FINAL FANTASY V

From the 2D pantheon of Final Fantasy games, FFV might have the oddest place, along with FF III, it looks like it is kind of forgotten. Often you heard how FF IV or FF VI are classics, how FF I has a special place for being the first, and how FF II is usually hated, but V seems to be the one that eludes people. Most of what I read were positive things, but they were so little that I entered this entry knowing nothing, and I’m glad that it was this way, as it made my experience more filled with twists. I can’t say that it was a perfect experience, yet it was a fulfilling one nonetheless.


Sealed Away

The core of Final Fantasy V is its job system that has evolved in some way from the job system on FF III. You start as a Bare or Freelance class and each time you make significant progress within the story, you’ll be awarded a new set of jobs to choose from. These jobs range from a variety of melee and magical jobs with some hybrids like the Red Mage or Geomancer, each job can only equip specific types of equipment that significantly alter their stats and make them more proficient with their skills: a Black Mage will heal more than a Knight because of their job stats, to give an example. Each job can be leveled up and their levels vary from job to job, as well the points needed to level up each level, for instance, a job like a Geomancer will only take 3 levels and 175 ABP points (the job system unique exp currency) to master, and on the contrary, a Knight will take 6 levels and 690 ABP points to master, so in a way, some jobs will be more useful than others. The beauty of this job system, however, is its skill mixing potential, once a character level up a job it will be awarded a new skill of that particular class, and now will be available to equip it with another job, so you can have healing Ninjas and summoning Thieves if you want to. Trying to make the most efficient killing machines within my party was a lot of fun, it reminded me a lot of my time with the Final Fantasy Tactics games, and is easy to see where they took their inspiration from.

The only downside of this system is when changing jobs and skills, each time you change any of them your equipment set up will be also changed to “the optimum” according to the game selection, and more often than not it will choose a set that you’ll likely change. In my case, I used the white mage skill a lot, but each time I wanted to heal a character (off battle) a tedious process of selecting things through menus needed to be done, to finish with your equipment all wrong. The sentiment of “I’m doing a chore each time I heal” never left, and I never get used to it till the end, so be prepared. Also, unless you consult a guide on what each job rewards you, you’ll be getting “random” skills.

On the other hand, you also level up your character’s base levels that in turn increase their base stats. These two separate systems have their own points and depending on the enemy you’ll get a certain amount of each one, they are more or less balanced and to beat this game you don’t need to do much grinding or any grinding at all. True to the past entry, Final Fantasy V uses the ATB (Active Time Battle) system, which I like for the most part, my only issue is that some of the inputs felt a little laggy and in situations where speed is required it’s easy to mess up and choose a wrong command. This can be tweaked a little in the options where you can select the speed of the battle or the typical Active and Wait mode (on which if you choose Wait mode, time will stop when navigating through magic spells and items), nevertheless, is more a nitpick than an actual problem.

Aside from the normal battles, the more interesting ones might be the boss ones. For the first half of the game, these boss battles are pretty basic, where you need to take care of them and not die, but after you hit a certain point, the battles start to get trickier and challenging. Overall they are good and there are a lot, so it has a sense of reward and anticipation to them, but aside from a few you’ll most likely beat them on your first and second try, however, the harder ones were a lot of fun, these make me reconsider my strategy and approach them from another angle, and because of the job system, it just meant to change a couple of skills and be more offensive or defensive according to the battle to finally complete it, and make victory the more rewarding.

It is kind of ambiguous and hidden, but it contains a multiplayer mode where it seems that a 2nd player can control other party members in battle. It might look like a small feat, and in a way it is, but still, I totally could play this game with another person, even when it is just in battles. Sadly I couldn’t try it but it is nice to know it is there.


Four Hearts

Storywise, it has the classic approach of good versus evil. Final Fantasy IV presented a great story filled with nice twists and amazing characters, but because of the larger pool of characters, sometimes felt a little sidetracked. Final Fantasy V doesn’t delve into the darker themes of the past game, neither have a complex story of politics and conquest, it is more a mix of the things that worked in the past games, and lands into a safe middle ground: not as simple as the first game but not as dense as the fourth.

