(100% achievement run has been done)
TL;DR
One of the best if not the best Final Fantasy gameplay-wise, but it is seriously lacking in terms of story and character depth. Not bad at all although FFV has no unique selling points other than the job system. The port sucks.
The most overlooked Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy V had a hard life. I is legendary for establishing the series, II was so bad in terms of game design that it is probably even worse than XIII, III and IV got 3D-Remakes that fixed a lot of mistakes and VI was released only one year later and has become one of the most beloved titles within the series. And we don‘t need to talk about the later entries, don’t we?
Yet still V has a beloved fan base that rarely claims it‘s the best Final Fantasy, but still being widely beloved.
So lets take a look why Final Fantasy V survived and how it managed to captivate players to this day.
Gameplay
Rarely I start talking about gameplay as the first bullet point, but FFV is by far the most refined one in the whole mainline series. To make it short: There are a lot of jobs with up to 6 unique abilities you get from leveling the job. Every job has one slot for their own unique skill and one additional slot for every already learned skill from another job. In short: There are almost infinite possibilities for combinations and trying new stuff out. And then there is the Freelancer job. It is your first job and has no skill on it’s own, but has two slots and keeps the highest stats you got from other jobs and their passive abilities as soon as you reached the highest job level. Now we reached infinite possibilities.
Nowadays FFV is one of the most replayable FF games as there as many approaches to fights as there are job combinations. Not all of them are equal, but most of them can work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ff5fjf/
This subreddit is dedicated to speedrun the game in an annual charity event and it shows the pure dedication of the community towards this game.
Story
The story is mostly pretty forgettable. There is an evil existence and you want to save the world. While there are some twists, don’t expect anything special except some of the best laughs within the whole series. Gilgamesh gets introduced in this game though and he is my favorite character in all of Final Fantasy. So that is a plus, but also he is the only one with character development.
Music
There are some bangers but the OST is mostly pretty forgettable. But we all know which soundtrack deserves all the praise:
https://youtu.be/dghlAQDQneU
Clash on the Big Bridge is the on track that carries everything and is one of the best tracks in all of gaming. Despite that: Good, but not making an impression.
Visuals
I kinda like them, they are a lot better than FVI and the different costumes for every job are designed with an attention to detail. I enjoyed them, but this seems to be the unpopular opinion.
The enemy sprites hold up pretty well and have only been changed a little. All in all it is alright. Nothing spectacular yet still doing it’s job.
Let’s talk about the port
FFV is another game that has been ported from mobile to PC. And the port is at parts atrocious.
You want to go for 100%? You can scroll through your bestiary 2 entries at a time. The job abilities are not organized by jobs which means even more scrolling. There is no option to have default equipment for a job and changing your tactic for grinding or beating a boss can take up to 2 minutes because of even more scrolling for the right weapon. The grind for EXP can be very annoying and leveling every job becomes tedious pretty fast. In short: the port sucks. The GBA version is not much better, but there should be an improvement from a an almost 10 year old version of a game. I hate the UI with the essence of my being.
Conclusion
A pretty good game in terms of being entertaining and fun to play. Lacks in other departments and has some frustrating parts Square Enix seemingly did not want to fix. The port is one of the worst ones and is only surpassed by FFXIII-2 in terms of incompetence from Square Enix (and maybe Nier: Automata).
Zitat:
author:
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https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31884377-If-It-Is-Insane/
Thanks for reading
