FFV was good, I liked my time with it
The job system feels like the perfect upgrade from IIIs system and I love the feeling and design of each job, really it's major draw.
But it's the least interested I've been in a FF game so far. The story, the characters, the main antagonist are all good and all shine in their own ways (Gilgamesh the GOAT). And it has a lot of interesting ideas and saving graces. But nothing really gripped me.
Who knows, maybe on a repeat playthrough I'll enjoy it more, but for now it's the FF I've found least engaging and least fun

Final Fantasy games, objectively, are really well done, at least from the fourth-generation games, as I didn't play any newer iterations yet. But let me start of this review by saying that I realize that 3 to 5 so far have not been for me. On the one hand, I think it has a lot to do with how the game has clearly a younger audience in mind, especially in its story presentation, so perhaps I would have fallen in love with the franchise like so many others, if I had played these games at a young age myself. On the other hand, young me was more interested in sports, fighting and platforming games, so I probably wouldn't have.

But having said this, if you are one of those who loves Super Famicom Final Fantasy games, I'm hoping you understand that I think fundamentally, Final Fantasy games are good, I just didn't gell with them yet. Final Fantasy IV I actually did beat, but both 3 and 5 I didn't, so let me go over why in this review.

As with IV, there are pre-named characters in this game's story and there clearly is a lot more attention being paid to it since IV then before. The production values are also off the charts here, and the game has added some QoL features to make life much easier than in III, which was the last game that had the well-known 'job system'. In this game, the job system is actually well explained and you quickly get a grasp of how it works. Many other features of this game are explained as well, making it less important to constantly look up a guide or the game's manual to figure stuff out.

The job system is something I want to quickly talk about here, as I finally understand why people rave about it. In III, I thought the job system was really lackluster and more of a gimmick forced on me than something I enjoyed using, while in V, it's really good. It's actually wild how many options it gives you to customize and mix&match your characters it gives you. From what I've seen, it only gets deeper the further you are in the game.

While that is great, to me it only affected my enjoyment of the game so much, as the gameplay itself is the same as in FF III, meaning it still uses constant random encounters that mostly either are too easy or too hard, though mainly the former, it still asks you to grind, and I don't want to know how much you need to grind for the final few dungeons, it still has a few enemy attacks that just make the gameplay straight up not fun for me (more on that in second) and it still uses the ATB system, which I'm not a fan of.

In terms of enemy attacks, the one in FF IV I disliked the most was the one that allowed your enemies to literally one-hit kill you regardless of your HP or whether you are guarding or not. I don't remember the name, but I found that to be a non-sensical thing, especially because it worked pretty much all the time.

In FF V, the thing that annoyed me the most was the "sap" skill that some enemies apparently have. From what I gathered, you couldn't even tell whether you were inflicted or not, and there is no telling when it would disappear, and I think no way to remove it, especially since it is easily inflicted on all party members at the same time. What it does is reduce the HP of all party members in a really quick way, which means you need to constantly heal against it until the effect runs out.

This issue gets exacerbated by the ATB system. The ATB system basically means that while this is a turn-based game, the enemies will not just wait out your turn. As their attack meter fully charges, they will just steal a turn, if you wait too long. And "waiting too long" is literally a couple seconds of thinking of what to do. To me, this places it between a true turn-based system and real time combat, both of which I enjoy a lot. The ATB system, I do not. Especially when I got sapped, turning on the proverbial jets to pick the skill I want got really annoying. The first boss that does this that you are fighting also has a bar that charges twice as fast, so as your party's HP is rapidly going down, getting hit is not a great thing to happen. There are only so many revive items I can use. And having to 'hurry' is not something that adds literally anything to combat. I either know what to do but can't do it quickly enough, or I don't know what to do and have to look at my options and strategize, which I can't do in a short amount of time. There is an option to turn the ATB system to "wait", but all this does apparently is have the enemy wait if you go into a specific menu like "Black Magic". Staying in the general command screen still lets the enemies steal a turn.

Finally, I want to go over the story. I played roughly 10 hours, so I got about a third of the way through the game I would imagine. So far, all I have seen about the story clearly tells me that it was written for a young audience. I don't mind this at all, that's most people who would play it at the time, and many people got emotionally connected to the cast with this story. Playing this now however, I can't say I enjoyed it simply because I'm clearly not the target audience. The game's way of endearing you to its characters is through multiple contrived events instead of genuine chemistry built up between the characters through its writing, which is understandable due to the Super Famicom's storage space but again, speaks to the target audience of this game's story.

