This was a major step forward in the gameplay of the series. For the first time, I found myself seeking out random battles for the sole reason that it was fun. This absolutely carried the game.

This game has a long tradition: Four Job Fiesta. It’s part charity event (along the lines of Extra Life marathons) and part Nuzlocke style challenge run. Anyone can register for the event, which will display their progress through the game on the website. At each point in the game where you unlock new jobs, the website will tell you which of those new jobs you are allowed to play. Players have to be creative to solve the game’s various challenges while being limited in this way. It’s not uncommon to see people resort to strategies like permanently breaking pieces of equipment for big bursts of damage to kill bosses that are otherwise too difficult to kill with their selected jobs. For some extra fun, the most infamous, difficult to deal with job, Berserker, is weighted based on the total donations gathered by the event. The more people donate, the more Berserkers will be forced upon participants. Players can donate themselves to re-roll, but this causes the risk to continue to rise for everyone. It’s a cool event. One I may participate in now that I’ve finished the game once normally.

This is actually how I first discovered the Final Fantasy franchise. I’m sure I had heard the name before, but I never actually looked into the games behind the name until this moment. A YouTuber I watched started uploading a Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta series. I didn’t know what Final Fantasy was. I didn’t know what jobs were (in an RPG context). I certainly didn’t know what a fiesta of four of them meant. I looked into it, thought it was neat, and filed the thought away. I had no access to the Final Fantasy series at the time, and I wasn’t going to watch someone play a challenge run of a game I’d never played. Years later, it’s one of the first things I think of when I hear the name Final Fantasy. My brain autocompletes the “Four Job Fiesta” part afterwards.

I bring up all of this because I want to emphasize just how special the gameplay of Final Fantasy V is. The fact that we’ve got a community-loved charity event based around it that’s been going for decades now should indicate this.

Unfortunately, not everything in this game shines nearly as bright. In fact, this game kinda feels like two steps forward, one step back. I found almost everything else to be worse than FFIV—not so terrible that it significantly impacted my enjoyment of the game, but definitely noticeable. The things that made IV great and the things that made V great are unfortunately incompatible.

I’m noticing a trend in the series so far. FFI, FFIII, and FFV are more similar to each other than FFII and FFIV are. I wonder if this was an intentional design direction, or if it was caused by a pendulum of feedback from the community: “This one is fun, but we want more story focus!”, “The story was good, but make it more fun!” back and forth. So far, the even games have had much stronger stories¹, and the odd games have had stronger gameplay. The even games have been more serious, and the odd games have been more lighthearted.

This has been the strongest swing of the pendulum so far.

The Review#↑

Audio & Visuals#↑

Once again, see my thoughts on the Pixel Remasters for general notes about how these games look and feel. I’ll focus on the stuff unique to this game.

I didn’t enjoy the artistic side of this game nearly as much as FFIV.

The music was good. Better than FFI and FFII, but not nearly as good as FFIV. There were a few standouts though, such as the generic boss battle theme and villain’s theme.

The pixel art was also… mixed, for me. The character designs of the main cast didn’t really resonate with me. Though, some of the job sprites were very good. The main cast’s story sprites just have these bright, seemingly randomly selected colors that clash with the environments and even themselves. The job sprites are (mostly) much, much better looking and fit in with the rest of the game more. Environmental art was really good though.

Another thing the developers clearly focused on this time was expressiveness. Unfortunately, I think they took it a little bit too far. I liked what FFIV had going on. The animations weren’t sophisticated, but they got the point across easily. For FFV, all expressions were blown up to comical, cartoonish proportions. Character’s eyes would pop out of their skulls or turn into hearts. They’d do extremely energetic double fist pumps and flying kick animations all the time. Everything was as goofy as possible. It felt like this game was designed like a saturday-morning cartoon. It made it really hard for me to take anything seriously. I love some comic relief, but this was all comedy. I found myself needing relief from the relentless comedy instead.

Story#↑

Skip to Gameplay if you want to avoid spoilers.

As alluded to in the previous entry, this was an extremely goofy, saturday-morning-cartoon story.

Bartz, why did you and your companions risk everything, completely unprompted?

Exdeath was a character fitting such a silly name. He was evil. That was the entire personality. Why did he do what he did? He’s evil! Did anything drive him to evil? No, he’s just evil! Okay, but like, is there a second personality trait, or…? Sometimes, he’s also overconfident!