It focuses mainly on 4 characters: Bartz, Reina (Lenna), Galuf, and Faris, on their adventure to save the crystals from being destroyed and uncover the mystery of Galuf’s amnesia while meteorites are crashing on the planet. The start can be quite bland, as aforementioned, it goes by the classic formula and can be somewhat uninteresting, but once it takes its road it keeps building slowly but truly with a sense of expectation and it keeps getting better and better. The same happened with our main cast, at first, I didn’t prefer any of them but before I knew it, these 4 characters became people in front of me, and in the next moment, I was rooting with them for their struggles and their dreams. The game makes an excellent job of showing us optional (I think) cutscenes where their true selves and insecurities emerge to the surface and get to know them better, some of these scenes are incredibly done and have transitions that have film editing quality to them, they’re rudimentary but they convey a lot and that’s what it counts. Thanks to these scenes we get to understand why are they like they are, why Faris is that though? Why does Bartz long for adventure? The game is not as dark as FF IV but I love how it tackles its darkest tones more subtly. If the overall theme of FF IV was redemption, the overall theme here may be hope.

The game is so subtle in its themes that it can be a little hard to notice them, but it also has an anti-industrial-pro-nature message, it is not as direct as in (fast forward to the future) FF VII, but it is there, sum the meteorites plot, among other mechanics and is easy to see how this game could be the baseline for Final Fantasy VII, additionally, it has some saying on gender issues, it is a delicate subject to tackle on and I’m not sure it addresses it the best way possible, but at least they tried and it felt progressive for its time.

The drawback for the story is that the dialogue is way too simple, normally for games of that era, I don’t mind that much their localization, but as the story unfolded and things get more personal and the stakes higher, I have this feeling that maybe the oversimplified dialogue replaced a better written and more beautiful script, I could be wrong as I haven’t researched this topic but one can only wonder if the original script was this lighthearted and silly. Don’t get me wrong though, the game has a hopeful and lighthearted tone overall but sometimes the dialogue can be quite silly for its good. The biggest offender might be Faris, you see, Faris is a pirate, and for that reason, they decided to give him a thick pirate accent, oversimplifying his character in the process, not to mention that it can be quite distracting. From what it seems, this is the only edition of the game he has this artistic choice, so bear in mind that. Something similar happens with the main antagonist, it feels more cartoony than it sounds to be, but I have no proof at all.

What the game do great in terms of merging story with gameplay, however, is its rhythm and progression, Final Fantasy IV took some cues from FF II in this regard and make an incredible experience, yet, FF V might surpass it by some levels. Sometimes you’ll be doing a dungeon, while the next destination could be just a town and an event, or in the next end, it will be a boss rush through many enemies. It never felt repetitive and I was always expectantly to see what will be next, throw side questing into the equation and you’ll get a memorable adventure, my favorite aspect of the side-quests were the summon bosses that you almost casually met in the wild. Also, a commendable thing is that for the first time in the franchise, the last dungeon wasn’t a chore to make. It has some layers that look different but it never felt infinite nor padded like the ones before. If anything, this game has a high rate of random encounters, they’re not the worst you will ever see but they’re high nonetheless.

One of my favorite parts of the story, it is also one of the greatest and most hyper battles in the entire series to this point, and I’m entirely sure it’s because of the music. Also, it reminded me a lot of certain battle sequence of Chrono Trigger so this must be the reference point for that particular part. And in true Final Fantasy fashion, the final battle poses a great challenge, I consider it among the more challenging and rewarding battles of the franchise as it should be, it is also comfortably near a save point and as previously mentioned, you can go in and out through the last dungeon in a more or less fast way to get better equipment or to get stuff sorted out. Speaking of getting better equipment, when you go to armor and weapon shops, items don’t have concrete details (or any detail at all) on what their stats are, so you won’t know if a weapon is stronger than another unless you buy it, normally they are, but some towns can sell older and newer equipment and are easier to get them mixed, so you better make some notes on this regard or consult a guide from time to time.


In Search Of Light

Visually it looks quite similar if not the same as the SNES version or at least to an uneducated eye as mine that’s what I get when watching videos to compare them, I imagine that this would be a matter of taste but in my case, I prefer it to retain the most closer resemblance to the original work, since looking for a way to play it on a SNES would be a little bit expensive. That aside, V has my favorite designs and sprites from the series to this point, enemy sprites are quite detailed and they look gorgeous, it always gets me how little things like eyes are abstracted to the point of being a couple of pixels and they also go the extra mile to convey emotion, it is mind-bending.

Music-wise overall the soundtrack has aged pretty well and is solid, but there are some songs that stand-out above the rest, I’m not the only one to think of this as some of them are used in official arrangement and orchestral albums, I liked a few of them before playing this game, but I discover and fall in love with other ones too. Comparing sound to the original SNES version, the bass sounds a little deeper and other sounds may be different, but the transition is not as jarring, so overall I think that it sounds pretty good.