So overall, again, I think this game is good and I can see why many people would enjoy the job system even today, but I can't say I enjoyed this game personally, both in terms of story and gameplay.

(This is the 82nd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Played a four job fiesta for the first time. This game's amazing on its own but it's pretty impressive how well the mechanics works if you just stick to 4 jobs.

Got Black Mage, White Mage, Summoner and Chemist. Kinda boring, magic heavy team- chemist was interesting though. Had a blast playing through the PlayStation version specifically (it was the first version I played and I enjoy the silly translation) but the slowness of it probably means I won't come back to it.

Couldn't beat Omega or Shinryu with this party, got destroyed way too quickly and grinding or even retrying to get the perfect rng felt way too tedious.

I've tried playing this game three times and I've dropped it all three.

There's nothing that it does that's actively awful, but it just proceeds at such a glacial pace that every time I get sick of it. Not only are the dungeons long but the story is filled with padding upon padding, the last time I quit was at the point that I realized that I was in the middle of a detour through a dungeon to get into another dungeon to solve a quest (that was at best tangentially related to the actual story) so that I could get finally get past a barrier that was preventing me from actually doing what the plot was pointing me towards. So much of this game is just derailing you to do some random errand and I think that gets boring fast.

I feel it’s a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of entry, that is to say it’s mostly improvements but with some caveats. While the job system is excellent, it loses the ludonarrative advantage of fixed jobs that 4 capitalised on, and I never felt that anything in this game reached the holistically great moment that was Cecil’s arc from Dark Knight to Paladin in 4. I think it’s unsurprising that, in a series increasingly concerned with narrative, 4 ended up being the blueprint for most of the series in this regard. On the bright side, the return to free job-switching is much better than 3. With 3, it often felt quite gimmicky; you have a section where you get miniaturised and have your physical attacks rendered useless, which invariably must be solved by changing all 4 party members to magic users, and when it was over you just changed back to your regular team. In 5, however, encounters have a more flexible range of solutions, and progression is much more easily tracked. Not only does dabbling in a variety of jobs have a much better reward, thanks to the ingenious decision to allow job abilities to be freely transferred, the way that mastered jobs carry all of their stats and abilities over to the non-job/mimic allows for a long-term planning that makes this kind of system sing. I’ve long subscribed to the idea that the secret to successfully designing strategic gameplay lies in integrating and creating a tension between short and long-term decision-making, and with jobs, not only do you have to consider your composition with regards to the current boss or dungeon, you have to consider how the investments you make affect your final composition. The replayability this gives is excellent too. In terms of gameplay though, I’m still not a fan of how the late/endgame plays out in these early FFs, where it feels like in order to provide a challenge for the player who now has a very strong arsenal of abilities, they just start spamming insta-kill moves or status effects at you, which is by far the biggest source of frustration.

Narrative is definitely a step back for me. I can’t tell if this is solely explained by the aforementioned lack of characterisation that fixed jobs provides, but party members in 4 felt much more meaningfully implicated in the events of the plot; almost everyone in that game had some personal relation to Cecil, and the direction of the plot felt naturally directed by his goals and desires, whereas this feels like a return to the “four randos save the world” plots of 1-3 (Galuf being the weird exception). Exploration and tone have been changed accordingly. 4 had sparingly few moments where you could go out of your way to discover an optional area that you wouldn’t just go to later anyway, whereas here there’s an effort to open up the world much earlier and provide more significant avenues and rewards for exploration, it’s a great change and the added freedom thematically complements the freedom of the job system, but it’s a change that also accompanies a much more meandering tone. 4’s plot was ultimately goofy, I won’t deny that, but it was goofy in this innocent, melodramatic manner that resulted from earnestly trying to take itself seriously and deliver an emotional story. This is purely speculation, but 5 feels like an attempt to bashfully acknowledge how goofy 4 ended up being by playing up that goofiness instead of trying to really isolate and develop what made 4 great. The fact that 6 ultimately ended up doing that is why I think 5 has had (at least in my perception) so many positive reappraisals, it’s not only because it wasn’t localised, but because it feels like a potential style of Final Fantasy that was lost to history in favour of iterations on 4. The story has its moments, mostly comedic, that did make me laugh, and nothing misfired as hard as, for example, the fight against Edge’s parents in 4, but that potential for misfire is what I think is missing - that swinging for the fences of creative spirit set against the glaring hardware limitations and miniature sprite animations is what I think makes early Final Fantasy so captivating to this day. Don’t mistake this for me saying that 5 is “soulless” or some other nonsense - it’s full of soul, it just comes from a different, more whimsical/gameplay-driven place. The music did strike me too. As soon as I finished 4 and started up 5, the improvement in how well-rounded the bass felt instantly hit me, there was definitely a dramatic step-up in the team's handling of the sound chip (though if I’m being totally honest a lot of 4’s melodies still stick with me more strongly!)

