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After sucessfully bringing the series into the 16-bit era, Square decided to go back to the "Light Warriors" story formula and even bring back the job system from Final Fantasy III. It's a very good game that constantly walks the thin line between "great" and "very good" because of some serious problems. Let's take a look:
The Story:
As I said before, this game goes back to the "Light Warriors versus Darkness" formula and it's the last and also the best use of that formula in the whole series. It starts with our protagonist Bartz, who's a traveler that lives his life freely riding his chocobo called Boco. One day, a meteor falls in a forest near where he's camping and he goes there to investigate. He finds a young girl named Lenna and an old man named Galuf who are trying to get to the Wind Shrine, which is apparently in danger. After meeting a pirate leader called Faris, they eventually reach the shrine, where they find out that they have been chosen by the crystals as the Light Warriors. The Wind Crystal gives them the ability to switch jobs at will and sends them on a mission to save the other crystals, because if they get destroyed the earth will fall out of balance. The story is great, mostly because of the characters. All of the main four characters have very well defined personalities and are well developed and the secondary cast is also very good. Even Boco gets a chance to shine as a character. My only problem is the villain. He wants to destroy the world because he's just evil and that's how he rolls. This would be fine in the NES games, but after FFIV it feels lacking.
Overall it's a good story with great characters.
7/10
The Gameplay:
This game takes the FFIV gameplay, fixes the "front row and back row" and inventory problems(Thank You) and adds a reimagined version of FFIII's job system.
First, the good: Thanks to the return of the job system, you now have a lot of control over your party's development. Each time you finish a battle, you get Ability points, which are basically Exp points for jobs. Each time a job levels up, you learn an ability that allows you to do something normally exclusive to that job while in other jobs. For example, if you level up your "Black Mage" job, you get the "Black" ability, which, if you equip it to a character, he/she can then cast black magic even if his/her current job is White Mage. You can only equip one ability at a time (Unless you get the best job in the game that allows 3 abilities at a time) so the player has to choose each character's job and ability to form the best party for each situation. This was also the first game in the series where you could equip acessories or relics as they were called in the SNES era. These are optional equipment items that give you an extra ability like preventing your character from status ailments.
Now, the bad: My big problem with this system is that it lacks limitations. Correct me if i'm wrong, but don't the "White" and "Black" abilities kind of make the "Red Mage" job useless? My point is that these abilities render most of the different jobs useless since you can just learn their abilities and never have to use those jobs again. This should be called the ability system because it's really more about the abilities, not the actual jobs. Also, some of these abilities are overpowered. There's an ability that allows a character to physically attack a monster four times in a single turn. Talk about holding the player's hand. The "capacity points" limitation is also gone, which means you can just switch jobs all the time if you want. My biggest problem is that you don't even have to be careful with how you level up. Every time you switch jobs, the character's stats immediately change accordingly so that you'll never have to worry about switching someone raised as a mage to a knight. All of these factors I just mentioned make the game disappointingly easy. This wouldn't be so bad if the battle difficulty was designed accordingly, but it isn't, as the monsters and bosses only get tough in the last third of the game. The main reason why I loved the job system in FFIII is because its limitations forced me to be smart and use the job system carefully.
Overall, though, the gameplay is still good. Despite the serious balance issues, the new job system still gives you a lot of control over character development.
6/10
The Music:
After two masterpieces, Uematsu falls back into "great" territory with this soundtrack. There are a lot of fantastic tracks, but some are kind of forgettable. It's still a great soundtrack that's more than up to the series standards, though.
8/10
The Graphics:
This game takes the graphical style of FFIV and adds a lot of detail to the environments. Monster design also reaches a new level of creativity. After being a debugger in FFIV, Tetsuya Nomura (Considered nowadays a Square legend) joined the monster design team. We also of course get more great character designs from Yoshitaka Amano (Reprising his role from the four previous games) and fantastic animations, resulting in a great looking game.
9/10
Overall, Final Fantasy V is a very good game brought down by unbalanced gameplay and a very low difficulty level.
Final Grade: 7.5/10
Join me next time when we take a look at the highest point of the series: Final Fantasy VI.
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