Die Tree, Die!

Game Over, 5!

Final Fantasy V on the SNES was never released in the US for the cited reason of being too difficult for US audiences. Despite the obvious condescension in this statement, I have to agree. This game is brutally difficult, particularly by the end. The game actively fights against grinding which is both good and bad for you.

Along with the standard levels, and probably more important overall, you have to level up each job individually. There is no penalty for switching jobs and doing so is encouraged. Leveling up the jobs doesn't improve your stats and actually, has very little benefit to that job at all. Instead, Job Levels provide you with access to that job's abilities while using other jobs. The more job levels, the stronger abilities you gain from that job.

This provides an extremely satisfying game of mix and match. Maybe you like your Red Mage to have access to Dimensional Magic (Time Magic) as well or maybe you want to specialize and have a Black Mage with full White Mage spells. If you level up Ninja, you can give your Knight the ability to dual wield two of the strongest swords in the game or the ability to dodge like a Samurai.

The possibilities are endless and immensely entertaining. Coming up with new combinations for each character and the party as a whole is easily the most fun aspect of all five Final Fantasy games so far.

It's everything else that makes Final Fantasy V a far worse experience than it could be. I'm all for hard games but there's a difference between challenging and just unfair. Challenging is when you face severe risk but using your intelligence and quick thinking, you can come up on top. Unfair is having enemies with a spell that kills you if you're the wrong level. Sure you could get lucky and simply not be affected by this. In fact, odds are you will be lucky. But luck shouldn't have anything to do with it. Other enemies will be able to absorb various elemental damage. This is fine for magic but by the end of the game, most weapons have an elemental affiliation and most aren't plainly expressed anywhere. Why does that make sense that a dagger to the gut would somehow heal an enemy rather than kill it? When you play against the risk of losing hours of gameplay with enemies that can kill your whole party the second the match starts or those enemies will be immune to your attacks, it stops making that risk worth it. 

Enemies also provide a ridiculously low reward relative to their difficulty. Sometimes you will face unbearably hard bosses who provide you with 0 gold or EXP while you'll fight a couple easy enemies that will give you thousands. It doesn't seem to make any sense but it always errs on the side of less. It's no coincidence that many of the top forum topics for this game are finding good areas to grind job levels.

Check out my last post to see my evaluation of the storyline. To summarize, the game doesn't get any better later. In fact, the ultimate goal of Exdeath, to flood the world with monsters, is perhaps the most cliche storyline in existence. Not only that but even this doesn't make sense by the games own logic. All of the big bad monsters have been stuck in the Void. Exdeath wants to free all of the monsters from the Void. To do this, he reunites the world which will bring the Void into the real world. To prevent anyone from stopping him, he brings everyone else into the Void. You recognize the problem here? All of the people who can stop the monsters are being brought to the monster's location. Even if Exdeath succeeds, it just moves everyone back outside. Nothing really seems to change...

And Exdeath is still a giant evil tree.

Don't get me wrong, the game isn't terrible. It's vicious and the story sucks but the job system literally makes the game entirely worth playing. The sense of satisfaction from getting the perfect combination of jobs and abilities is a lot of fun. The game isn't as strong as IV but the jobs alone beat out the NES trilogy.

Game Rankings:

Final Fantasy II < Final Fantasy Adventure < Final Fantasy < Final Fantasy III < Final Fantasy V < Final Fantasy IV

Game on!