Literally every character was written like this. Bartz wasn’t really brave, just too dumb to understand danger. Galuf was the angriest old man. Lenna was a horse dragon girl. Faris’s gender was pirate (based).

Everyone gets 1 (one) personality trait. There is no character development. You just see these traits on display on repeat in different circumstances. Sometimes those circumstances aren’t really even that different. Here’s the third time Lenna poisons herself to save a dragon’s life. Here’s the fifth time Faris shows she hates acting/looking like a princess.

It’s tiring. It not only made the characters feel dull, it made the pacing suffer due to all the repeated filler. Yes, we have to see Galuf get angry at the young “whippersnappers” again after the made the same “lmao old” joke for the 7th time. I assure you, dear player, it’s very important.

I did like some of the grander elements of the story though. The split/merged world concept is really neat. Krile eventually replacing Galuf and inheriting his abilities was a cool moment. Gilgamesh was excellent, and would have been all the comic relief the game needed on his own. Walking through the rift at the end was cool! It’s a shame that the cool stuff got drowned in cartoon writing.

Gameplay#↑

Now this is where FFV really shines.

The ATB system from FFIV is back, but it feels even more manageable this time. The party size is one smaller, so you have fewer plates spinning. The animation delays and the speed of the ATB bars have been tweaked so that everything is a little smoother. In general, it felt more like I was in control and less like the battle was progressively slipping out of my grasp.

A small note on progression before I get into the big stuff: I appreciated the balance between previous FF games magic systems. This game uses mana instead of spell slots, like FFIV. Unlike FFIV, however, you don’t learn spells automatically upon leveling up. Thankfully, you don’t have to re-purchase every spell for each character that may want it. A single purchase unlocks each spell for anyone in your party who has the ability to cast it. I like this because it means money is still relevant for casters. Getting to a town and visiting the magic shop(s) to see what new spells I can buy is far more exciting than increasing my damage/defense by a few percent by swapping out equipment. At the same time, it allows me maximum party flexibility. I can make as many characters healers as I want just by equipping the relevant jobs, and all will have full access to my library of spells.

Now, onto the good stuff:

The Job System#↑

This is what really set the gameplay apart, and what made the Four Job Fiesta possible in the first place.

At the start of the game, you have access to only the Freelancer job. It’s essentially a generic job. It can possibly do anything, but it’s not very good at it (for now). Over time, story events will grant you access to new jobs. You can switch them freely for all of your characters out of combat. This part is very similar to FFIII (and FFIII’s job system was one of my favorite parts of that game, so that’s a very good sign).

The big upgrade over FFIII is how you can blend jobs together. As you play with jobs equipped, you level them up. Each level a job gains gives you a bit of a stat boost while that job is equipped, as well as unlocking a new ability and/or mastering an existing ability. Mastered abilities are unlocked for other jobs. You can only equip one at a time, but that one ability slot amounts to a surprising amount of playstyle customization—especially since you can swap them at any time out of combat. Some of those abilities are passive, and some are active. The passive ones tend to also come with some stat bonuses.

For example, I may not always want to spend mana for my casters to deal some damage. It’s often overkill to hit that random wolf at 10% hp with one of my precious spells. Instead, I can get a few levels in monk on each character, and then I can equip the “Barehanded” ability. This gives each character the strength and health stats as if they were a monk, and allows them to punch for high damage. So now, all of my casters will deal decent melee damage in a pinch, and get a bit tankier as a bonus.

I wanted to add some more support spells to my White Mage, but I didn’t want to lose access to healing. So, I equipped the Time Mage with the ability to cast White Magic, unlocked through already having mastered White Mage on that character. Now I’ve got a character that can do support and healing!

The Mystic Knight can empower its blade with spells, but this takes an additional turn to set up and doesn’t really pay off in damage. The primary benefit usually is that you aren’t technically casting a spell on the enemy, so it can’t be reflected. However, giving my Mystic Knight a few levels in Ranger grants it access to the Rapid Fire ability, which strikes 4 times at half damage each. This is strong on its own, but in combination with the Spellblade ability, only the physical damage is halved for each of the attacks. So it effectively quadruples the spell damage.

The possibilities are endless. There are a ton of cool combinations for combat.

It goes beyond combat too! Some jobs have passive abilities for exploration and utility. For example, The Mystic Knight can cast defensive spells on themself automatically when at low HP. The Thief can spot hidden passages in the world. The geomancer can spot pitfalls and traps. The Thief can improve your movement speed on the map. The Chemist buffs every consumable item they use (great for topping up the mana of other characters by using Ethers). These passives are really useful, and I swapped between them constantly depending on the situation.

