company are directed towards the Great Forest of Mua, the birthplace of Exdeath. He was born in the woods five hundred years ago when an evil spirit turned one of the trees into a monster. Exdeath was sealed away in the forest for approximately five centuries, but he finally escaped, so he was sealed away in Bartz’s world for thirty years before he escaped again. Clearly, sealing him away isn’t going to work a third time. It arguably didn’t work the first two times either.

Exdeath seeks an item that rests in the Great Forest of his birth, so Bartz travels there to try to stop him. Since it’s surrounded by mountains, the only way to get there is by surfacing in the nearby lake, and players should hopefully notice the village of Mua, where they can finally buy the third tier of Cure, Fire, Bolt and Ice as well as other high level spells and a varied selection of armour and weapons.

Exdeath is a very pragmatic and intelligent foe. Rather than try to enter the Great Forest, which repels intruders who don’t carry a special key item with them, Exdeath burns the entire forest down! Whether this game is meant as parody or not, Exdeath does not mess around. In hindsight, it seems like this is the best solution when you’re faced with a supernatural problem. There’s an obstacle in my way, mystically guarded by a magical force I can’t hope to power my way through? Let’s see if that obstacle is fireproof!

Exdeath immolating the Great Forest of Mua marks a turning point in the game. Battles begin to offer more ability points on a regular basis, so it’s easy to grind here for a bit. A relatively decent amount of experience points are also obtained here, as well as loot which includes copious amounts of Ether and Hi Potion, greatly helping mage classes.

The way jobs are designed to teach players their skills goes a long way towards encouraging grinding. Admittedly, ability points are very few and far between for the first twenty hours or so of the game, only really being earned from bosses. Ordinary enemies drip feed the party only an ability point or two per battle. Fighting a random encounter that offers several ability points at once is a very good feeling, and generating extra experience and levels is a nice bonus from that.

The first ability a job has to offer usually requires ten to twenty five points in order to learn. Skills like the Thief’s ability to see hidden passages and the White and Black Mages’ ability to cast level one magic only cost ten ability points to learn. Even at one ability point per battle, it doesn’t take a lot of time to learn a level one ability. Eventually, they take longer to learn, like the final Red Mage ability which costs 999 points.

A good way to keep oneself motivated during an abilities grind is to focus on smaller goals. Switch Lenna to a mage, for example, then focus on the fifteen points it takes for her to learn how to summon level one creatures. By then, maybe Bartz is a Knight and is twenty points away from learning how to equip shields. Then Lenna is only 25 points away from learning how to summon level two creatures, a grind which is slightly easier to take than the 45 total points she needs.

By then, everyone’s close to their next level anyway, so you might as well earn that level. Now Faris has just a few points left in order to earn… and so on. It really feels like players are constantly being rewarded while grinding in this game, and with how tough the enemies can be at times, a good grasp of the job system is a must. I do feel like most players who know a thing or two about the Final Fantasy series should still be able to brute force their way through the game, but grinding for more abilities to experiment with doesn’t make the game feel like it’s too easy afterwards.

 

 

Requiem

Just like my avoidance of fighting Garuda in the third game in the series, I know I must stop delaying and face what’s coming next, so after hitting level 40, Bartz and the rest of the party venture inside the Elder Tree. The party accidentally breaks the seal for Exdeath, who gains enough power to destroy them.

Krile can sense something’s wrong, so she arrives to save the day like Rydia did for Cecil. Exdeath proves too powerful and he attempts to destroy her, too.

Faced with losing his granddaughter, Galuf resists the onslaught of Exdeath’s magic and faces him in battle. He again proves too powerful for Galuf and drops his HP down to zero without breaking a sweat.

Galuf keeps fighting.

Exdeath tries another physical attack, maybe also another Fire 3 or Bolt 3, but Galuf still stands.

Now Exdeath beginning to sweat. This isn’t how this fight is supposed to go. You defeat the good guys, monologue for a moment and then go and fulfill your plan. This Galuf, he doesn’t seem to be falling down. He’s already at zero health! There’s practically an obligation to fall down at this point! You can’t take anyone below zero health, can you?

