I just beat FFV! Here is my review.

[Scarlet]

There were a few threads that were made recently beating a Final Fantasy game. I've created a thread where you can post about your review on the game.

If you have beaten Final Fantasy V for the first time...Please post your Final Fantasy I reviews here.

If you beat Final Fantasy V already and still want to write a review, then go ahead.

 

[Pokeslob]

ok I can wirte a review

Final Fantasy V

this game is the best FF game ever created!
heres why:
-The storyline is actually interesting!
-The characters were a good part of the story to, each had an interesting backstory, which made the story even greater as well!
-The job system was amazing! The fact that if you trained as a black mage long enough you;d get to use Black Magic even as a swordsman was a great Idea and still bamboozles me today why they don't use that!
-Visually the game looked good, for the SNES anyway, just the overall design made the game easy to look at!
-and a great musical composition! who could forget Battle on the Big Bridge? if you don't know this song by name you'll know it when you hear it

really there is nothing bad about this game

10/10

 

[SABR]

ok I can wirte a review

Final Fantasy V

this game is the best FF game ever created!
heres why:
-The storyline is actually interesting!
-The characters were a good part of the story to, each had an interesting backstory, which made the story even greater as well!
-The job system was amazing! The fact that if you trained as a black mage long enough you;d get to use Black Magic even as a swordsman was a great Idea and still bamboozles me today why they don't use that!
-Visually the game looked good, for the SNES anyway, just the overall design made the game easy to look at!
-and a great musical composition! who could forget Battle on the Big Bridge? if you don't know this song by name you'll know it when you hear it

really there is nothing bad about this game

10/10

It's one of the overlooked games, but not the very best. I'm quite glad to find someone who shares my appreciation for this game! It took me just under 40 hours, over the course of a month. I hadn't played this one before, and I'm glad I got to play the GBA remake. I couldn't get enough of it. Agreed, there is nothing bad about this game, the class system is fun and innovative, and we might be the only two people on the planet who really love this game.

FF5 ftw!

 

[DDM]

Ive beaten the game more than 5 times already still don't get sick of the game, the class combo are just so unique, definitely deserves the Thumbs up FFV is by far my favorite FF series

Lets try to put more effort in for reviews please

My bad

EDIT: The first time when I beat this game, my results were very bad, I barely defeated Neo Exdeath, I couldn't even defeat Omega and Shinryu I went to the man that knows it all and only to find myself missing this much treasures and that much treasures. To be frank... I thoght to my self, man... FFV sucks... FFIV wasn't that gay if I recall...


The FFs I played:

o yeah Note: FFIV is one of my favorite FF series as well. FFIV I played after I beat FFV tho.. Its kinda strange but I went FFV -> FFIV -> FFV -> FFV -> FFVI -> FFVIII -> FFVII -> FFVA -> FFVA -


back to the topic!

why did they have to kill FFV? Then i thought to myself, what am I saying? I didn't even Master most of my Jobs which means i don't even have this much ability, i was missing so many Blue Magic and Summoning Magic I missed so many treasures.



How I got into FFV:

The year was 1992, one day me and my mother went to a convenience store and I saw some funny looking box so I grabbed it and start reading the back of the cover not even realizing that I was actually out of the store... after that I realized that it was a SNES game... I had a SNES but I can't afford some thing which costs 6000 Japanese Yen, which is roughly 60 USD. Anyhow I realized that i just went out side of the convenience store and not paying for the game so i ran back in the store and said to the girl that served my mother... Im sorry Im no thief!!! please forgive me here is your game... T_T , the girl smiled at me and said your mother paid for that I was like oh... thank you...... T_T WTF I just made a complete fool out of my self T_T anyhow i went outside and said a thousand thanks to my mother. I went home and started to play it... I couldn't get the hang of it at all....... T_T eventually my father came home and said... what are you doing... I said I am trying to play this game but I keep on dying.... Then my father started playing and I started to watch him play. Well yeah he finished it and i thought, thats not too bad... so I started playing it myself.



back to the topic!

