As promised, part one of our thirteen-plus part review of the Final Fantasy series.
So, we wanted to begin with one of the more underrated Final Fantasy titles, Final Fantasy V, in order to build our tolerance for the series early and make adapting to later, "easier" titles that much faster. After playing FFV, I'm pretty glad we spent the time playing all of the Shin Megami Tensei games we did prior, given the game's challenge level as well as its depth of customization and sheer, well, we'll say that a lot of series and games owe a lot of creative debt to this game.
Concerning the story, those who have played any pre-PlayStation Final Fantasy can probably spot most of Final Fantasy's tropes and archetypes from a mile away: your characters are infused with one of the four elements and are charged with the responsibility of maintaining the balance of nature in the world. The ultimate bad guy is an incarnation of a sheer force of evil, somewhat of a destructive and malignant fifth element, There's chocobos, airships, Meteor, Holy, you name it.
Surprisingly, this is not a bad thing.
Final Fantasy as a franchise has always done one thing right, and that's stick to the script. Their theme has always been the potential end of humanity by its own hand, usually due to resource exploitation. Usually this abuse rears its head as the personification of some negative force, who coincidentally is the final boss. Sticking to this motif allows them to reinvent themselves at the nuts-and-bolts level, telling the same story but with different characters, settings and events, hopefully to give us a different perspective on their message. Sometimes this reinvention goes completely sideways. Sometimes it's the story's fault, sometimes it's the battle engine, sometimes it's the levelling.
Final Fantasy V is not one of those games.
If you've played Final Fantasy VI and understand the Espers system, you understand most of the job system in V, but there's some under the hood stuff that's worth reading.
FFV features a job system that gives you your expanded attack, defense, special command, passive ability, and weapon class attributes as a character. You start off as a Freelancer, who can equip any weapon and only has Attack and Item for options. As you progress you unlock new jobs, beginning with Black/White/Blue/Red Mage, Thief, and Knight, all stalwarts from the series' perspective, but eventually you get classes like Ranger and Mime whose influences on your stat development may be minor, but completing their jobs unlocks some of the best attacks in the entire game. At a point the game gets somewhat cheesy, but considering the minimal hand-holding at the beginning and the amount of elbow grease required to unlock some of the better skills, it ends up making the end game extremely satisfying. The cool thing is, once you max a job out, the passive skills (for sake of example, Thieves learn the passive skill Find Passages that makes hidden pathways visible) rub off on you once you pick a neutral job class. Once you get the hang of the delicate nuances of the system, you can build every character precisely the way you want.
The above is squarely the reason I feel many of today's games owe a great debt of inspiration to FFV, including FF Tactics, the Disgaea series and most other Nippon Ichi games, World of Warcraft and its ilk, etc. Beyond the more obvious face-value inspiration, the blown-outness of the game's core mechanics is something we rarely see in games today, and that level of polish is normally the realm of fighting games, open-world adventure titles (which RPGs are, just with more numbers), first-person shooters, you name it.
I have some problems with the game overall, but many of them are relics of their time, and since this port is particularly faithful I must forfeit some of them. However, one sticks out as particularly inexcusable: the final boss of this game takes constant left turns into "so bad it's good" territory, and the game as a serious effort suffers. While certainly not as terrible of a villain as Sephiroth (really, who could be), Exdeath (in this port, sometimes it's translated as Exodus) does his fair share of wiping out hapless innocents and making sure the justice league (that's you) has a lot of personal sacrifice to endure. Let's just say that someone's home town doesn't make it to the end of the game, which if you've been paying attention, is not much of a spoiler when it comes to this series.
If you have a Final Fantasy itch but are (somehow) sick of replaying IV and VI for the seventeenth time (okay, on second thought...), then V's totally worthwhile. We prefer the GBA version for the updated script, the PSX version will play on your PS3 if you have one of those and it's probably like $15 on eBay or Amazon so pick whichever you like. It's up in the higher ranks of our favorite, if not our actual favorite, because while it doesn't bring the freshest of ideas to the house consistently and the villain's story is hilariously bad (but good!), the things it gets right it hits out of the park. The job system is truly revolutionary and is fleshed out to near-perfection, and the integration of the rest of the game's systems into it shows they truly stood by this element of their design. "But E, we play RPGs for story!" Go for it, so do we, and even though it's a story we've heard a few times already, this was a particularly excellent retelling.
-E
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