So Exdeath starts throwing out more and more attacks. The ultimate Black Magic, Flare! The ultimate White Magic, Holy! Each do more damage than Galuf’s maximum available health! Meteor, delivering four hits, roughly totaling more than double Galuf’s maximum health!

Galuf is still ignoring the damage being dealt to him and is delivering blow after blow to the villain, who starts getting frustrated. Why isn’t this one man dying?!

Exdeath is soon defeated by Galuf and disappears, but the old man collapses. His granddaughter and his friends gather around him to try to help, but he’s pushed himself too far. It isn’t anger, it isn’t hate, it’s his love for Krile that fuels his desperate attempt to break the limits of battle and of his own endurance. Galuf uses himself up completely to save those he loves the most and with his last breath, he reaffirms the party’s goal to find a way to permanently defeat Exdeath.

And then he dies.

The scene is played so straight and so dramatic with very little sense of irony that if I was leaning towards the game being a parody up until this point, this would likely change my mind completely. There is definitely a lot of goofiness in Final Fantasy V, but Galuf’s death scene is properly dramatic and more worthy of reverence than the deaths that Final Fantasy II‘s characters faced. If it was supposed to be a parody, Galuf would’ve been incredibly dramatic about his impending death and then a Phoenix Down might’ve put him back on his feet and everyone would’ve had a laugh and gone on with their adventure, but that doesn’t happen. Galuf is gone forever.

I want to say his death scene is like Tellah’s too, but Tellah was motivated by hatred and revenge and used a spell that he knew was suicide in order to defeat Golbez, but in the end, Golbez lived, so it felt like a waste. Galuf acted out of love and although he also died as a result of his actions, he died so that others could live. The rest of the party were actually being killed right then and there and if he did nothing, the world would’ve been doomed.

Because players spend twenty hours with him, watch him struggle with his amnesia and eventually learn about his past and who he’s fighting to protect, Galuf’s death is much more meaningful and moving than Tellah’s ever was.

Players have also been building Galuf to be a valuable member of the team, so given how the series has handled death in the past, you’d think that twenty hours of building him up would be lost, right?

Nope. Before any more battles can be fought, Galuf passes on his abilities and equipment to Krile, meaning that twenty or more hours of progress are not gone forever.

At Krile’s suggestion, the party storms Exdeath’s castle. It would appear at first glance that this is the final dungeon and Exdeath is the final boss, especially after Kelgar, the last remaining Dawn Warrior, uses the last of his life energy to dispel the castle’s illusions and reveal it for the hellish building it actually is.

In the process of navigating Exdeath’s long dungeon of a castle, complete with save spots since this is not the Crystal Tower from Final Fantasy III, the party meets up with Gilgamesh again and enjoys a ridiculous duel, until Exdeath gets tired of his antics and banishes him to the void.

The party confronts the villain, who asks the party not to interfere, because he’s using the crystals of Galuf’s world to return the world to what it once was. The party defeats him, but the crystals of Galuf’s world shatter…

 

 

Home, Sweet Home

The overworld theme from Bartz’s world plays as the party finds themselves gazing upon Castle Tycoon. But how could this be? Weren’t they in the final dungeon just a moment ago, trapped forever in Galuf’s world?

The biggest plot twist of Final Fantasy V is that Bartz and Galuf’s worlds are the same world but split in two. A part of Exdeath’s plan, of which he has now succeeded, is to rejoin the two worlds. This has the added benefit of removing some of the natural barriers that prevented exploration in the early portions of the game, as well as the meteors that acted as gatekeepers during the game’s first act.

It also means the story isn’t over, not by a long shot.

Bartz rides around the continent upon his faithful chocobo until he finds a cave, and this begs the question. Way back at the beginning of the game, Bartz didn’t have a lot of places he could go with Boco, but now, he’s able to go a lot further. Does the geography of a video game world change so much from one day to the next and everyone just deals with it? How do people get around if mountains just come and go all the time?

I suppose this explains why the map often changes from one game to the next in a series set in the same world, like Lufia or Breath of Fire, and no one ever talks about it. Dragon Quest went to great lengths to try and deliver a somewhat authentic Alefgard experience in the Erdrick trilogy’s second and third games, but it feels like they’re an exception.