Well I pretty much just tried to do what my father did and yeah... I end up leaving out a lot of stuffs. I was still glad I finished the game by myself tho, i went to my friend's place that day and told him about FFV he said, oh you know about FF series? wicked Ive only played FFIV, you have even played FFV? WICKED!!! That game just came out man!! I was like FFIV? LEND ME IT NOW!!! well I wont continue from here since it leads to me playing FFIV so the deal was we traded FFV for FFIV and after a week or so give it back. After I got my FFV back I thought to myself man I did bad.... Father and my buddy always beats me in every game they play..... T_T, so I asked my father... Dad... can I borrow your book please Im just so shit at game T_T my father laughed at me and said ok here you go heres the guide books . -



The FFV Guide books:

My collection includes... my fathers FFV books includes, the 3 books I posted in the other thread of FFF FFV section I think it was called something like picture book or something... yeah those 3 books and another one with the 4 warriors of the dawn which is not Bartz, Lenna, Galuf and Faris but it is actually Galuf, Dorgann (Bartz's father ), Kelger (Galuf's puppy friend), Xezat (some guy with a funny hat... ), But all those book's guide are actually very average.. the book with a decent guide is actually a little thick and it doesn't have that much pictures. It covers everything step by step; I read that book and finished the game much more better than the first time.

back to the topic!

From there I researched FFV then started to make progress obtain most of the items. Kill monsters like Shinryu and Omega, and have a much better treasure obtain rate -> to check that you have to of reached world 3 go to Karnak town and use the submarine, and you will see a cave like thingy, go in it and you will see an old man dressed in purple. Talk to him to find out what he knows hehe.

From that day onwards I started like FFV more and more till the point that I would finish the game once and restart it again just after that. Tho the style of playing changes. The first time I beat the game properly I used the easy way, -> make everyone Monk -> Monk which have had low level Black and White magics, whenever magic is required I simply use the magic attacks, and since Monks can take hits, I put them in front to increasing their close range combat damage. Second time I used thief to steal items and use a different style of playing, the thieves had the low Black and White magic ability and barehanded. In world 2 for both of the Strategy I used samurai, because I wanted to get the Samurai's !Iainuki ASAP so it would make my lvling up faster which means it would obtain ABP fatster too . After that I used Dragoon for the first strategy and Ninja for the second -> both moving onto Time mage then -> Summoner, I have got really close to getting 100% Treasure from the man that knows it all but, I tend to always forget something, so I never get 100% from the treasure part .

Note: really close means this... ->

i have obtained 4* of whatever item that is obtainable and stole 4* whatever thats stealable

i think the 1% is missing from the forest of moore I should of grabbed the flame shield but i grabbed the aegis instead.. T_T

just to show that I have actually beat the game..

I stopped playing FFV for a while till they made FFVA and finished it twice. I have to say that, FFVA's new bosses are a little bit out of my expectation, they are not just one of your oh, ill hunt you down just for the fun of it! It takes a bit of thinking and you need to of plan a good strategy to beat them. Yeah thats pretty much it, the more I play FFV the more I like it, definitely is my favorite FF series.

 

[Bambi]

Ive beaten the game more than 5 times already still don't get sick of the game, the class combo are just so unique, definitely deserves the Thumbs up FFV is by far my favorite FF series

Lets try to put more effort in for reviews please

 

[ShadoeBlyson2]

V was exellent. Good story. The characters are geting closer and closer to haveing a personallity. The game had an ending that was halfway intresting. Expesially if some of your party members died in the Neo Exdeath fight. They actually STAY dead. I killed krille on perpose. XD. Also the job system was Top notch. My favorite job was the Freelancer. I give this game a 7/10

 

[James Fazon]

It took me about a month to finish this game, it's quite an epic! There are only a few reviews in this thread so I'll add my review to the others. I will keep the spoilers to a minimum.

Firstly, this is a great game! It tends to be overlooked because its release was sandwiched between IV and VI which were iconic milestones in the series. I can see why V is not loved as much as the other two, but taken on its own it is an enjoyable and unique game that is well worth investing time in.

Gameplay:

As you will probably be aware, V uses a very flexible character development system. Characters may be given a variety of different 'jobs' such as White Mage, Knight, etc. As they gain job levels (seperate to regular levels) they earn certain abilities which can then be utilised when a character moves onto a different job. This allows you to have for example, a Knight that can heal, or, slightly more unusually, a White Mage that does thousands of points of damage with a lance! The job system takes a good while to learn, and it can be frustrating at the start, but spend some time with it and you will start to think of great combinations and powerful characters.

Otherwise, gameplay is similar to the other SNES era games. You will visit towns, get a story scene, traipse off across the world map, go through a dungeon culminating in a boss and hopefully collect some treasure along the way. One distinction though is that the whole process is a lot harder than most of the games. The bosses in particular require proper tactics. Level grinding can only get you so far.

The game offers a few more unique gameplay sections, which could be seen as improvements over four. Timed dungeons and splitting up the party stand out as firsts for the series in this game. World exploration works in a good way too. You finish one map and then you're in another. You finish that one and...well its pretty good, you should play it! There isn't a repeat of 'the underworld' either from IV. It would be so easy to just have an underworld V, but the developers did something a little different.

