By RoSoDude on May 30, 2024. Reproduced with permission.
RoSoDude’s recent FF work includes comprehensive ATB enhancement mods for FFIX, FFVI, and FFVII (TBA). When not modding FF, RoSoDude is a PC gamer obsessed with systems design, and he’s worked on extensive balance modifications for Deus Ex (GMDX), System Shock 2, Prey, and Pathologic, with future plans to create mods for Dying Light and other games. You can follow these and other projects via RoSoDude’s blog, Discord, or YouTube.
After my recent playthrough of Final Fantasy 6 (which I wrote about here) and my less recent playthrough of Final Fantasy 7 (which I wrote about here), I decided to jump right into Final Fantasy 5. What I found is a game that has some of the best character progression systems, battles, and level designs in the series I’ve yet played. While the story is probably the weakest of the three, its gameplay fundamentals are the strongest, with a higher degree of difficulty that promotes full engagement with exploration, encounters, and party customization.
The heart of FF5’s gameplay is its job system. Each player character starts as a freelancer, all with nearly identical stat distributions and the ability to equip any gear. Early into the game, the player is granted access to 6 job classes — the defensive knight, the bare-handed monk, the agile thief, the healing white mage, the offensive black mage, and the novel blue mage — and not long after acquires another 14 jobs in batches to choose from, including series staples like the jumping dragoon and the hybrid red mage as well as new additions like the weapon-enchanting mystic knight and the potion-mixing chemist. Equipping a job gives a bonus or penalty to the character’s main stats: strength increases physical attack damage, magic determines maximum MP and increases magical attack damage, agility modifies how quickly a character gets their turn in battle and increases attack damage for some weapon types, and stamina determines maximum HP. Each job has a signature command ability, such as white magic for casting healing and supportive spells, black magic for casting offensive spells, the thief’s steal ability, or the ninja’s ability to throw unwanted weapons or shurikens and magical scrolls from the inventory. Many jobs also have innate passive abilities, such as the knight’s ability to cover allies with low HP to absorb physical attacks, the monk’s ability to counter physical attacks, and the blue mage’s ability to learn enemy spells. In addition, as the party acquires ability points (AP) from battles, each job will level up, earning new abilities at every job level, which may be new active commands to use in battle or passive abilities like the ability to equip a job’s signature weapon type.
Simply having swappable character classes with linear power growth is not terribly interesting on its own. FF5’s job system injects significant depth and player expression by allowing the player to choose one ability they’ve acquired from any leveled job to go along with their equipped job, which allows for a wide degree of customization as the player upgrades jobs and unlocks new abilities to combine. Many abilities, particularly magic commands and the equip weapon type passives confer a stat bonus from the source job (proportional to job level for magic commands), such that equipping white magic on a knight allows them to cast healing spells more effectively, or equipping the monk’s bare-handed skill on a black mage allows them to attack effectively with fists. Moreover, the freelancer job inherits the stat bonuses and innate passive abilities of every job a character has fully mastered and can equip two abilities acquired from leveled jobs, and there is a final hidden job class that can forgo the standard fight and item commands to equip up to three abilities from leveled jobs (though it lacks the full gear selection of the freelancer). The result is a very flexible system that rewards investment but also promotes strategic adaption. If the player is struggling with a particular area or boss, rethinking their party setup by changing jobs, abilities, and equipment is more effective than grinding levels. At the same time, it is important to chart out a plan for leveling jobs to avoid spreading AP across jobs that won’t be useful for a character build. I ended the game with Bartz jumping on enemies for massive damage with dual-wielded spears enchanted with the defense-piercing flare spell, Lenna dualcasting powerful multi-target summons and potent white magic, Krile rapid attacking with katanas and throwing weapons, and Faris supporting the party with buffs from time magic, blue magic, and potion mixing. These represent some dominant strategies that emerged during my playthrough, however the number of viable strategies that are possible by combining various job abilities is practically uncountable.
