There was a narrow window for me and jRPGs(I know there is some argument over this term being used to other Japanese RPGs, but as a wRPG hater I only mean this as a term of endearment). From barely being able to parse Final Fantasy 1 by the end of the NES's life, to burning out on jRPGs on Xenogears. I tried to play Final Fantasy IX after that, but by that point I was burnt out and broken.
By the time, Final Fantasy V was available as a part of the PSX Final Fantasy Anthology(Truly wretched versions of the game), I was already cooked. I was interested in the game, I didn't know how burnt out of the genre I was yet, but watching a friend play through the first hour or so... nothing really clicked with me. I never got the Anthology. In fact, I don't think I played another jRPG for at least a decade after. Part of that was missing the PS2 during its prime and focusing more on PC gaming, but it still helped solidify the genre burnout I was feeling. As such I missed Final Fantasy V, and all the context for the series that came with it.
While the effects are fading now, the West, for many decades, had a false history of Final Fantasy. It's easy to draw a clear line between Final Fantasy 1, Final Fantasy 4, and Final Fantasy 6. Labeling the trio as 1 2 and 3 could never make more sense. FF1 introduced the premise, FF2 introduced actual characters, and FF3 took it to a whole other level of complexity and depth, while experimenting with aesthetics and theme. It feels right. The PSX trilogy after it even seemed to reinforce it.
... But it's also wrong. Nothing is linear about the development of Final Fantasy as a series. Characters, dynamic plot beats, and serious story telling come in at 2. 3 introduces a whole crazy job system. 4 discards all of that to focus on a simple, well told story, focusing on one character... and 5 whips things back to the weird zone. I had expected Final Fantasy V to be a clean bridge between 4 and 6. Instead it was the capstone in the arch of classic final fantasies, locking in place a core truth about the series. Final Fantasy has never rested on its laurels.
Final Fantasy is always reinventing and experimenting. Final Fantasy V isn't a bridge between two formative games in my life. It's this whole ass other thing, that kinda rules.
A quick note on Versions. I played the SNES version with the GBA translation and... a sprint hack. Shameful for a purist, I know 😔
I Now Understand Why Final Fantasy V got a Bad Anime Adaptation
I had never known Final Fantasy to be unserious. Jokey at times, but always carrying itself with a sense of prestige. Final Fantasy V... does not. At all. Final Fantasy 1 starts with the rescue of a princess. Final Fantasy 4 starts with war crimes stacked on war cimres. Final Fantasy 6 starts with... well, more war crimes, and one of the most intense, mood setting intro sequences in the entire setting.
Final Fantasy V begins with anime hijinks. A lone chocobo rider, finding an old dude with amnesia. A random princess shows up... now they're in a Pirate Cove, recruiting a very handsome gender bending pirate. The plot does what it needs to move things forward, concern for contrivance be damned The Wind Crystal is destroyed, but don't worry, our boat is pulled by a sea serpent. Another boat, powered by steam and fire, loses its the power with the destruction of the Fire Crystal... simply gets modified to not need it.
How? Because Cid and Mid read a book. What changes are they going to make to undo this deep, worldly elemental loss? Don't worry about it.
The game undercuts its plot at every step, yet somehow does nothing to remove the weight of it's story. It's full on, unabashed anime bullshit, where the investment doesn't come from some intricate, well thought out plot, but how the events are affecting the characters we're invested in.
It would seem weird to get invested in such trope heavy characters, especially compared to the deep motivations and characterizations we see n Final Fantasy IV and 6... but it's a weird trade off. 4 sacrifices everything and everyone for Cecil. Even his closest companions, Kain and Rosa, are half-character, with only Rydia managing to be anything past a trope. It's Cecil's story, everyone else is support.
Final Fantasy 6 is great breadth... it's characters are tantalizingly and immediately well characterized... but quickly we see a lot of weird blind spots, overlaps, and often simply a lack of development. There are great things in Final Fantasy 6, but half the time the game won't even bother to tell you whose talking, because it doesn't matter... Also Sabin just jumps off multiple waterfalls to solve his problems so maybe we shouldn't be judging based on contrivances.