I think, despite all that, I slightly prefer 5 overall - though I go back-and-forth on it. A lot of that is because - if you asked me whether I would rather replay 4 or 5, I would pick 5 in a heartbeat, thanks to that job system. I think the way ABP grinding works in tandem with random encounters actually changes things quite a bit. Both 4 and 5 have very high encounter rates, but whereas in 4 encounters are mostly just a drip feed of experience and a drain on your resources, in 5 they’re also progressing your job, which tips the psychological experience of getting into a random battle ever so slightly over into the positive side. It’s interesting how the subjective enjoyment of a game can rest on such a mental razor’s edge, but I think it’s a testament to how effective integrating different mechanics together really is.

For added context: This is mostly just charting my progress with the series. At the start of the year I had only played 14 (which I have way too many hours in) and 15 (which I played at launch and despised), so I was long overdue to make my way properly through all the games. Needless to say, I’m very excited to play 6 next…

Final Fantasy V is a game I’ve always somewhat struggled to appreciate. It has lots of old-school Final Fantasy trappings in its story and gameplay both, and while this is one of my favorite game series, the early entries were never to my taste. Having finished it, though, I’ve started to really appreciate some of the ways in which it playfully riffs on those classics, even if it still falls short in many key aspects.

I’ve always heard, and until recently believed myself, that Final Fantasy V was one of those “good gameplay, bad story” Final Fantasies, more at home with the likes of X-2 and XIII-2 than VI or VII or IX. From my current perspective, this now strikes me as odd; perhaps it was a result of my expectations going in, but I found myself disappointed with the gameplay and impressed with the story.

While the job system introduces some interesting ideas, and the game certainly has some great highlights in the encounter department, I thought Final Fantasy V’s battle system was mostly still very basic. The ATB system as usual adds a degree of pressure to strategize and menu efficiently, provided you play on Active, but ultimately the strategy in-battle is still very shallow. Like most of its ilk, this game is fairly easily completed by using the strongest attacks available and occasionally healing. Often, the excuse for this lack of depth in battle is that the real depth lies in how you prepare for battles. The prevailing opinion appears to be that FFV is especially strong due to the complexity and room for customization provided by its job system. As such, it is with that job system that I find myself most deeply disappointed.

The job system certainly has some interesting combinations that reward a degree of experimentation. It’s unfortunate, then, that a few especially strong combinations nigh-on invalidate nearly everything else. By equipping your strongest physical party members with dual wield or two-hand and giving them the rapid fire ability from Ranger, they can output enormously more damage than any other possible setup. Furthermore, by giving your magic users dualcast and white magic, they can easily keep the entire party alive while also being able to dish out heavy magic damage using Holy. If you equip a single party member with Blue Magic, they can use Mighty Guard to easily apply the most important buffs to the entire party. This leaves little reason to do anything else at endgame.

Of course, endgame is not the entire game, and those options will not be available from the start. As such, I found the job system entertaining for some time, but as the game rarely provided me a strong incentive to make full use of it, I still found it somewhat lacking. Later bosses eventually started to encourage more sophisticated setups, but in my experience it was too little, too late.

Ultimately, the problem with games that lean heavily on a job system without introducing deeper combat mechanics, and which require significant investment to level any individual job, is that it becomes difficult to test the player on their ability to come up with situation-specific setups without them knowing what they’re going to need in advance. If the player hits a wall where they’re unable to progress without one of a few specific jobs leveled, and they happen to not have any of those jobs leveled, they could potentially be required to spend hours farming AP just to clear one encounter. As such, Final Fantasy V and indeed most games which lean heavily on similar job systems never throw these kinds of obstacles at the player, and in turn they never explore the full potential of their systems.

