Not exactly limiting yourself that much if you were permitting Rapid Fire. In fact, it's almost certainly the more busted ability over Spellblade, even if Ranger is a more mediocre job than Magic Fencer (or whatever we're calling it, localizers can't decide).
GAMEPLAY: I'm using a SNES ROM with that 1998 RPGe fan translation. It’s pretty good, though, it keeps the jokes. But half the equipment and abilities have completely different names from the versions everyone actually knows. The translation calls Freelancer “Jobless.” I can relate to Bartz. We're both sad and underemployed. Turns out Ghido’s actually a chill dude in this version. The GBA one made him into a miserable old cunt.
The intro is pretty long if you just wanna boot up and start learning. After like 30 minutes they hit you with the first crystal and a bunch of jobs, most of them straight out of the original Final Fantasy for NES.(Red Mage should've been a Wind Crystal job though, come on.)
They give you Blue Mage right away. First in the series. You get to learn enemy skills immediately. The tutorial house even gives you Goblin Punch. "Here’s how !Blue works" [Goblin punches me in the nuts.]
Tule is a great 'first town'. Faris isn’t even in the party yet and she just runs into the shop like “equip me, bitch.” That’s how my ex did it. The game’s like “yeah she’s one of us, give her a sword.”
Any combination of jobs will carry you through to the end. The first world is stingy with AP. This is done on purpose so you can't master anything. By third world you are drowning an AP. To the game's credit I managed to master Mime and learn Doublecast without doing much. I just completed all the side quests.
This is the "boss game," by the way. So many bosses, and most of them have unique field and battle sprites. Half the fun is trying to figure out job combos that kill them in two turns. A few jobs are almost mandatory, obviously: Geomancer saves the day in the false floor caves. Bard is piss-easy to master (only three levels) and their Requiem song trivializes chunks of the game. Thief is complete dogshit. Steal is the worst mechanic in the series. You get a Reset spell so you can reload the fight if you mug the wrong item, but you’re still sitting there for twenty minutes trying to steal one Coral Ring and failing. Locke in VI was the same. Is Rikku the only competent thief?
The difficulty in the game is all over the place, but I wouldn't say it's overly hard or overly easy. Certain enemies will kick your teeth in because you won't see them coming and they have nasty surprises up their sleeves. Some bosses transform into different enemies mid-fight. The SNES hardware wasn't quite up to the task so the game script will replace them with an entirely new enemy to pretend they're "evolving" or teleporting.
V's other gimmick is the two different worlds merging into one, like maps superimposed over each other. Bartz's world is easy to navigate because Castle Tycoon is sitting in the middle like Midgar or Corneria. Galuf's world is a pain in the ass because there is no airship to fly over mountains. I do like that Bartz's atlas automatically changes when his world collides with Galuf's world, though. The map is telepathic I guess. The third world looks like my apartment when I don't clean it. The landmarks are completely fucked up because the old locations have become unglued by the Void. You need to use a combination of the airship and gold and black chocobos to reach everything. It's supposed to be confusing and it delivers.
Neo Exdeath is a bunch of bosses testing you on every job like a final exam. You gotta kill this sleep paralysis demon quick before he does Grand Cross and wipes your whole party. It’s tense. 9/10
STORY: The plot of V is paper thin, as you probably know. They front-loaded the budget into the job system and enemies having weird counters for every autistic thing you can do. The plot’s whatever. It’s fine. Each characters gets their little moments. Bartz is the hot-headed oaf, Lenna keeps eating grass and making herself ill (happens twice). Galuf’s the lovable scoundrel, Faris is the tomboy princess. My only real complaint is that everybody’s a little too angsty, but at least they’ve got actual reasons. I’m glad some loved ones stay dead instead of like Final Fantasy IV where every other death scene is meaningless because nobody's ever really gone.
The concept of Exdeath (should’ve kept the name Exodus, that was better) is pretty interesting. It’s a spin on the sealed evil warlord who immediately starts wrecking shit again. The logistics are fuzzy, though. A team of twelve warriors fought this demon lord back in the day. You can even go to the Sealed Castle and grab all their iconic weapons. The crystals get jammed into the plot pretty arbitrarily like always. They’re soul prisons, they seal Exdeath, there’s two sets of crystals because... reasons. He could’ve just smashed the crystals on Galuf's world the first time but I guess he forgot, like forgetting to pull out. Then he possesses random assholes to break the crystals on Bartz's world. And we never even get to see the actual prison. It’s supposedly in some forest north of Tule but you can’t go there. It’s just a generic forest. So basically the whole first act is one big fetch quest where Exdeath gets released, all the crystals get smashed, and not much happens until Krile crashes in on a meteor, fixes Galuf’s amnesia, and Cid starts handing out better ships.
Speaking of meteors...Galuf rides one to get to Bartz’s world, but at the end of the first act he just gets beamed back like it’s Star Trek. The meteor stays put. Then three more meteors fall near the other crystals, a werewolf shows up, some soldier from Castle Bal shows up… did they all rise separate meteors? Was Krile on the Ronka meteor? It’s convenient as hell that four different meteors all land right when the crystals break and every single one of them fails at their job. I think they just put a meteor in the opening because it looked cool and raised a question they never bothered answering.