FF5 on the other hand mostly has stay with the party throughout the entire game, with very few shakeups. While the characters are, on paper, simple, the game gives us time to get to know them in ways we don't get to see in its contemporaries. They have actual chemistry. Sure, some of that characterization is silly. Sure, Lanna LOVES poison and will find any excuse to poison herself while helping someone. Sure we do love force femmeing the femmeboy/girltwink(Okay look, if Lanna's fetish can be poison then you can't kink shame for liking this!!! It's awful but I love it, I'm the worst!!!), Faris. Yeah amnesia is a little played out for Galuf, and yeah MAYBE Bartz is the most typical jRPG protagonist of all time... but sometimes trash is good, and FFV knows its good trash. Good trash isn't poor quality, or badly made. Good trash is indulgent, and FFV indulges itself and the player as often as it can.
Character's don't really have arcs. They don't really change. Instead different parts of them are exposed to us (and even themselves), but it doesn't change who they are. When I write this out it sounds bad, but in practice, we're always learning about the cast. Final Fantasy V is about rising up in a time of need, and the passing of the torch. It's about doing what's needed, even if that involves putting on a cute little dancer dress. The characters' bases have to stay the same because everything around them all the time, from the world to their job selection is in flux. This stability oddly serves them better than the half explored majority of the 4 and 6 cast.
The villains are even more extreme. Instead of a looming, distant evil, Exdeath was more like a competent Skeletor. A fucking evil dweeb. A man who became a splinter that got stuck in the foot of a little girl so he could kung-fu fight with a magic turtle. Exdeath feels like a parody of a villain because he kinda is... and like Skeletor, it's fun. Even when the walls of his castle are breathing aggressively at me. It helps that Exdeath is also a legitimate threat and his actions have consequences, shaping the world you play in.
An Intimate, Reactive, Ever Changing World
Like the Cast, the World and its setting is simple, spiced up with some cute details around how different kingdoms used the Crystals. What feels different, however, is how we move through and interact with the world. Final Fantasy 5 throws multiple chocobos, airships, and even a hovercraft at you, but it doesn't compare to Final Fantasy V. Chocobos, Winddrakes, multiple boats, an airship, a submarine... and more importantly, the fact that none of these things ever become obsolete. Boko the chocobo is still useful even by the end of the game. Black Chocobos fill other niches. Hiryu the wind drake, (who has an incredible theme ▶), serves as a mid game airship that can't transverse high mountains and often acts as a bridge when players lose immediate access to their airship.
What more, Final Fantasy V is a game where you get how people get around in it. People flying on drakes, people sailing ships. You see naval fleets and everything. compare this to Final Fantasy 6, where with one airship(Well, two for awhile technically) in the world, it's a huge question how anyone gets anywhere. We see things like trains but we don't really see how that works with the world. It's not like Final Fantasy V every goes super far out of its way to make things make sense, but it does just a little bit more. The world is also always changing. Changes to the World Map are as old as FF1, but FFV just keeps going, constantly having the world respond to the plot... and then adding 3 different world maps, 2 undersea regions, and then making those come together sensibly? I adore it.
The Weirdest and Most Important Final Fantasy Soundtrack
The OST for Final Fantasy V threw me off at first. It felt... painfully inconsistent and often out of tone for what I'd expect from an SNES era Final Fantasy. I worried the soundtrack was just doing whatever it wanted.
And it was. I was right. It just took me a bit to realize that was awesome. Nobuo Uematsu goes ham on every track, from the myriad of battle, map, and vehicle themes, to even simple things like town music. The theme for Karnak City, Cursed Earth ▶, sounds so much more intense and dreadful than a town theme should, even without any real threats inside it to worry about. The mountain theme, Walking the Snowy Mountains ▶ killer bassline and bombast is immediately attention catching, but the electric organs and synths at 40 secs in start getting fun and weird.
These aren't particularly outlandish, even if they strike a unique tone for Final Fantasy... and Final Fantasy has been weird in that Era. The theme of the Lunar Surface, Another Moon ▶ from Final Fantasy 4 uses lots of strange sounds to invoke a dangerous and alien environment. Still, the melody under it is rather conventional. The weird lunar bloops are kind of a garnish over a simple track. It's barely trying to be a song. Meanwhile Final Fantasy 5's incredible Musica Machina ▶ is AGGRESSIVELY and UNCOMFORTABLY a song. All the discord and noise not being little quirky additions, but essential, unorthodox musical components.
A track that grew on me a lot was Exdeath's theme The Decisive Battle ▶, in which the first 50 seconds is about 5% organ, and 95% drums and bass going hard. When the song finally drops into gear, it's weird, abstract and offputting. The song hints at what is an unmistakable but subtle evocation of an electric guitar chord, before triumphant trumpets come in, only to immediately be cut off by dread inducing panflutes.