Plot:

That brings me nicely onto the plot. I think this is another aspect of the game that people complain about. Don't listen to that though, the plot develops in a really interesting way. Superficially, okay, crystals..blah...problems..blah...ancient darkness...blah...unassuming heroes, you've heard it before. A lot of the games are like this though when you break them down to their elements. V has a really good story, which in my opinion falls down in two areas.

Firstly, the game lacks a strong lead character. Bartz is a wanderer with only a chocobo for a companion. He's an everyman. While the other characters have their quirky ways, Bartz seems to be the one who just reacts however you'd expect your average guy to react. Cecil in the previous game was a much more interesting lead.

In the writers' defence though, there are many games where the main character is bland or a blank slate (think Elder Scrolls!) I think some games try to make the main character simply 'you', so possibly the player is meant to be the fourth character in the story. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it there though.

The other problem is that it’s slow starting. It seems very formulaic for the first few hours. After that though, things do pick up. Faris, a pirate captain who masquerades as a man, is a particularly amusing character who develops decently throughout the game.

Galuf starts off as an annoying, fat old man with amnesia who doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the characters at the start. As his story is revealed though, he becomes more and more interesting. I won't spoil it but think parallel worlds linked in a surprising way. He ended up as one of my favourite characters and was involved in some of the most moving moments of the game.

The villain is pretty good in my opinion too. You will really hate him and want to beat that smug, comical attitude towards killing people out of him by the end of the game! The game also introduces the famous Final Fantasy character Gilgamesh, who provides some entertaining and challenging repeat battles (I think this game was the first in the series to do this).

In short, once the plot finally gets going it is surprisingly deep, the equal to IV if not Vi in my opinion, just get through those first few hours of boring story (though good gameplay).

Visuals and Music:

The development team put the experiences of IV to good use and made many improvements. As always, there is such a big bundle of character and charm in those tiny sprites. A lot of their mannerisms are simplistic and predictable, but you will grow fond of them.

The visuals of the enemies are an improvement on IV. There are sea monsters, futuristic robots, disturbing undead, and scantily-clad ladies to defeat. In particular, the undead enemies later on in the game made me stop mentally making allowances for the age and low resolution of the visuals; they were impressively disturbing by any standards. The magic and summon effects were good too, an improvement on IV.

I also liked lots of the views in to the distance. That 'wow' factor is still there despite the age of the game. They replicated this effect to great success in VI. For the SNES, it is a really good use of the hardware.

The music is solid; a good piece of work. I don't think it quite matches the emotion and longevity of IV and VI, but that's fine, they were exceptional. Particularly later on in the game there is a particularly pensive and thoughtful world map theme that will get stuck in your head. The dragon sound effects are...not a success in the game though!

Replayability:

You will probably need to replay the game because it was too hard to beat the first time! Final Fantasy games tend to be quite replayable. This game is no exception. It is a huge, huge game with lots to enjoy. I would replay it.

It has lots of treasure to collect and a number of optional bosses and summons to fight. Some sections of the game were so challenging that I want to go back to them at some point to see if there was an easier way to defeat the enemies. The job system is a particular reason to replay it as you could use a completely different party to finish the game with. There is scope for some hellish challenges to do with the job system, but I don't want to think about those right now...ouch the game was hard!

There is more content on the peripheries of this game than IV I think. For me, another play through would probably be more about the gameplay and tactics whereas I think the plot alone would be enough reason to replay others in the series.

Conclusion:

Fantastic game. So it’s not the best of the Final Fantasy series; it’s still a good deal better than tons of rpgs of the same era. It's a good challenge for a gamer used to more recent games, which I believe to be easier. There's nothing wrong with this game, forget what people say and give it a try for yourself!

 

[Grimer]

IT was alright. The music wasnt as good as others in the series for starters. The story was a mess,and boring most of the time. The only character I enjoyed was Faris, besides that the others werent very interesting. the only good thing about this game was the job system, which was great, and it would be nice if future FF's went back to V's job system. Oh,a nd Ex Death has a dumb name for a villian, and he wasnt very interesting either.

 

[kratoscar2008]

It's one of the overlooked games, but not the very best. I'm quite glad to find someone who shares my appreciation for this game! It took me just under 40 hours, over the course of a month. I hadn't played this one before, and I'm glad I got to play the GBA remake. I couldn't get enough of it. Agreed, there is nothing bad about this game, the class system is fun and innovative, and we might be the only two people on the planet who really love this game.

FF5 ftw!

Now we are three

I played first on snes and the on psx and the game is awesome, (Spoiler ahead)
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Galuf fight to the death with X-Death was one of the more awesome and tear jerking moments in FF history.