Granted, worldwide reaction to the rejoining varies, but there are some who don’t react at all and that’s strange.

Within the cave, Bartz is surprised to find Guido inside! Guido reveals to him the truth of the world, that a thousand years ago, the two worlds were one. They were split in two in order to seal away a power known as the Void. The world had one set of crystals, and in order to split the world into two, the crystals themselves were split into two. The Void’s power was thrown into the extra-dimensional space between the two worlds.

I never could wrap my mind around how this was supposed to work. Were the two worlds occupying the same space, and if so, did the meteors launch from one world, hop into some kind of a wormhole and emerge on the other side? Was this meant to work like some kind of fourth dimensional tesseract?

If you think this is weird, wait until you hear about Final Fantasy XIV‘s multiverse.

Speaking of weird and silly, Exdeath the Splinter extracts itself painfully from Krile’s finger (she got a splinter a short while ago) and regrows into Exdeath the Evil Wizard so that he can duel Guido and have his evil monologue. He rejoined the worlds so that he can use the power of the Void to swallow everything. As if on cue, a Void opens around Tycoon Castle and swallows it up into nothingness, leaving an empty space behind, a void literally bereft of matter.

Guido and the party are flung away by the power of his duel with Exdeath, and the turtle recognizes the Ancient Library. He’d been searching all over for it, apparently, and only just now found out it had ended up in Bartz’s world after the split. There’s a book there that contains knowledge needed to defeat Exdeath with. If players remember the two books that were apparently only half there, one in each of the worlds, the book has also been rejoined. Apparently it was split in such a manner that the text inside could no longer be read, and it required the rejoining of the worlds before people knew what it said again.

According to the book, twelve legendary weapons were used in a war against the ancient evil Enuo, the original creator of the Void. Enuo was indeed defeated and the weapons sealed away until such time as they’d be needed again. In case of emergency, break glass. Four stone tablets are needed, each of them associated with the four elements.

Unfortunately, when Castle Tycoon is swallowed by the Void, Lenna is swallowed with it, so the party is again down one member. This can potentially bite some players in the butt if they gave her all the mage classes, especially White Mage. Being out of the party for a bit also means she doesn’t get any ability points and will be lagging a little bit behind when the party reunites.

Fortunately, it only takes one dungeon before Lenna is returned to the party. However, her body has been possessed by a malevolent being that Exdeath brought back from another dimension, but once it’s been defeated, Lenna’s back in the party for good. She loses out on only about a couple hundred ability points as well as at least a full level worth of experience, but it could’ve been a lot worse, I imagine.

Speaking of a lot worse, Exdeath starts punching holes in the world with the power of the Void, sucking up entire towns and leaving just empty space behind that not even water can rush in to fill. This is apparently just practice for him!

What I find interesting about the Legendary Weapons side quest is that it is definitely made to be run in a specific order. Four tablets are needed to unseal the weapons, and the first is in a pyramid that can be accessed to the west of the Ancient Library. Clearing the Library unseals Bahamut from a dragon-shaped plot of land and also sends the party’s airship floating across the sea towards them. The airship is then used to fly to the shrine housing the second tablet. Once the second tablet has been acquired, the tower holding the ultimate spells (Holy and Flare) is able to be accessed. Once the two spells have been acquired, the tower disappears and the party is able to regain access to the workshop where Cid and Mid can modify the airship to go underwater. This allows the party the ability to grab the third and fourth tablets.

Being able to go underwater means that the final crystal shard can also be acquired, but requires the party to breathe underwater for seven minutes. What are they, Blitzball players? This is actually a pretty tight deadline, especially since there are still random encounters, but then so was the escape from the exploding castle earlier in the game. Final Fantasy V revels in giving the player challenges that are easy to fail.

The final shard, once acquired, turns out to be:

Mimic – I don’t think any other game has made use of this class before or since, with the exception of Final Fantasy VI. A Mimic is able to copy the last spell or ability used by a party member in battle and this can come in handy by allowing for a chain of Bahamuts to be cast for free. The downside is there’s only one thing to learn, !Mimic, which requires 999 ability points. It feels like every other class has more useful abilities to grab, and for far cheaper.

