Final Fantasy V

released on Dec 06, 1992

Final Fantasy V is a fantasy role-playing video game developed and published by Square in 1992 as a part of the Final Fantasy series. The game first appeared only in Japan on Nintendo's Super Famicom (known internationally as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System). It has been ported with minor differences to Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. An original video animation produced in 1994 called FINAL FANTASY: Legend of the Crystals serves as a sequel to the events depicted in the game. It was released for the PlayStation Network on April 6, 2011, in Japan. An enhanced port of the game, with new high-resolution graphics and a touch-based interface, was released for iPhone and iPad on March 28, 2013, and for Android on September 25, 2013. FINAL FANTASY V has been praised for the freedom of customization that the player has over the characters, achieved through the greatly expanded Job System. Despite being released only in Japan, the Super Famicom version sold more than two million copies. The PlayStation version has earned "Greatest Hits" status, selling more than 350,000 copies.


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More

Peak gameplay, actually surprised me with how much I enjoyed experimenting combining different jobs.

Definitely the weakest of the SNES Final Fantasies, but that's maybe the highest bar for quality in all of video games. I like it more every time I play it though, my latest run on the Pixel Remaster was a real delight. The characters don't feel like they have quite as much personality as 4 or 6, but they're still a fun hang. Grinding AP for jobs is still a bit of a chore, but when you get endgame Freelancers with an insane variety of abilities to mix and match it feels awesome. Great music as always for a SNES RPG, so glad Battle on the Big Bridge became the Gilgamesh theme for the series

Stellar. Beautiful. It's a crime this was never ported to the west in a timely manner. Gilgamesh and Galuf would be cultural staples like Terra or Aerith if this was out on the SNES

And my adventure through the Final Fantasy games on Super Famicom comes to an end with one I've never actually beaten before! Popo gave me a guide to how the job system works, and I got right to work. And 34-ish hours later, I'm done! I didn't do anything absurd like maxing out every job, but I did do all the sidequests to get all the spells and super weapons and such. And also like FFIV, I played through this on my Wii U Virtual Console, so I played it in Japanese and with the benefit of a save state (so I needed to reset properly for deaths and such a lot less, basically).

On a presentation level, FFV falls right between FFIV and FFVI in basically every respect, as one might expect it to. The only slight exception is with music, which I have to put V at the bottom of that list for, as while Clash at Big Bridge is a GREAT song, basically every other song in the game is really forgettable. The environmental and monster graphics look beautiful though, as do the animations.

The combat is a really nice sister experience to FFVI (which is basically just FFIV but better) with its big ol' job system. I personally prefer FFVI more, if only because FFV does a fairly terrible job at actually informing the player about very large swaths of mechanics that the job system contains. Even things as basic as how many levels are in a certain job or what those levels unlock are entirely unmentioned until you just go and unlock them. If you don't have the patience for a LOT of experimentation and grinding, or you aren't willing to use a guide like I did, you are probably going to bounce off of FFV very hard, especially in its 3rd act (exactly like I did when I attempted to play through the PS1 version when I was younger). But I did use a guide for it, and had a lot of fun optimizing my team incrementally as I unlocked more jobs~. A lot of your enjoyment of the combat system in this game will be a lot on how you enjoy experiencing your RPG combat, but as long as you know what you're getting into, you'll probably have a good time. To reiterate, FFV's job system is not a bad system, it's just a very poorly explained one for the level of complexity it actually has.

The story is also a really nice advancement on IV's narrative. Because it can't rely on a character's combat job to do legwork for developing their character (as IV does a lot), V spends a lot more time developing the characters as people via their interactions between each other and with other NPCs, and it's done really well. It's use of overall themes isn't nearly as well done as VI does it (Exdeath is basically Kefka if Kefka had a story presence but no actual characterization), but its uses of comedy and levity break tone far less heavily than VI's do. Aside from some fairly serious issues I have with Faris' character (about whom I'm currently writing an entirely separate essay about), I really enjoyed the characterization methods used in V, and it's fairly easy to see how these translated to how VI would do its storytelling (right down to the final act of the game being far more non-linear with lots of optional side-goodies you're encouraged, but not required, to get).

Verdict: Recommended. This just barely doesn't make a "highly recommended" status because the caveat of being adequately prepared to deal with the job system is SUCH a big one. That withstanding, however, it's a fantastic game, and an excellent parallel experience to FFVI on the Super Famicom. What it does well it does nearly as well as VI, or does an entirely different way to VI such as to make V stand very well on its own as simply a game for a different kind of JRPG fan.

Fantastic job system, but ultimately the game failed to keep me entertain because of weird pacing and imo not so good dungeon design in comparison to IV.

Also, the story and characters is a huge step back from IV. Hell, I even got more entertained by the story of III.

A shame cause the job system is fun (even if grindy if you want to max a few for each characters)

I don't always beat games right away, and that was especially true in middle school, where I managed to hoard all the Final Fantasies on the Google Playstore on my phone, just to end up beating none of them on that platform. Hell, I didn't get close with any of them. However, with that in mind, FFV has been a top 3 Final Fantasy for me ever since I got into this series, and about seven and a half years later, that still tracks.

It all has to do with the game's job system. I don't think Final Fantasy V implemented it the best (See Bravely Default and Bravely Second for my favorite implementation), but Final Fantasy V's job system is truly something special, as well as being extremely revolutionary for the time. The format is genius: letting you level up jobs separate from character level, switch jobs whenever with no drawbacks, and most importantly, get rewarded for leveling jobs by getting new abilities you can use on other jobs. It all clicks together so seamlessly.

However, I will say that there's a few things this edition of the job system does suboptimally. First is how lopsided some jobs feel. For example, the Knight is a very early tank sort of job that across 6 levels gives you some useful passives, a command, and some passives that allow you to equip certain equipment types on jobs you normally would not be able to, and this is on a decent ABP curve too. Berserker, on the other hand, is a job that is a bitch to use because all you can do is attack with no discretion, and it has 2 levels. The first gives you the Berserk passive which is an absolute liability (especially when you can temporarily inflict Berserk later on if you REALLY wanted to), and then the ability to equip axes, a widely absent weapon type, on any job. And these two shitty skills are even less worth your trouble given that they are on an extremely steep curve of 100 and 400 ABP respectively (for context, random encounters will rarely give you above 4 ABP a battle until the endgame). It feels like some jobs are well thought out progression-wise (like the mages having nominally quick progression so you can use your spells elsewhere pretty quickly), and others are very underbaked.

Also I have a pet peeve with how Freelancer/Mime work with other jobs. Each base stat is inherited from the highest one among jobs you have mastered, which is really cool and incentivizes using different jobs. The problem? There are four base stats, and three jobs give you the best results. Seriously! I get archetypally how this job works, but Monk should not have been able to double dip! It's not hard to spread 4 instances of a highest stat across 4 jobs, and they messed it up! It's not the end of the world, but it really bugs me.

Outside of my gripes and the job system, FFV is a lighthearted game with a story that pushes zero envelopes. It is true comfort food with a heart of gold, and I enjoy that. The spritework is absolutely amazing, being the first Square game imo to really look like a SFC/SNES game instead of a more colorful NES game. Also the music is good, not really my cup of tea and heavily carried by Battle on the Big Bridge (a song that I'm constantly conflicted on if I love it or if it's really overrated), but still good. The star of the show here really is the job system.

For all that, I'd give this game a solid 9/10

Also, whoever thinks Shinryu is a harder superboss than Omega is actually delusional.