Another selling point for the gameplay of lots of RPGs of this type is their resource management systems. The philosophy of trying to conserve as much MP and as many consumable items as possible while traversing the overworld and dungeons is in theory a sound one, but FFV, like many of its contemporaries, fails to fully capitalize on this. By awarding plenty of gil and regular opportunities to purchase powerful healing items, it ensured I never felt heavily stressed for resources throughout my playthrough. My MP got somewhat tight during a couple of the dungeons, but unfortunately, those have some problems as well.

Easily the biggest issue with the gameplay of Final Fantasy V is its encounter rate. The random encounters simply are not interesting enough for this many of them to be an engaging challenge, and I found myself equipping the Thief’s “scram” ability and running from encounters very frequently towards the end of the game. A number of the dungeons felt incredibly tedious, drawn-out, and boring, in part as a result of this, and the gameplay experience really started to suffer in the last third of the game as the dungeons became longer and the encounter rate became higher.

All this is to say that I don’t think the job system saves Final Fantasy V from mechanical mediocrity. In a vacuum, its gameplay is scarcely better than that of its “golden-era” cousins on the PS1 or its immediate successor in FFVI. Instead, the saving grace of FFV is its overlooked and underappreciated story, which has some genuinely solid beats that I did not expect to enjoy so much going in.

All of the main cast members are fairly well characterized and have distinctive personalities without being overly one-note, and that in itself is an impressive achievement for an SNES game. FFV does a surprisingly good job of utilizing its mechanics to sell story beats - one dungeon is filled with flowers which poison the entire party when stepped on, and the story beat which caps it off shows one of the party members deliberately stepping over several of them to obtain an herb that will save the life of an innocent creature. It’s a moment that is only as powerful as it is because of the integration of mechanics and storytelling, and there are even more effective examples throughout the game which would constitute heavy spoilers if described in detail.

There is an important moment that occurs roughly two thirds of the way through the game which surprised me in how effectively it was able to deliver its emotional punch. Veterans of the series likely know what I’m referring to, but I recommend playing this game as blind as possible because I think this moment would hit harder if it came as a complete surprise. Even though it was spoiled for me, it instantly skyrocketed my investment in the story, and its ramifications were felt throughout the rest of the game.

Something that really surprised me about FFV’s story was just how funny it was. It’s clearly written in part as a parody of the bare-bones stories of the early games, but it manages not to be self-deprecating, and instead leans into the absurdity of some of its plot elements while providing ample levity through its character interactions. The villains aren’t the most compelling antagonists the series has ever produced, but I found them entertaining enough to hold my interest whenever they were on screen. In particular, a certain recurring secondary antagonist who was introduced in this game quickly became a favorite of mine, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of his appearances.

What really turned me around on the game, though, was the ending sequence - the final dungeon and the final series of bosses. They really impressed me - the encounter rate felt less oppressive, the areas more atmospheric and distinctive, and the bosses more engaging and tense. By the time the credits rolled, I was enjoying myself to a degree that I had only reached while playing some of my favorite Final Fantasy games.

Part of this was thanks to Nobuo Uematsu’s legendary soundtrack, which really kicks into high gear the further you get into the game. Uematsu is easily among my favorite composers, and the Final Fantasy series has consistently my favorite music in any media, which is high praise considering my extensive personal musical background. Final Fantasy V in particular, while not at the top of my personal list, easily rivals some of Uematsu’s most iconic work, and it really cannot be overstated just how much this contributed to my enjoyment of the game.

To address a few stray thoughts, I really enjoyed the overworld of FFV, and the way your ability to explore it progresses over the course of the game. I was initially somewhat bored by the aesthetic, but eventually it started to introduce more distinctive elements that felt a bit less generic. Some of the sidequests in this game are needlessly cryptic or easily missable, and collecting all of the blue magic spells, while satisfying, could occasionally be very frustrating during occasions where a Beastmaster is necessary to force the enemy to cast the relevant spell. I didn’t attempt either of the game’s superbosses, mostly because by the time I was approaching the end of the game, I wasn’t really in a mood to grind out the levels necessary to make them reasonably doable.

In the end, Final Fantasy V was never going to be one of my favorite Final Fantasy games. It’s just not the right aesthetic, and its story and gameplay both ultimately lack the depth required to really make me fall in love with a game. In spite of that, I can finally say that I do enjoy FFV, even if there are a number of entries I enjoy more. For a game that I have historically struggled to love, I think I can settle for liking it.