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…