Everything changes once again in the endgame. That Freelancer job you start with has a secret: It automatically equips every passive you’ve unlocked for that character. It also has two active ability slots, you can make it a blend of two other jobs. Since passive abilities also come with stat boosts, this means the Freelancer gets better and better stats the more other jobs you’ve mastered. It doesn’t stack, but rather takes the highest boost to each stat possible from your mastered jobs. It feels awesome. It feels like these characters are really mastering their crafts. They’re still specialized and unique, but given more power by all the experimentation you did along the way. So you’re not punished for trying out more playstyles, you’re rewarded!

There’s also a Mimic job, which functions similarly to the Freelancer. It’s better for mages, as it can equip three types of magic, but loses access to some other functions in trade. Freelancers tend to be a bit better for physical fighters. It was really cool having three types of magic on each character. There are so many types of magic in this game, and it’s nice to actually use all of them in the endgame. The Mimic also gets a “Mimic” ability, which repeats the last used action in this battle. This got really silly when I used the Red Mage’s Dual Cast ability to twin-summon Bahamut, one of the strongest spells in the game, and then had the rest of my party Mimic this.

This job system really made me enjoy getting into random encounters, to the point that I often sought them out. It gave me that “just one more fight” feeling. Every job levels up at a different rate, and some are very short detours in your character progression. So my characters rapidly got out of sync on job levels, but that was a good thing! It meant that every other battle, something would change in some way. My Samurai got a new badass ability. My Geomancer just finished leveling and I can equip a new job on that character. My usual healer just got to the level of Monk that they can punch things now, so I can swap back to White Mage! It’s a constant cycle of new elements being added to the combat sandbox, and new strategies opening up. It’s the most engaged I’ve been with an RPG’s leveling system, maybe ever? It’s good.

Blue Magic#↑

This game introduced the Blue Mage job. You can’t purchase spells for it like the other casting jobs. You also can’t go on quests to earn big spells like Summoner does. Instead, this Job has a mini-progression system all for itself. While having the job equipped (or the passive “Learning”), being hit by certain enemy spells adds them to your Blue Magic spell list. This could be anything from a standard damage spell, to a heal, to something that completely steps outside of the usual magic system. Some of the craziest spells are on this list. For example, Level 5 Death will instantly kill any target with a level divisible by 5, even bosses! There are other spells you can learn to modify enemy levels to manipulate them into being valid targets for this. That’s just one tool in the massive toolkit Blue Mage offers. It’s by far the most varied, versatile, and powerful spellcaster in the game—it just takes more effort to build it up.

Oh man, I did not expect to like this as much as I did.

The spells are so cool and powerful that I wanted to gather them all. Every zone, I looked up what spells I could earn, and I tracked them down relentlessly. Some spells required using other jobs to set up the Blue Mage for success. For example, an enemy won’t usually cast a heal on you, but if you can temporarily get them on your side, you can force them to do just that!

It’s a really interesting, iconic system. It made me enjoy exploring even more, and it gave me yet another source of progression to make the happy brain chemicals go brrr.

Quests!#↑

Something of a smaller note, but I loved the sidequests.

There’s this moment near the end of the game where you are told to go collect 12 legendary weapons. You can collect them in any order. The story is pretty much halted at this time, which is a bummer—but this was still a fun quest to tackle. Getting those weapons really increased the power of my party. So I prioritized getting the ones that would benefit me most. I then prioritized the weapons that I could equip on the jobs I’d want to level soon, feeding back into the excellent progression systems even more.

Final Thoughts#↑

Rating: 8/10
Playtime: 17 hours

I really liked this one. The only thing that held it back was the story. It was just a little too goofy for me. I’m sure some people hold this up as their favorite story due to that tone, and they aren’t wrong for that. It’s just not for me personally.

Even with the story that didn’t appeal to me, I thoroughly enjoyed my playtime. The gameplay really carried it, and I recommend it for that experience alone.

Next Up#↑

Final Fantasy VI! Very excited for this one. It’s back to the serious, story-driven style that I prefer. It’s consistently one of the highest reviewed titles in the entire series. It tops almost every “best Final Fantasy” list I’ve found. It’s generally more beloved than even the community’s darling FFVII. Everyone claims this is because it has a truly remarkable and unforgettable story. Will it live up to the hype? Will I enjoy it as much as seemingly everyone else?

As always, please look forward to it.