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.)