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chuckroSomething’s gone wrong with the elemental crystals (again) and this time they shatter, but grant four warriors power through the remaining shards. Those warriors are tasked with saving two worlds from an evil sealed by the previous generation of heroes.
Talking Time reached this in the collective play-through/retrospective of the Final Fantasy series, and I haven’t played it since 2006, so I decided to give it another run through. I tried it with the Custom Classes hack to keep things interesting and perhaps add some extra variety. That hack allows every class to equip three abilities (like the Mime class) and Fight and Item aren’t required; it also changes the stat system so that which abilities you equip impact your stats.
The fact that the class-specific ability is in the first slot (rather than Attack, which is optional) is irritating. It makes it harder to speed through easy battles. That said, being able to switch out three abilities on every class (so, for instance, you could have !Mug instead of Attack) is a nice feature. For that matter, adding the passive abilities of every mastered class to any other class you take (rather than just Freelancer and Mime) gives more incentive to master classes earlier and focus on certain combination builds. The original game pretty much streamlines you into bouncing through classes to build your characters, then changing them all back into Freelancers for the endgame. For that matter, this replaces “stat floors” provided by mastered classes with stat bonuses based on the skills you equip. In the original game, you generally want everyone to master Monk, Thief and Black Mage (the classes with the highest stat floors) so that their final stats are maxed out. That incentive is gone in this system.
A bunch of classes were shuffled around to different crystals: Most notably, Monk was removed from the Wind Crystal but Time Mage, Summoner, Bard, Dragoon and Dancer were added. This makes the early load-out more varied but also more reliant on equipment and harder to cheese (giving someone the Monk’s Barehanded ability before turning them into a wizard was a classic early-game move). Bard was a very odd choice here, given that you can’t learn any songs until after the next Crystal anyway. The four bonus classes that were added to the Advance version of the game (which you normally can’t get until the last third of the game) were added to the normal crystal jobs. So you have a lot of variety for the majority of the game.
The transition from the fire-powered ship to the black chocobo is hilariously abrupt. I mean, the number of vehicles you run through over the course of this game is absurd to begin with (and that’s following FF4’s 3 airships, a hovercraft and two chocobo types), but the fact that the very first place I went with the fire-powered ship led to me losing it was just crazy. Fortunately, there don’t seem to be any places you can exclusively get to with that ship.
FF5 has such a weird place in my head, because I had played 4 and 6 to death by early high school, and my friend Dan got a copy of the Super Famicom cart and an adaptor, so my first experience with FF5 was playing it in Japanese with the entire script translation printed out on the bed next to me. I don't think I even made it to the third world. Then early in college I discovered emulation and fan translation patches, but I think I only played a little of it that way because the officially-translated PS1 version came out that same year. (And boy, that translation was...not great.) I played half of the PS1 version, then returned to the fan translation a year later. I did a LOT of grinding to master job classes, both times. It wasn't until I played the GBA version in 2006 that I really got the knack for focusing on classes I wanted to use and only grinding for skills/stat boosts I genuinely needed. (I think this hack actually increases the grinding again, because there’s so much variety it’s harder to focus.)
This game has never been my favorite, probably because I imprinted on the games that released in the US before it and it's so different from them in a bunch of ways. (Coming into 5 after playing 1, 4 and 6 but never seeing 3? It's jarring.) It does make sense, graphically and thematically, as a bridge between 4 and 6, but I never had the same love for it.
I think this game also depended very heavily on the hidden missables in a way that 4 didn’t and 6 backed away from: There are a lot of areas you can’t return to that have hidden items or spells that A) are very useful immediately after and B) remain useful through the endgame. Karnak Castle, which has a 10-minute countdown timer, has the Esuna spell and a Ribbon! Several bosses have blue magic—hell, there are random encounters only briefly available that have blue magic that you can only learn by controlling or confusing the monster! I find this frustrating, because it’s not enough to be completist; you have to be completist at the game’s set pace. (Honestly, there’s a design philosophy in jrpgs that started as “hey, let’s hide a few fun Easter eggs” and grew into “Let’s make all the best stuff missable in a tiny window unless you’re using a guide.” And I’ve always been grumpy about it.)
Overall: FF5 is a solid entry in Final Fantasy canon and I understand why some people really love it, but I don’t have the affection for it that I have for the games I played when I was younger. This hack adds variety but removes focus (and prevents you from easily being overpowered in the endgame), which means it’s an interesting change of pace but not necessarily an improvement and certainly not a replacement.