That said, I actually like Exdeath’s goal. He doesn’t want to rule anything, he built a castle just because it makes collecting the crystals easier. Galuf’s world is great. His old crew, the Dawn Warriors, all show up and die one by one trying to subdue Exdeath. Xezat’s death is a rough watch. Then Galuf himself dies and it just bluntly says “Galuf has died” in the box. No “X has left the party”. Hits different.It’s clearly riffing on Tellah’s sacrifice in FF4, but where Tellah does it out of pure hate, Galuf does it out of love. Nice touch.
The game ends on a pretty upbeat note. The surviving crew keeps adventuring together, they roll a little montage of all the funny and sad moments, and roll credits. 6/10
GRAPHICS: V is basically a victory lap for everything Square did in the 8-bit and early 16-bit games. This is the last time we see a town called Crescent, two types of chocobos show up (you’ll be forgiven for forgetting VI even had them), and they even squeeze in a cameo from the dwarves. The ending has a Mode 7 flying sequence in preparation for VI. I first played the Anthology version so I was surprised the SNES original also does that cool zoom-in on each character when it lists all the abilities they mastered and the EXP tally
Amano’s influence is starting to creep into the monster designs, especially the humanoid ones. VI will go in a more baroque direction, but here it’s mostly contained to ninjas and slutty sirens. Some of the boss designs are very elaborate though, and I’m glad they didn’t rely too heavily on palette swaps.
The job system is a double-edged sword because every job needs to be readable, so the four main heroes have to stay super generic, which means Amano’s character designs are wasted on them. It's a shame.bexause really like Faris’s blonde look, which feels like a prototype for Setzer. But in my head she’ll always be that purple-haired chick in the green scarf. King Tycoon’s armor and winged helmet are excellent, and Exdeath looks like a warlock who can suplex you.
Environments are hit or miss. They do some creative stuff with the Wind Shrine tileset to turn it into an Egyptian-style pyramid covered in vines. But if you do the full Sealed Castle sidequest you’re gonna get real sick of that same Wind Shrine background. The Fork Tower is a big letdown not just because it looks bland but the “split the party into magic users and physical attackers” gimmick is pointless. Enemies only become dangerous when they mix both types. Fanatics Tower and Phoenix Cave did this a lot better.
I’m pretty sure Square made the Void the final dungeon just so they could asset-flip a bunch of old locations, but at least they rearrange them in this surreal, disorienting way (kind of like Cyan’s nightmare in Doma Castle). Castles in the sky and all that.
Town design is pretty uninspired overall. Karnak is the exception, that place is literally on fire and melting. I couldn't tell the other towns apart without the text box reading me the name. The water wheel looks neat, at least.
I do like that all of the castles have secrets that even people living there don’t know about: hidden passages, libraries with books you have to rearrange, that kind of thing. Very FFIV. And Square was clearly proud of the Wind Drake sprite and sound effect because they reuse it constantly. 8/10
SOUND: The town theme in V is one of the best in the series, man. I love everything about it, especially those first few lute notes when you walk in. The main battle theme is super enthusiastic without driving you insane (unless you’re farming items, then it becomes torture.)
Lenna’s theme is this melancholy remix of “Ahead on Our Way,” the main title theme. They do a bunch of different variations of that melody throughout the game and I like all of them. Bartz’s world theme is very can-do and optimistic, that rolling rum-tum drumbeat makes it feel like your party is marching forward with purpose. Galuf’s world feels like actual uncharted wilderness, and paired with the darker color palette on the mountains and oceans, it really sells the idea that this place is still recovering from Exdeath’s rampage. When you get dropped back at Tycoon Castle in the third world it starts playing the normal first world theme again, so at first you don’t really register how scrambled everything is. Then Exdeath starts swallowing entire towns with that lame hexagonal Void effect and the music switches to something closer to “Searching for Friends” from VI.
The Sealed Castle, where all the ultimate weapons are stashed, has this creepy, almost Sephiroth-adjacent theme that lets you know right away you shouldn’t be there.
The final dungeon theme is proper encouraging, and the Neo Exdeath fight has similar energy to the Zeromus battle, complete with the psychedelic tunnel background. 10/10
Amano’s influence is starting to creep into the monster designs, especially the humanoid ones. VI will go in a more baroque direction, but here it’s mostly contained to ninjas and slutty sirens. Some of the boss designs are very elaborate though, and I’m glad they didn’t rely too heavily on palette swaps.
Starting? Amano designed most of the enemies in the really early FFs. Actually, it was V where Nomura's influence started creeping in because he was charge of drawing the battle sprites and he designed a lot of monsters. In fact, that boss you posted, Mellusine, has her final sprite closer to Nomura's take on her than Amano's.
(Red Mage should've been a Wind Crystal job though, come on.)
It’s clearly riffing on Tellah’s sacrifice in FF4, but where Tellah does it out of pure hate, Galuf does it out of love. Nice touch.
