Final Fantasy V (5) was never brought to the stores in the United States and
was never translated officially by Square, but now it has returned in the Final
Fantasy Anthology. Both translated and with added FMV sequences. This is the
opening story line: "The world depended on the power of four particular crystals
- Wind, Earth, Water and Fire. With the power of Wind the people sailed the
ship, with Fire they began the industrial movement and so on all the crystals
had theor importance. One day the King of Tycoon felt that something strange was
bound to happen, he ran to the Wind Crystalīs shrine and when he got there he
found the Crystal shattering right before his eyes. A few moments after a meteor
fell down causing eartquaks in the surrounding area near Tycoon Castle, and then
the King mysteriously dissapeared. After this extraordinary happening four
people from different places got together by strange circumstances but with a
common goal, to bring back peace to the world."
Storyline Final
Fantasy V must be one of the biggest Final Fantasy games ever, you explore three
huge world maps and uncountable cities on your way to save the world from the
evil Ex-Death. Ex-Death is a villain, that is pure evil and with no real reason
for conquering the world and to enslave the people, but his own evil interests.
The worst lack by having a main villain with no real personal interests or
reason to be evil is that he gets quite un-characteristic but the good thing is
that he can be how evil and nasty the story writers want without any other
explanation but - thatīs just the way he is -. In the storyline lurks many
suprises and secrets, things might not be as they seem and you learn to not
trust anybody but yourself. You take controle over King Tycoonīs daughter, a
young hero named Butz, a pirate and a mysterious old man with amnesia. They all
are special and have their own personalities but it would have been fun with
some more to play with and a character gallery as big as the one in FFVI would
do this game good. The storyline get more and more focused on Ex-Death and his
goal to have controle over the world in the end but itīs at least better then in
FF8 where they not explain anything about the main villain. Rating:
92%
Gameplay The gameplay is the best and the worst part of
FFV. If you like the "job system" that is used in the game you will like it, but
if you like me donīt want to change around your characters abilities, clothes
and weapons all the time you will grow tired of it fast. Your party consists of
up to four heroes, you can select different jobs and when you select a job the
character changes clothes, abilities and he can only equip a few of your
collected weapons. New jobs are acquired by finding crystals of the four
elements, and each job have a limited offer of skills to be learned. The skills
can be everything from new attacks to gaining more HP or running faster.
Everytime a character gain a job level whis is done by battling she/he learns a
new skill or as they say in the game: ability. Sometimes the game seems to be
repeating itself, you walk around in the same citys and caves over and over
again but at the special moments of it you wake up from the boring dreamworld
and the game get better. The difficulty in the game is above average but at the
same time balanced and you must never relax because you can easily get
slaughtered in a normal monster fight. Itīs very unusual to defeat a boss on the
first try and some towers and caverns are really hard but both savepoints and
healing locations are well located and you know that Square never will forget
about evening out the odds when you are in a critical situation. The encounter
rate of enemies is at the line to be disturbing but itīs not much worse then in
Final Fantasy 4 or 6. The bosses are hard, some of them are that hard that you
have to try over and over again many times to beat them until you find a
solution to out smart them, you must have patient with this game because itīs
not easy. Raing: 87%
Music and Graphics The music are
not as good as the one in FF6 or FF7 but better then most games outside the FF
serie and a hell of a lot better then Final Fantasy 8. Final Fantasy V have sad
songs, powerfull songs and even pirate songs, otherwise the music has everything
as you could expect from a FF game. You could say that the theme for this game
is a more irish kind of music, youīll see what I mean when you listen to the
tunes of some of the villages. Graphics isnīt SNES games strongest side and this
is not a exception, but itīs good enough for me and you hopefully donīt play
RPGs for the graphics. The monsters look OK and the bosses arenīt that awful. I
actually prefer the map graphics of this game over the ones in FF7 and FF8, at
least it goes fast when you ride your airship here. Rating:
80% Overall Rating Itīs a decent game and it give you MUCH
playing for the money. At times itīs frustrating with all the random battles and
I donīt like the job system so I give it relative low overall rating compared
with FF6īs but itīs still a good game and I think that everybody should at least
give it a chance. Overall rating: 86%
Final Fantasy Insider
Coverage