MOGSPECTIVE: FINAL FANTASY V

i might not be ff6's biggest fan but anybody who says terra's theme is bad has a dirty soul

FFV is my go-to game when I want a JRPG with a solid battle system and a flexible class system without the heavy narrative baggage of IV or VI. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but sometimes you just need a game that carries itself more on its gameplay than its story.

It also certainly has the most replayability of the three SNES games. I mean, you can only replay FFIV so many times before you realize that there just aren't very many different ways to play it.

author=GreatRedSpirit
It's an adventure across worlds where you team up with buddies and help your dragons and fight against an evil tree-wizard-man-thing that calls itself EXDEATH. Along the way there's character building, discovery, sacrifice, introspection, and a bit where your buddies show up and cheer against the evil TWMT.

Teenage Wutant Minja Turtle?

I know you didn't just call Exdeath a turtle. He eats flips turtles for breakfast giggles.

author=Liberty
V was not my favourite.

I’ve only played FFV once, and that for the PS1 and the “anthology collection” where it was bundled with FF6 together.

I remember playing it for a bit and got to around the part where the second crystal shard scatters after beating the boss there - and then I just stopped playing. I think I got lost and I didn’t know where to go to next, or something, or maybe the sheer length of the enemy encounter animation for the PlayStation version started to get to me after a while, but I just stopped playing altogether around that point.

Whatever the reason was, I didn’t think that FFV was a “bad game” at the time that I played it and it was more or less because of the particular version that I was playing on had longer loading times which almost doubled the amount of time it took for me to play it and I just stopped playing it because of that.

Although the gameplay and the detailed job system and what you could do with each character and how you could mold them to seemingly anything was definitely a huge step up in my books over the other games in the series at the time instead of just having one said defined class for everyone, the overall story and characters really weren’t that interesting to me at all…well, expect for that one part when the party finds out that Faris is actually secretly a woman in disguise and Bartz and Gaulf are both freaking out about it when they first find out. Okay - that part I liked, lol.

But I think this is one of those cases that I really can’t say too much about this game yet as I really oughta to give it another chance someday and get a lot farther in it before having a more solid opinion about it. I’m sure that the story does improve along the way forward, along with the characters once you finish dealing with all the crystals first, but I definitely need to play another version of it besides the PS1 one, because I can’t handle those god-awful loadtimes. I think FF6 had the same problem on there, too.

Hey, it was on sale when we bought back then. And how could I not refuse at the time to go back and play an old school Final Fantasy game that I never heard of until just then that had similar graphics to my favorite one in IV for such a low, low price!? I would have been a "fool" not to pick it up!

…And now I whole-heartingly regret that decision.

Liberty
Now, I'm not saying it's bad or anything like that, I just feel like it lost it's way a bit in the second half and, idk, something about it just didn't appeal to me as much. It does have some great parts to it, though.

smells like ff6

I only ever played the fan-translated rom of FF5. And that was a really long time ago (when did that thing come out?). I remember quite enjoying playing around with the jobs. I'm fairly certain I grinded like hell for some of it though. I don't remember many storybeats. Except that one of the characters died and was replaced which was both upsetting and awesome.

And Gilgamesh had awesome music.

I didn't finish the game though. I got to the final boss and despite feeling like I had grinded through the game (possibly) I was apparently way underleveled for the final confrontation and just ragequit right there. Never to pick it up again.

I guess it was a good game that left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth afterwards.

Yeah, you can use a chemist mix (or a cannoneer thing in the GBA version) to berserk Exdeath 2 which screws up its death-counter AI which normally spawns Neo Exdeath. If you bug out the script Neo Exdeath never spawns and you win the fight! Berserk can be really good, you can berserk one of the bonus bosses then just have a Knight cover & guard the party and take zero damage from anything Shinryu throws and you can pelt him down at your convenience. It was fixed in the mobile port though. In FF4DS I used berserk on a few endgame enemies because regular attacks and special attacks are all kinds of fucked up balance in that game.


I can understand why people have trouble with NED too. Almost every boss is just a single target so the action economy is much kinder to the player, he gets some horrible killer moves like Almagest (this is usually the big HP attack) and Grand Cross (random status effects), you can't even tell which one is using it, and when he's down to the last bit he turns on his asshole AI which lets him use even more Almagest. A lot of strats for him comes down to "kill the Almagest part immediately" which first time players wouldn't know (it's the one on the right / front of NED). After he's down kill the Grand Cross part (top), the bottom part (I forget what he does but he isn't...) and leaving the back one for last. In true FF5 fashion where you can shut down entire bosses if you know what status works on them the back part of NED doesn't have the 'Heavy' flag which makes them immune to HP% and OHKO attacks. In addition the Magic Lamp item which goes through all the summons from strongest to weakest per recharge. When it gets to Odin in the Ned fight he will use the OHKO Zantetsuken move instead of the useless Gungir spear lob and OHKO the back Ned every time.

I think it's hilarious and it's a neat cherry on top of some of FF5's balance issues.

(technically the bottom part of Ned is also vulnerable to Break/Petrify but iirc there's no certain way to apply it and the status evade chance algorithm is in Ned's favor)

There's a patch for some versions of the game which allows three configurable ability slots for each class. The game is much more fun as a result, because you can build exactly the character you want... like a grand master black belt Black Mage with the Samurai's Shirahadori sword-clap defense.

I'm getting really excited to play this game actually! I'll probably come back later every now and then and give my thoughts as I play. In case anyone's wondering, I'll be playing FFV: Advance (GBA version) with a sound patch from the original SNES version.