One thing to note though is that this version has some pretty long loading times, most specifically, the random encounter animation when it starts and ends have way too many seconds long, in the short run it may look harmless but in the long run, those seconds made all the difference as it can make advancing and navigation too tedious, the cherry on top is that the ending animation has this blackout effect as if it was an eye slowly closing, I can’t say for other people but in my case, in some nights when playing I notice that my eyes started mimicking this motion and it made me kind of sleepy, so I wouldn’t recommend that you play this while tired or driving, or not playing anything while driving at all (huehue).


Dear Friends

It is no wonder why this game turned out as great as it is, you just need to have a quick glance at the credits and you’ll see that almost every area has a now revered veteran. Is not only Final Fantasy classic helmers Hironobu Sakaguchi, Nobuo Uematsu, or Yoshinori Kitase. You’ll also find Kingdom Hearts director (and basically the character designer for the modern Final Fantasy games) Tetsuya Nomura, Yasunori Mitsuda from you may know of being the lead composer of Chrono Trigger and the magnificent Xenoblade Chronicles games, and even Hiroshi Takai who has been involved on other Square games that I love and is currently directing Final Fantasy XVI. These names are the ones that stood out for me but I’m sure that there is a lot more talent involved here.

I surely didn’t know what to expect of Final Fantasy V, but after the great game IV turned out to be, my expectations were a little low as V is not that quoted on the medium, I imagine this must be because this game didn’t see Occidental lands after many years have passed since its release, still, I was rewarded with a great experience. Some localization desitions may not aged that good or the challenge may be somewhat dull for some portions of the game, but it is impossible to ignore the charm and heart the developers put into the core of the game, being the story, the mechanics, or little details easy to overlook. Its greatness doesn’t come with a darker story but with the freedom of its systems that lets you bend its rules as the very idea of fantasy does. You fall in love with its characters not because they’re perfect or well-scripted, but because flawed and vulnerable as they are, they felt like human beings, and as any real human being they never lose hope, this reminded me of something my mother used to say, that: Hope is the last thing to die.

The ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ torm of the new Versions of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI continues through the Country. Kotaku didn't let himself be lumped to make his own Article, how miserable the new Versions are. But the more I read into the Articles, the more I notice, every little Detail is actually analyzed. Some People are probably sitting in front of the Screen with a Magnifying glass. The HD reissued versions of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI for the PC are based on the Mobile Variants that appeared some Time ago for iOS and Android Systems. For the PC, the Resolutions have been adjusted again and a fully functional Control via Keyboard and Controller is also possible. Because many have complained the Sprites in the Game would not match the Portraits in the Dialogues, which Also get a simple Answer: The Sprites are based on the Characters "more common Anime Designs while the Portraits on Yoshitaka Amano'S realistic Artworks are based. In this Case, there are Discrepancies, since Amano'S Artwork would never show colorful Hair and are always kept very abstract in principle. In the new Version of Part VI, however, Designs of the Sprites and Portraits coincide, so there should no longer be any unbelieving glances. Despite a New look, the JRPG classic from SNES Had to lose nothing of ITS charm. The Look is sharp and very colorful, The timeless Soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu has been retained and additionally a little optimized in terms of Quality. The Bonus Content of the GBA Version has also been added. Deductions are available for the somewhat unclean Port. The Performance of Final Fantasy V fluctuates. I connected my Laptop to my TV and play with a Resolution from 1900. For The most part it plays absolutely smoothly and without further Glitches, sporadically, however, a small Tearing or the one or the other Ruckler occurs (no matter At which Resolution You play). The grey Edge in the Full Screen is also a Shortcoming and incomprehensible that Square Enix does not seem to be able to fix these Problems. Such small teething Problems do not cloud the Fun of Play, but should not occur. However, you can handle some Tools, or if you play over your home TV, you can easily get rid of these borders if you adjust the Image Format without having to accept any losses from the optical Presentation. Little Conclusion: The Charm of Final Fantasy V has also been preserved in this high-resolution version. I do not share The Smear Campaign against these new Versions, nor should they be taken too seriously. Because if you have a lust for the Original, you'll get your SNES out, their PlayStation (or the Version from the PSN) or THEIR GBA. However, a Price tag of just under 15 Euros is not worth either classic, not even if the Teething problems were fixed. Square Enix has set the Price excetingly too high. So If you can wait, you will get away much cheaper at one of the Steam Sales and can continue to complete your Final Fantasy Saga in his Steam Library at the latest. Because as is already known, a somewhat polished Version of Final Fantasy IX is also on The rise outside the PlayStation For the First time.