Beaten: Jan 27 2021
Time: 24 Hours
Platform: Mac
Final Fantasy V is a game I’m of two minds about. On the one, it feels like an attempt to marry the massively complex job system of Final Fantasy III with the fleshed out storytelling and characters of IV, a kind of meet in the middle moment. As that, it’s pretty great! The job system feels much better (imo) here, significantly more flexible and fun than it was in III, and the storyline flows nicely. It’s got a brighter tone overall than the fantastically dour, Shakespearean IV and the downright apocalyptic VI, but still pockets some rather affecting character beats and some like, actually funny jokes? Actually nuts. That being said, it also carries with it some of my least favorite aspects of III, as another in the line of Extremely Technical FF games. There’s a couple ways that this comes into play that kind of annoyed me, like a mild glut of enemies and bosses that revive other enemies as they die, thus requiring you to beat all of them at the same time. The back end of the game is filled with bosses that require certain strategies like this, and while no one in particular really got on my nerves (until SPOILERS twintania END SPOILERS), the boss design as a whole did grate on me a bit. The job system here really lends itself to design like that I’d say, for better or for worse. There’s no punishment, even trivial, for switching up your jobs and strategies on the fly. In this remaster, you can even save right before bossfights, so if one strategy doesn’t work out you can just switch up and try another. You can potentially create whatever job combinations you want! For a wide stretch of the game I even had a ninja holding two lances! Because that’s what you think of when you think ninja, right?
This system is really just asking to be split wide open. Want to be able to chain 8 fire-infused sword attacks per turn? Go for it. The only blocker to that is grinding up your jobs until you’ve unlocked all their abilities, but by the time where you really need all those abilities, grinding for job points is fairly quick. My thing is that I’m just not a huge fan of these kinds of systems. Not only is it asking to be split open, you kind of need to to get through the final portion of the game without losing your mind. Or at least I did. It’s cool, and the possibilities really do seem endless, but I’ll always prefer systems like IV or VI or VII use, which have flexibility in some areas but don’t require that level of breaking the combat system, or at least not to the same extent. It’s still good and fun, it’s just not quite my thing. That only became an issue for me in the last third of the game though. Before that, it was nice and breezy, and I was flying along with the story, using whatever cool job combinations felt nice to me. The story does some cool things with memory and parallelism too, which feels really nice bouncing off characters like Bartz and Faris and Galuf, who are just massive wells of energy and charisma. Lenna and Krile are cool as well, they’re just a bit more reserved, comparatively (they also get some really awesome stuff with that parallelism and kind of form the thematic backbone of the game? big big fan). Honestly, at the end of it, I’m just a bit deflated. I can’t by rights call it a bad game, or an unfun game, because I had loads of fun with it and I think it’s brimming with about as much cool stuff as they could fit into it, but I dunno. I’m not sure how it’ll last in my memory, especially compared to its siblings. It’s definitely cool though.
Time: 24 Hours
Platform: Mac
Final Fantasy V is a game I’m of two minds about. On the one, it feels like an attempt to marry the massively complex job system of Final Fantasy III with the fleshed out storytelling and characters of IV, a kind of meet in the middle moment. As that, it’s pretty great! The job system feels much better (imo) here, significantly more flexible and fun than it was in III, and the storyline flows nicely. It’s got a brighter tone overall than the fantastically dour, Shakespearean IV and the downright apocalyptic VI, but still pockets some rather affecting character beats and some like, actually funny jokes? Actually nuts. That being said, it also carries with it some of my least favorite aspects of III, as another in the line of Extremely Technical FF games. There’s a couple ways that this comes into play that kind of annoyed me, like a mild glut of enemies and bosses that revive other enemies as they die, thus requiring you to beat all of them at the same time. The back end of the game is filled with bosses that require certain strategies like this, and while no one in particular really got on my nerves (until SPOILERS twintania END SPOILERS), the boss design as a whole did grate on me a bit. The job system here really lends itself to design like that I’d say, for better or for worse. There’s no punishment, even trivial, for switching up your jobs and strategies on the fly. In this remaster, you can even save right before bossfights, so if one strategy doesn’t work out you can just switch up and try another. You can potentially create whatever job combinations you want! For a wide stretch of the game I even had a ninja holding two lances! Because that’s what you think of when you think ninja, right?
This system is really just asking to be split wide open. Want to be able to chain 8 fire-infused sword attacks per turn? Go for it. The only blocker to that is grinding up your jobs until you’ve unlocked all their abilities, but by the time where you really need all those abilities, grinding for job points is fairly quick. My thing is that I’m just not a huge fan of these kinds of systems. Not only is it asking to be split open, you kind of need to to get through the final portion of the game without losing your mind. Or at least I did. It’s cool, and the possibilities really do seem endless, but I’ll always prefer systems like IV or VI or VII use, which have flexibility in some areas but don’t require that level of breaking the combat system, or at least not to the same extent. It’s still good and fun, it’s just not quite my thing. That only became an issue for me in the last third of the game though. Before that, it was nice and breezy, and I was flying along with the story, using whatever cool job combinations felt nice to me. The story does some cool things with memory and parallelism too, which feels really nice bouncing off characters like Bartz and Faris and Galuf, who are just massive wells of energy and charisma. Lenna and Krile are cool as well, they’re just a bit more reserved, comparatively (they also get some really awesome stuff with that parallelism and kind of form the thematic backbone of the game? big big fan). Honestly, at the end of it, I’m just a bit deflated. I can’t by rights call it a bad game, or an unfun game, because I had loads of fun with it and I think it’s brimming with about as much cool stuff as they could fit into it, but I dunno. I’m not sure how it’ll last in my memory, especially compared to its siblings. It’s definitely cool though.