Mastering the Job system is quite fun and you can create any crazy amount of party variations thanks of the learning ability system.

This game is a 100/10 for me.

 

[SquallKefka17]

So finished the PSX version on PSP this week. The game was quite enjoyable at times a little frustrating at others but overall worth the 39 hours or so it took to complete it.
For me its pros were Galuf , Faris and a quite slick ATB system. Travelling by Dragon was very cool and it makes me wonder why you never to use monsters or summons as modes of transport after Final Fantasy V. The job system was annoying at first but after a while I got into it. The one thing the job system lacked was proper information on each job to help the player decide what jobs to do I needed to check the internet for this. The likes of the Red Mage class can be very misleading. The ABP required for some of the more advanced abilities was a bit ridiculous at times even though you could farm it late in the game. I can see where FF VIII got its select your command list from whatever abilities you've learned from in this game but FFVs frustration in this sense was that auto abilities took up an action command slot which made no sense.

Ex Death is an entertaining character for the whole game bar his bizarre metamorphosis into Neo Ex Death (which is never explained in the game how or why he transformed into that form which annoyed me. my guess was it was meant to be a representation of all the monsters sealed within him). Bartz himself is a little flat as the lead character and Reina(Lenna) doesn't offer too much to the story either. Galuf, Krile and Faris though are entertaining characters throughout the game. The plot is quite strong throughout and the game pokes fun at itself and characters which I quite liked then of course there is the entertaining and at times quite bizarre Gilgamesh.

Difficulty wise its starts off with your characters barely taking any damage at all. Neo Ex Death is a challenge for a final boss(although the first stage Tree Ex Death is dreadfully easy) and Shinryu and Omega are both entertaining challenges and will take quite a few attempts and luck to defeat as I played the PSX version I don't think Neo Shinryu and Omega Mark II were there for me to challenge. The thing I enjoyed the most about this game is it rewarded you for clever set ups and didn't expect you to level up very high to defeat the super bosses just be very smart (my party was around level 43 for Shinryu, Omega and the final battle with Ex Death). On a side note may i also say what a terrible job yet again of the final boss music by square on a PSX remake of a classic Final Fantasy the boss music sounds way too high in Neo Exdeath's music just like how the drumbeat kept playing even through the organ part of the final part of dancing mad for Kefka in VI so so wrong!!!

Anyhow my verdict not as bad at all as I was fearing a well-paced game that doesn't demand too much grinding well worth playing and completing. Is it as good as IV or VI for me?Probably not however it is better than a lot of others I have played in the series for me and somewhere around the middle for me in terms of all FFs I've played to date. It also has the best battle theme for grinding too when you do spend a little bit with the Shield dragons.

 

[Vivi-Gamer]

So I just beat Final Fantasy V... overall, it was entertaining and I enjoyed the majority of it, but there just isn't really anything memorable about the story... I like some of the characters and how they did put time into linking the warriors of Dawn with the Warriors of Light but Bartz as a character wasn't all that engaging. I think Faris was the most interesting character in general as the run-away princess. Leena's relationship with the Dragon pluck a few hear strings as did Kriles late game appearance.

After playing the game, I still am not won over by the Job System! It's brutal! To be honest, a majority of the game I by-passed with Samurai Class - They had a lot of HP and they also had the most game breaking attack in Zeninage, which was better than Holy, Flare & Meteor combined! I found that the only time I struggled without that was at Fork Tower - but even then I had One player as Samurai and Chucked moneyz at the Minatour and then had 3 other characters take down the mage. I just think that the system over all was tedious, where something like Final Fantasy IX which has specific characters, you can sort of pick your favourites and still feel their idenity matches their class - Many later FF's have the problem where Eevry character feels the same and it comes down to choosing your favourite Limit Break which I just don't enjoy as much.

Another big issue I had was knowing where to go next, I constantly had to look at my BradyGames Anthology guide but even that didn't have Mini-map telling you where to go. I think this is mostly due to a lot of the towns and areas not being that distinctive which pre 32-Bit era FF's all had. Some were fun like the Underground Library though.

The stand out character for me is Gilgamesh by far! Everytime he was on screen he stole the show, from playing World of Final Fantasy I always thought they just exagerrated how silly he was, but was delighted to see he was so daft in the game.

I played the GBA version on Emulator (I do own the GBA version, box and everything!), fullscreen and it was great, by far the best way to play it. I also used my PS4 controller which made it even more ideal and natural.

I don't have much more to say on it, ExDeath wasn't a very compelling villian, thought I did like his backstory and confrontation with the previous warriors.