Talking Time reached this in the collective play-through/retrospective of the Final Fantasy series, and I haven’t played it since 2006, so I decided to give it another run through. I tried it with the Custom Classes hack to keep things interesting and perhaps add some extra variety. That hack allows every class to equip three abilities (like the Mime class) and Fight and Item aren’t required; it also changes the stat system so that which abilities you equip impact your stats.
The fact that the class-specific ability is in the first slot (rather than Attack, which is optional) is irritating. It makes it harder to speed through easy battles. That said, being able to switch out three abilities on every class (so, for instance, you could have !Mug instead of Attack) is a nice feature. For that matter, adding the passive abilities of every mastered class to any other class you take (rather than just Freelancer and Mime) gives more incentive to master classes earlier and focus on certain combination builds. The original game pretty much streamlines you into bouncing through classes to build your characters, then changing them all back into Freelancers for the endgame. For that matter, this replaces “stat floors” provided by mastered classes with stat bonuses based on the skills you equip. In the original game, you generally want everyone to master Monk, Thief and Black Mage (the classes with the highest stat floors) so that their final stats are maxed out. That incentive is gone in this system.
A bunch of classes were shuffled around to different crystals: Most notably, Monk was removed from the Wind Crystal but Time Mage, Summoner, Bard, Dragoon and Dancer were added. This makes the early load-out more varied but also more reliant on equipment and harder to cheese (giving someone the Monk’s Barehanded ability before turning them into a wizard was a classic early-game move). Bard was a very odd choice here, given that you can’t learn any songs until after the next Crystal anyway. The four bonus classes that were added to the Advance version of the game (which you normally can’t get until the last third of the game) were added to the normal crystal jobs. So you have a lot of variety for the majority of the game.
The transition from the fire-powered ship to the black chocobo is hilariously abrupt. I mean, the number of vehicles you run through over the course of this game is absurd to begin with (and that’s following FF4’s 3 airships, a hovercraft and two chocobo types), but the fact that the very first place I went with the fire-powered ship led to me losing it was just crazy. Fortunately, there don’t seem to be any places you can exclusively get to with that ship.
FF5 has such a weird place in my head, because I had played 4 and 6 to death by early high school, and my friend Dan got a copy of the Super Famicom cart and an adaptor, so my first experience with FF5 was playing it in Japanese with the entire script translation printed out on the bed next to me. I don't think I even made it to the third world. Then early in college I discovered emulation and fan translation patches, but I think I only played a little of it that way because the officially-translated PS1 version came out that same year. (And boy, that translation was...not great.) I played half of the PS1 version, then returned to the fan translation a year later. I did a LOT of grinding to master job classes, both times. It wasn't until I played the GBA version in 2006 that I really got the knack for focusing on classes I wanted to use and only grinding for skills/stat boosts I genuinely needed. (I think this hack actually increases the grinding again, because there’s so much variety it’s harder to focus.)
This game has never been my favorite, probably because I imprinted on the games that released in the US before it and it's so different from them in a bunch of ways. (Coming into 5 after playing 1, 4 and 6 but never seeing 3? It's jarring.) It does make sense, graphically and thematically, as a bridge between 4 and 6, but I never had the same love for it.
I think this game also depended very heavily on the hidden missables in a way that 4 didn’t and 6 backed away from: There are a lot of areas you can’t return to that have hidden items or spells that A) are very useful immediately after and B) remain useful through the endgame. Karnak Castle, which has a 10-minute countdown timer, has the Esuna spell and a Ribbon! Several bosses have blue magic—hell, there are random encounters only briefly available that have blue magic that you can only learn by controlling or confusing the monster! I find this frustrating, because it’s not enough to be completist; you have to be completist at the game’s set pace. (Honestly, there’s a design philosophy in jrpgs that started as “hey, let’s hide a few fun Easter eggs” and grew into “Let’s make all the best stuff missable in a tiny window unless you’re using a guide.” And I’ve always been grumpy about it.)
Overall: FF5 is a solid entry in Final Fantasy canon and I understand why some people really love it, but I don’t have the affection for it that I have for the games I played when I was younger. This hack adds variety but removes focus (and prevents you from easily being overpowered in the endgame), which means it’s an interesting change of pace but not necessarily an improvement and certainly not a replacement.