The rejoined world is full of various side quests that help to power up the party and give them a bit of an edge in the coming battles. The best magic, the best weapons, the best summons, and so on. There’s even a tower that contains scripted encounters every five floors that grant the party 100 ability points each, which goes a long way towards helping to level extra classes.

One of my favourite side quests involves practicing playing piano at various locations in Bartz’s world, then Galuf’s, then the rejoined world, which culminates in him being able to play Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1 at the hidden piano in the town of Mirage, a feat that Bartz is especially proud of.

Eventually, though, the party does have to go confront Exdeath. This is both a good and bad thing about video games. The world is doomed if Bartz doesn’t do something, but there’s always enough time to seek out extra pianos or summons or whatever. Final Fantasy VII is especially guilty of this kind of gameplay and story segregation. Once Sephiroth has summoned Meteor, it feels like there’s this time limit hanging over your head and yet there’s always enough time to go back to the Gold Saucer and try to earn more GP.

I think this is one of the reasons why the Lightning Trilogy wasn’t very well received. Not only did the first two games throw away Final Fantasy’s usual job system for a system which featured a grand total of six roles, the third game went against the grain and made everything subject to a tight deadline which required either a guide or several playthroughs and copious notes in order to do everything and finish the actual story. None of the games featured levels in a traditional sense, which limited how much power the player was able to gather, and if inexperienced players wanted to level a bit in order to generate a bit of a cushion to fall back on if they needed to, they couldn’t.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Final Fantasy XIII is a subject for another time.

 

 

The Final Battle

Translated as the “Cleft of Dimension” by the fans who first enabled western players to be able to play Final Fantasy V in English, the extensive final dungeon makes use of several areas from the game, mashed together and frozen in time. Exdeath is planning on returning everything to a state of nothingness and this is the first step in that process. It is up to Bartz and the rest of the party to work their way through several places they’ve already visited like the village of Mirage and beat many bosses along the way in order to enter the Void and challenge Exdeath on his own turf. This is probably the best place to grind for both experience and ability points if players want to gain a few more levels before taking on the boss. If players are after only ability points, the final area before Exdeath is the best place to do so.

This is also where Final Fantasy introduces optional super bosses. For the first time in the series, a pair of bosses exist whose defeat gives the player a sense of accomplishment and bragging rights, and they’re pretty tough for players who aren’t prepared. Leveling up also does next to nothing to help against them, due to the lack of stat increases mentioned earlier in this article. Defeating the likes of Omega or Shinryu requires an understanding of the game that many casual players won’t have right away, and is generally for veterans to accomplish.

One of the ways in which the game ramps up difficulty is by having the random enemies in the Void automatically counter players. For example, creatures like the K. Behemoth will spam Meteor on the party if the party uses magic on him and a minor physical attack every time he’s attacked physically, and the Iron Giant will counter physical attacks with debilitating moves. Knowing which enemies do and which don’t have counters, and how to fight them, is key to victory this late in the game.

Figuring out the copious number of bosses found in the Cleft of Dimension is another key to victory. For example, a boss like Twintania comes with some nasty surprises, but hopefully by the time this dragon is fought, players will have a lot of jobs and abilities to choose from in order to concoct a winning strategy. Twintania has a Gigaflare attack that deals massive damage and can kill an underprepared or underhealed party. Damage also comes pretty quick and is often spread out over the entire party, meaning players are expected to heal a lot. One of the ways in which I sometimes like to deal with this is to cast Haste2 on the party and Slow on the boss with a Time Mage so that my White Mage can cast Shell on everyone starting with the character with the lowest HP, taking time to heal when necessary, on the assumption that the character with the highest HP will survive a Gigaflare if I’m not fast enough with four Shells. The other two party members are dedicated to dealing as much damage as possible to bring down Twintania quickly. Or I bring a second White Mage to help with healing and Shelling the party in the absence of a Time Mage, but the amount of time I have to shield the party from Gigaflare is tighter.

A walkthrough will, of course, recommend more efficient ways to defeat bosses like this one, and speed runners have their own strategies as well, but half the fun of Final Fantasy V is coming up with your own ways to defeat everything.