Overall it's a mid-tier FF game for me, nothing majorly awful, but nothing that really stood out. I would still push that 3DS Remake I was hoping for - if anything by the same creators and style of the Secret of Mana PS4 Remake - Which is probably the only way S-E would get a second playthrough out of me.

 

[FighterMcWarrior]

Final Fantasy V was a weird bird. My first experiences with it came in the form of attempting to emulate it on ... sigh ... a Macintosh Performa 6116 CD running a copy of MacOS 9.

You heard that right. We are talking in the megabytes of total ram, and I don't believe the entirety of the computer even held more than 200 mb. In other words, this was not the ideal situation to be in when trying to emulate a SNES game. Frameskipping software was practically invented to get these old comps to run games, and FFV on my Mac (emulation.net, emulation on the MacOS!) was quite a...well, let's get to it shall we?

Firstly, it was not possible to both play the game and listen to the music at the same time; it just took too much processing power, to the point where both would slow down to such a degree that processing a single frame could take up to 10-15 seconds. No, not milleseconds. Seconds. So then, turning off the music was the only way I could actually play the game, and I had to have the frameskipping turned up pretty high in order for the speed to be anything near acceptable.

RPGe had also not yet translated it into English, so it was entirely in Japanese, and I understood exactly 0 of it. But by gum, I was gonna play it. I had already played FF1, FF4, and FF6, and this was the "next big thing" for me, until FFVII came out. I remember many times getting up to the Ships' Graveyard, and being unable to progress, due to the inability of the snes emulator I was running to show transparencies. You go in the water, you can't see yourself anymore.

It began a long chapter in my life that is still going today (messing around with settings on computer games to try to get it how I want it), and it also showed me what I might have been missing about the rest of these here Final Fantasy games.

What we take for granted as common knowledge about FFII, FFIII, and FFV not having been released in the USA was, back then, actually something of a bit of confusion. Electronic Gaming Monthly ran an "International Outlook" feature on FFV, but referred to it as "Final Fantasy III," because the previous skipping of FFII and III on the NES was not even a known thing in the West at that time (Remember that this was still before most people had internet-connected computers in their house, much less inside their phones. Wi-Fi hadn't even been invented yet so far as I know).

But my family had a 14kpbs dial up modem and I think we had an ISP called 'mindspring' or somesuch. So, through some rudimentary researching and also by agreeing to delete these games after 24 hours, because they are for demonstration purposes only (lol), I managed to suss out V's existence.

Finally, after a few years of getting stuck at this or that place and not really being able to understand what was going on with the story (why is this blonde lady in a swimsuit with a whip attacking them? Whaaaa), Final Fantasy Anthology came out, and with it, the first English translation of FFV (warts and all).

But I still remember hearing FFV's music (using the snes emu's "music box" feature, anyway) and having that feeling of "Wow, this seems like it'll be really cool when I finally get around to playing a working copy of it"...and honestly, it is. It's not the most snappy dialogue you're ever gonna hear in a game, but that really wasn't established in games back when this came out, you know.

All works of art are products of the time in which they were made. FFV is 1992, through and through. Shine on, you crazy Crystals...

 

[Miko]

This was the most recent game I completed to the very end, maybe a monthish ago? My brother and I are working on playing the earlier ones and then some. I think FFV was really underrated and I really enjoyed my time with this one! I chose to run it off of my PSP from the Playstation version.

While I agree Bartz has a much weaker character arc I think the others had an awesome story line. Galuf was probably my favorite character from start to finish and it broke my heart what happened to him. I don't normally like the 'kid' characters but I really enjoyed Krile as well even if she did join the party later in the game (albeit with Galuf's preloaded stuff.) Lena was probably my least favorite, but I still enjoyed her importance in the game.

I see a lot of people struggled with the job system (including my brother!) but I seriously only remember struggling once with my characters, and it was in a very mundane part of the game. I'm not sure if I just had a solid strategy down or what, but my party seemed to always be very balanced out & in some cases ahead of the game. I don't claim that I knew exactly what I was doing, but on the other hand I don't think it was dumb luck either. I'll be interested in revisiting this game again in the future and see how this pans out in the next run! My brother, who played along with me in his own time, struggled with the job system and had a finish time of about 35:56 whereas I had a finish time of about 27:16. Very interesting! Does anyone else have their finish times?

I agree with one of the top comments above, I also found myself looking to my guide to see what to do next. I think the idea might have been for the player to go out there and explore more but no one likes venturing hours at a time in the wrong direction, just to go back. ):

I'd like to finish off by saying that I thought the transportation via the meteorites was kinda dumb.