The guitar thing is interesting because so much NES and SNES is electric guitar coded, but mostly with classic guitar melody and leads. This uses it in a more experimental way, as if you were jamming with a band and a guitar was just one of the instruments on hand... but this isn't a jam session. These are digital sounds that can sound like anything, but Uematsu is purposefully invoking that progressive rock creativity.
Also like idk what to say but Gilgamesh / Battle at the Big Bridge ▶ just rules, but we all knew that. Speaking of which...
Odds and Ends, Before this gets Completely out of Hand
Gilgamesh rules. Gilgamesh rules so much he makes me like Ultros less. Ultros was a fun, if annoying, little goblin cephalopod, but now that I know WHY he exists... what a pale imitation. Ironically Big G is maybe the only character to have an actual arc, assuming everything goes your way enough to actually see it. It's not much (though at the same time, maybe too much), but it's cool. What a god damn himbo idiot.
I haven't talked about the gameplay much and it's funny, because it feels so miles above anything else Square was doing at the time that comparisons almost seem dull. Like Ultros, part of me, who was charmed by Gogo being able to literally change out any command, was kinda shocked to see that JUST BE A THING. A perfectly normal thing to do for ALL of your party members. Who needs Fight when they can have Blue Magic and just use the 0 MP Goblin punch? Someone with Rapid Fire and Dual Wield, that's who!
Also things like status effects and stuff actually seemed to matter. The FF's we got either were broken on fundamental levels (FF1 and 6) or had their knees chopped out (FF4). A lot of people of my generation, including myself, didn't learn how to actually PLAY a turn based RPG. You didn't make plans cause you didn't need plans, and any plan you made beyond how you value DPS vs Healing felt like a waste of time. FF5 is kinda the Final Fantasy we needed, the one that would make us actually make real choices.
Graphically, the game was honestly weirdly inconsistent. I guess that kinda feels like a theme here. The character spritework varies wildly in quality, sometimes looking worse than Final Fantasy 4, while sometimes matching 6 (and without getting into the muddiness that occurs in some of 6's louder environments). Understandable given the amount they had to make, but it weirdly felt like an older game than it was. One of those situations where the game was, again, far less of a clean bridge between 4 and 5 than I was expecting. I did appreciate some of the more clever effects. The subtle overlay used to give the illusion of a round plant while on the airship was a neat, simple sleight of hand. I was also charmed that 5 and 6 do the same exact Mode 7 tricks during the ending. Realizing so many things in 6 were an homage to 5 (like the existence of Gogo at all) was neat.
5 brings in enemy graphic designer Tetsuya Nomura, whose designs absolutely rule. I knew there was a big difference between 4 and 6 on the enemy design front, but I didn't know it was Nomura who had a love for weird abstract freaks and hot women smoking. Easily my favorite era of enemy design.
Thinking more of 5 and 6, I realized during this that 6's job system was "turning every job into a character", an attempt to give you a similar amount of options (seemingly) but with a diverse cast instead. It... didn't quite work out like that in practice though. The sauce was definitely in the mixing of class elements. It does make the decision to ditch the job system for 6 at least make sense though. "You can give everyone espers and special relics that change their skills, that's LIKE job leveling and skill mixing"... but it really isn't. Plus, building a party in Final Fantasy 6 came at the expense of everyone else. Meanwhile, swapping around because you had a new plan in FFV was painless and almost free. Time spent on the wrong jobs was barely wasted. Any "wasted" time could be leaned into for a late game reward. Freelancers and Mimes being the best classes in the end solve the duel purpose of giving you more toys to play with, and rewarding you for previous experimentation. Just a beautiful system, and one Square seemed frequently relucent to go back to.
I walk away from Final Fantasy 5 with more questions about the early history of the franchise than I started with. Will I need to play 2 and 3 now to truly grapple with the history of the series? Maybe, but I'm not in a rush. What's more incredible is I can look at 4m 5 and 6 and not have a clear favorite. I can see three beautiful games, each accomplishing their goals and making their own sacrifices to get there. I wish I had this game in the 90s. A younger me would have done so many playthroughs. But games don't go bad, and I am here enjoying it like I could have enjoyed it at any other time in my life. Will I see you all for Four Job Fiesta? ... We'll see when the time comes.
My original live thread on bluesky. Just scroll up to the start, if I link the first page first it won't show the whole thread 🙃