Given that Gilgamesh was banished to the Void in the party’s previous encounter with him, it’s inevitable that he’s found hanging out near the end of the massive dungeon. Unfortunately, he’s having a hard time of it, having been driven nearly mad from all the random encounters. But once he recognizes Bartz, he has a chat with the party and finds out there’s a way to escape. In the end, he resolves to meet again as friends.

I feel like, if Gilgamesh is meant to be a parody of recurring bosses in a video game, they didn’t need to put as much work into him as they clearly have. He has a story arc with goals to strive for, and in the end, he becomes friends with Bartz’s party. It’s no wonder he’s such a fan favourite that he makes numerous appearances throughout the series.

He does make one more appearance in the game, at the very end. When the party is fighting the last of the bosses in the Cleft of Dimension before fighting Exdeath, Gilgamesh comes rushing in to help finish off this final enemy. He gives an inspiring speech to each of the party members, whom he has come to see as friends, and sacrifices himself to kill the boss. That said, some players will have a party set up that could easily deal with the boss, so this is basically a scripted event that’s only really there for the story.

Upon approaching Exdeath, he casts more villages into the Void, deliberately choosing places personal to the party, before casting the party themselves into the Void, although they’re rescued by the Warriors of Dawn, whose spirits have lived on perhaps because of the noble sacrifices they’d made in the name of preserving the world.

Exasperated by how many times the party has managed to defy him, Exdeath assumes his true form, that of a demon tree, and attacks.

As a final boss, his first form is actually not that much stronger than any of the other bosses in the void and has less tricks than Twintania, but that’s because he’s saving himself for his second form. Players must decide before going into this battle whether to focus on dealing massive damage during the first round with skills that increase the number of hits made and/or the strength of their attacks, or focus on dealing massive area of effect damage during the second round with powerful magic like the Bahamut summon. There’s a four-hit combo attack whose strength lies in dealing massive damage to single targets, but it tends to hit random targets when there’s more than one to hit, limiting its usefulness. Exdeath’s second form has several spots that can draw fire and take zero damage, and four spots that do take damage. In order to defeat him, only those four spots matter.

Exdeath is also perhaps the only boss that has the potential to completely destroy a party unless they take certain jobs into the battle, namely the “Jobless” job. Jobless party members gain the maximum stats of every job they’ve mastered and can equip any gear. They can also take two abilities with them from any job. This matters because there are three Ribbons readily available in the original version of the game, and Ribbons protect against many status ailments. Exdeath’s second form can cast a debilitating attack that inflicts status effects at random on the party, but characters with Ribbons don’t have to worry about that.

Upon defeat, the Void disappears from the world, restoring everything and everyone that was taken. The Crystals are also restored, thanks to the strength of spirit of the Warriors of Light, thus ensuring that the world will continue to function like it did before. As the end sequence plays out, we learn that it’s been a year since the defeat of Exdeath, and the Warriors of Light still travel the world together in search of adventure.

 

 

Dear Friends/Ending Theme

In a way, the “this must be a parody/satire” argument is a good way to explain away plot holes or other nonsensical elements in a game. Final Fantasy V might not always take itself seriously, but it has its moments of extreme clarity and treats Exdeath as a very immediate and serious threat. It should be noted that demented clowns don’t show up in the series until Final Fantasy VI. Kefka is a much more plausible candidate for being a parody of Final Fantasy villains.

Plus, if you think that Final Fantasy V is nonsensical, you’re about six years and two months early since there are a lot of nonsensical elements to Final Fantasy VIII that are going to make that game such a treat to talk about.

By that I mean that the game was released six years and two months later. It’s certainly not going to take me six years and two months to get around to talking about it.

Throughout the game, I wondered if Final Fantasy V was intended to be parody or satire, but I think in the end, I must conclude that the game isn’t. Instead, it’s intended to be a lighthearted adventure that knows when to focus on the drama and doesn’t quite know when to let up on the comedy but does still strike a decent enough balance between the two. It is probably not a satire of the tropes of the genre and instead uses comedic timing to endear players to the game’s characters and then uses its dramatic moments to drive the story forward and make players want to see what comes next. If Final Fantasy IV showed other games that it’s possible to tell a story in the medium of RPGs, Final Fantasy V showed that it’s possible for its characters to have fun.

 

 

More Retrospective articles coming soon…