Final Fantasy V took many elements from III and IV and combined them to create the best gameplay in the series up to this point. The major achievement here was the upgraded job system which not only allowed you to customize your party's abilities like in the third game, but also allowed you to level up individual jobs, earning additional active and passive abilities along the way. Once you mastered a job, you could switch to another one to ultimately mix and match multiple jobs into a myriad combinations that would alter the way you would approach the dungeon crawling and boss fights in the game, and gave the game a level of replayability that few RPGs of the time possessed.

Additionally the Active Time Battle system from IV saw a return here with the addition of the ATB gauge that would allow you to better understand who would be next in line to attack and became of a staple part of the ATB system until it was discontinued entirely many years later.

The visuals are about on par with Final Fantasy IV, and poses the same colorful and well designed sprites the series had come to be known for. Similarly, the soundtrack was another excellent addition to the franchise by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu, introduced a mix of returning tracks with some that would become new classics in their own right.

The story, while the weakest part of the game, wasn't bad by any means, but it felt more pedestrian partially because it was less serious than the moody tale told in IV, and also simply because there wasn't as much character development this go around. Ultimately, the incredibly well designed combat system made up for the slight step back in storytelling to cement this as one of the top 2D Final Fantasy games.