Given the wealth of options available to the player, it is to the game’s credit that the enemies and bosses present a respectable level of challenge from start to end. Beyond just high HP and damage, the majority of bosses and even a great deal of the enemy encounters are designed with unique gimmicks that evolve over the course of the game. These range from simple ideas like shifting elemental weaknesses, casting status ailments on the party or counter-attacking when hit by physical damage, to more complex ideas like a multi-enemy boss that revives its allies if they are not all killed in the same turn to favor area of effect damage, or a boss that shifts between identical illusory copies every time it takes damage, counterattacking with powerful magic if it is struck by area of effect damage. Many foes are capable of using the same status buffs as the player, such as haste, shell, and reflect, which require strategy to work around, but more surprising is that a number of bosses can be affected by status ailments, rewarding experimentation and full use of character skillsets. Practically every boss has something that sets it apart from the others, and most of them will take a novice player several attempts to defeat, forcing them to re-evaluate their approach. A player who insists on sticking with the same party setup for the whole game will struggle, as FF5’s battles are more about adaptive strategy than building an all-purpose team that can handle everything. While other Final Fantasy games can be equally inventive in their enemy and boss designs, FF5 deserves special praise for its consistent difficulty curve that allows its expressive gameplay systems to shine. I sometimes see it stated as a truism that RPGs like Final Fantasy should be intentionally designed to be easy so that any character build can overcome the game lest the player be punished for experimentation, however FF5 is a confident counterargument to that proposition, as its faith in the player to learn and understand the game systems to achieve victory is what makes it such a great RPG.
Final Fantasy 5 is no slouch in level design, with a diverse set of dungeons full of mazes, traps, treasures, and puzzles. From a steam-powered ship with conveyer belts and one-way air ducts to an ancient library with shifting bookcases and enchanted tomes to a pyramid with shifting sands and spike traps, nearly every dungeon has a unique gameplay gimmick tied into its theme. The encounter rate is generally rather high, though it didn’t bother me as much as it sometimes did in FF6 or FF7, possibly due to the encounter designs in each area offering an engaging challenge and continuous character progression. There is no way to purchase MP-restoring ethers in the game’s first act so resource attrition in early dungeons is a real concern, and even basic enemy encounters can wipe the party if they don’t pay attention to status effects and enemy weaknesses. In addition to typical dungeons, FF5 also integrates light puzzle solving and exploration into towns and the overworld, hiding summons, gear, and even a final job in locations that a player will only find if they pay close attention to the world map and NPC dialogues. One of the best sequences of the game finds the player escaping from a castle on a timer — escaping in time is rather trivial, but in the disarray many treasure chests that were previously blocked off are now available, and so having a thief in the party with the ability to sprint and escape from encounters is virtually required to get all of the treasure. The thief and geomancer jobs are some of the more interesting ones in the context of level design, as they possess abilities that are useful in dungeon exploration rather than combat, recalling the game’s tabletop RPG roots.
The third act of Final Fantasy 5 allows the player to tackle a number of side objectives in any manner they like, or they can even rush to the final dungeon if they want to try it with a lower level party. I managed to find and overcome most of the game’s optional content, filling out all of my magic command lists and unlocking all 12 sealed weapons; attention paid to earlier dialogues, world layout, and story events really pays off here, along with thorough exploration. As in other Final Fantasy games, the last dungeon is a worthy gauntlet of tough enemies and 7 bosses before the ultimate confrontation, which offer a good test for the player’s party setup and opportunity to finish leveling some jobs. I was able to conquer one of the game’s 2 optional superbosses, Omega, with an exploitable strategy revolving around a hasted bard with the agility of a thief. The story of FF5 is mostly forgettable, matching a saturday morning cartoon in tone and thematic resonance, but its gameplay is some of the most solid that the series has to offer, and would be my first recommendation to anyone looking for an entry point into Japanese RPGs. Since the game was never released in English for the SNES, I recommend the Clean Edition patch, which bundles together the classic RPGe fan translation (with some revisions) with some bugfixes and interface improvements (like L+R working in menus, which was a godsend), as well as an optional version including the excellent Weapon Formula Tweaks hack.
[Editor’s note: for this article’s continuation that compares V to VI & VII, please visit RoSoDude’s blog.]
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