Final Fantasy V

"A slight dissapointment"

Being a now veteran of the series, I hadn’t yet played Final Fantasy V. It was always in the
store in the Anthology and I just kept walking by (broke!). Anyways, I got it for Christmas this
year and dove right into it when I got it. I was so happy putting it in and expected it to be as
good as the all the previous and later installments. When I put it in I was expecting fun with job
systems, classic gameplay. What I got was a boring job system that kinda disappointed me.
There were times in this game where it really felt like a chore to finish, but I did it, and I’m giving
you my unbiased review.

Gameplay: 7

Well, the job system was a disappointment. It just wasn’t fun. It took originality from the
characters and it also took too long to master them. I don’t see why people can talk about how
great it is, all I wanted to do was put the controller down. Other than the job system, there is the
basic gameplay elements present in all the other Final Fantasy titles. You’ve got familiar
summons like Shiva, Ifrit, Odin, Phoenix, Leviathan, Bahamut, and Ramuh. The summons all
look pretty cool and have some good animations. Going back to the subject of the boring job
system. All in all, it’s pretty complex. You get 21 jobs in all, each with their own special ability.
For example, the Summoner is able to summon monsters. You can learn certain abilities by
using certain jobs. The good thing is, if you gain these jobs, you can use them at any time
through the game with any other job. This gets tiring and pretty time consuming after a while
though. All in all, it gets a seven because of the bore of the job system.

Story: 6

Well, the story has some good points and MANY bad points. First off, let’s bash the villain,
X-Death. He had absolutely no personality. Jeez, it sounded like he was from the Power
Rangers or Superman. You know, the cheesy laugh and the cheesy dialogue. The story was
about crystals, simple as that. It seemed like, just when you got something fixed, or were finally
doing good on your journey, something bad would always side track you. It was very cliche and
got old after a bit. Cid and Mid helped out the story a bunch though. I mean, their names saved
the story alone. Cid and Mid, it’s fun just saying the names. Anyway, another cool part of the
story was the first appearance of Gilgamesh. He was easily the best villain in the game. He had
some cool music too. There were three worlds. Bartz’s world, Galuf’s world, and a world
which is a mix of the two worlds. Each one had it’s own story and was pretty cool. The story
was OK, but it was extremely repetitive.

Audio/Video: 9

Highlight of the game. It is usually the highlight of ALL Final Fantasy games. All of the tracks are
very good especially the evil theme (don’t know the name of the exact song). The theme where
someone evil would come. The songs in the towns are very good also. The graphics are good
overall. You can’t expect much from the SNES. I have no real complaints, and it shouldn’t stop
anyone from the 32-bit era from playing the game.

Replayability: 6

I might replay it to beat Shinryu and Omega someday, but for now, I really have no plans on
replaying this game anytime soon. I thought it dragged on and I had SOME fun but enough in
my book. I could NOT put the controller down while playing Final Fantasy 1, and you think I’d
get the same feeling from a later sequel. I was let down. Again, it all depends on how much you
enjoyed it the first time. The ending cinema is fantastic, and should be reason enough for you to
atleast beat the game once.

To Rent Or Buy:

Buy it if your a Final Fantasy die-hard. I always suggest buying Final Fantasy games regardless
of the quality. My reason for this is: If you rent a Final Fantasy game, you get so many days to
play it, and you probably won’t beat it. You need to play a whole game through to get the full
enjoyment of it and get your opinion. So shed the money and buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/11/01, Updated 05/27/01