Final Fantasy V took a long time to reach America. For years, Square promised a port of the game. Final Fantasy IV had been a mild success for a company uncertain about how to market JRPGs to American audiences. Instead of building on that effort, however, they decided to make an easier on-ramp: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
It didn’t go well.
Seven years after its initial release, it finally hit America as part of the PlayStation Final Fantasy Anthology. Square hopes it would ride the surprise mainstream success of Final Fantasy VII. Unfortunately, the port was famously sloppy. And anyway, before then, Final Fantasy V was making history in another way: This was one of the first Final Fantasy games released in an Internet era. And as such, it was an early example of the pioneering work of emulation and fan-translation. People around the world collaborated to make this game playable by Western audiences while Square moved on.*
Was it worth the hassle? Did the stellar reputation of Final Fantasy V survive the journey to America? Welcome back to Fantasies Revisited.
“Something’s wrong with the wind….”
Princess Lenna of Tycoon, whose kingdom guards the Wind Crystal, leaves to find her father, the King. He went to try to protect the Wind Crystal — but he never returned. When a meteorite crashes nearby, she meets up with Bartz, an adventurer, and Galuf, an old man who can’t remember who he is or why he was at the crash site. They join forces with Faris, a pirate lord, and together, the four of them set off to save the crystals.
On their journey, they learn that the Crystals don’t just make the planet habitable — they keep the wind blowing, the water moving, etc… — but serve to imprison an ancient sorcerer, Exdeath. The Crystals imprisoned Exdeath for years, but technological innovations have drawn on the power of the Crystals to provide energy for the kingdom, weakening them and allowing Exdeath to exert influence on the world once more. Can the heroes prevent him from shattering all four Elemental Crystals, opening his prison and dooming the world?
And what fate will befall the world if they fail?
“I must go to the Wind Shrine to make sure nothing has happened to the crystal.”
Part of my praise for Final Fantasy IV was that, in removing some player agency, they were able to tell deeper, richer stories about their characters. Final Fantasy V abandons that pretty quickly. This is a game that is 100% all about the Job system. Don’t get me wrong: The story is way better than Final Fantasy III, the last game that focused heavily on this mechanic. The leads may have interchangeable jobs, but they’re still distinctive characters with arcs of their own.
I still think that you lose a lot when you give players that kind of flexibility. But Final Fantasy V makes a compelling argument in favor of the mechanic. The Job system here is expansive and in-depth, with a flexibility that the previous iteration (and, to be honest, future iterations) lacked. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, the game is sublime. Indeed, I would argue that how much you enjoy Final Fantasy V is directly correlated to how much attention you give to the Job system.
Because if you aren’t constantly switching jobs… I’ll tell you, vast swaths of the late game are insufferable. Borderline unplayable, even. A lot of late-game enemies auto-counter specific attacks, forcing you to swap jobs room by room, boss by boss, and pray that you don’t get an unlucky encounter. The fights are winnable — they’re just long. If the enemy counters every time you hit it, and you have to hit it six times to kill it, you’re stuck watching the same attack animation over. And over. And over again.
On the flip side, however, many of those same late game fights become absolutely trivial if you’ve found any of a half-dozen broken skill combinations. Critic and fan Chris Kohler singles out a particularly broken build, one that combines skills from multiple classes to allow players to effectively cast spells eight times in a row, which makes the game’s most challenging enemies trivial.
The other option, the thing the game wants you to do, is just change jobs. But that doesn’t pair well with random encounters. Some enemies auto-respond to magic. Some auto-respond to physical. If you don’t know which encounter is coming up, you don’t really have a way to adequately prepare for it. The Pixel Remaster does at least give an ‘auto-equip’ option. This should automatically equip the strongest loadout for each class. In practice, there are issues, and changing class frequently means spending a lot of time in menus.
That said, the game mostly manages to avoid the sort of ‘rock paper scissors’ thing the mechanic could inspire. The jobs are varied, interesting, and relatively strong. Combinations that seem absurd on their face are often viable in interesting ways. The game brings out depth and nuance in classes that don’t look like natural partners. This inspired the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta, an annual charity event that limits players to four completely random jobs. Players discovered hidden strengths to classes like the Bard, the Chemist, and others, which might not have seen much playtime in a normal run.
“Lenna. Don’t worry.”
One of my favorite ‘tricks’ the Final Fantasy games like to play involves the way it expands the world map. In III, you started with a relatively small overworld map, only to learn that this was just a single floating continent in a much bigger world. Final Fantasy IV sent players under the world, to a vast magma cavern that housed a number of the game’s more advanced dungeons.
To my delight Final Fantasy V managed to continue the tradition while still surprising me. As you play, you learn that Galuf, the amnesiac you found at the meteorite’s crash site, is actually from another world. Once upon a time, four warriors from Galuf’s world tracked an evil sorcerer here. Using the power of the crystals, they imprisoned him deep below the earth. But as the kingdoms began draining power from the crystals, the prison weakened. Exdeath awoke. And he sought vengeance on Galuf’s world.
Having the characters choose to abandon their family and friends for a one-way trip to another full world map was a bold choice. I thought that was the game’s big play.
It wasn’t.
Instead, the game reveals that these two worlds were once one. A horrible tragedy split them apart. Exdeath forces them back together. Thus begins the game’s surprising finale, which takes place on the ‘Merged World.’ A third world map, one that combines the previous two into a coherent whole. Seeing the world like this, strange environmental design choices come together. Something had been missing, natural forces held in place with a series of crystals.
It’s an incredible payoff, one that feels simultaneously more mythic and more grounded than the previous two.
“I’ll be fine.”
Final Fantasy V also marks an important thematic shift for the series. In much of the series to date, the Crystals were an essential but nebulous recurring element. They ‘brought light’. They had power. But, ultimately, they were really just McGuffins with no weight.
Here, the game does something interesting: It makes the Crystals environmentally necessary. The destruction of the Wind Crystal causes the wind to stop blowing. Players have to find a different way to traverse the ocean. The Fire Crystal provides heat and power to a prosperous kingdom, but it turns out that they are overdrawing on the Crystal. They weaken it, eventually causing it to overload. The explosion causes serious damage to the kingdom’s infrastructure and leaves them without power.
Final Fantasy had always had a loose environmental theme. While many of your enemies are sorcerers, it wasn’t uncommon for them to be at the head of a more technologically superior empire. The forces opposing them tended to come from idyllic small towns, rife with trees, living in harmony with nature. Final Fantasy V combined these themes for the first time in the series. It makes both of them richer together than they were apart.
Further games would tackle these themes in much more depth. Final Fantasy VI focuses heavily on the idea of a technocratic empire attempting to dominate the natural world. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII is a gargantuan ode to environmentalist themes. But I don’t know that either game exists as fully without Final Fantasy V finally bringing the disparate themes and iconography that dominated the series to date together in one place.
“Have faith.”
Join us in a couple weeks as we wrap up the fabled SNES era of Final Fantasy with the game many still consider to be the series’ best entry: Final Fantasy VI.
*If you’re interested in learning more about fan attempts to make Final Fantasy V accessible to Western audiences, I highly recommend Chris Kohler’s book Final Fantasy V. The book is an in-depth look at the game’s early history by one of the early die-hards who tried to help make it playable.