Final Fantasy V Advance

Screenshots

Notes

This one was a long time coming. I had a lot of life stuff distracting me and the game itself is quite long.

Final Fantasy V Advance is a port of the original Final Fantasy V for the SNES. This is one of the titles that never originally got translated and brought to the west on the SNES. It made its western debut on the PS1 before later appearing on the GBA.

FFV is a typical Final Fantasy game of its time. The art style, combat system, and grand plot spanning multiple worlds are all similar ideas that we iterated on throughout FF3-6, before FF7 which made the jump to 3D but kept a lot of the older ideas.

The story is reasonably good, typical Final Fantasy stuff. You play as 4 heroes who come together and realise they are destined to save the world, initially trying to stop the 4 elemental crystals from shattering, but then change to trying to stop Exdeath, a kind of aggregation of evil who was previously sealed in a void between worlds. Over the course of the story you learn a lot about the characters, and that they all have connections to the crystals which weren't immediately obvious. This is all handled fairly well.

The gameplay uses the "ATB system" which a lot of the FF games around this time use; it's a kind of semi-real time semi-turn based system, where you wait for a meter to fill before taking your turn. On your turn you can do the usual attacks, magic, special moves etc.

The unique feature is the job system, which allows you to choose a "job" (most other games would call this a class) for each part member. Each character levels up in their chosen job over time, separately from their main XP level, learning new skills. A similar system was in Final Fantasy 3, and has later appeared in other games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. One oddity is that spells are still bought from shops, so even if you level up the magic classes early on they won't learn more powerful spells.

I do have some issues with the game though:

1) Length. I felt the game was a bit over long and got fatigued in the third act. I ended up putting down the game for a long time before finally pushing through and finishing it.

2) Weird balance. The combat balance is strange, some jobs are way more useful than others. Time Magic is almost mandatory due to haste(ga), which is arguably the best spell in the game. There are a lot of weird things in the game, like spells that instakill your characters if they are at certain XP levels. Near the end you get a job with an ability that has a good chance of dealing 9999 damage, with any character, any equipment, and no MP/resource cost. I could go on for a while about stuff like this.

3) Unclear signposting of where to go/what to do. Often I found myself wandering the world map without a good idea where to go. This is exacerbated by the constant changing of what vehicles you have available, and so what places you can get to. I looked up stuff in a walkthrough after coming back to the game.

4) Excessive encounter rate. It really sucked the fun out of exploration. Even worse, near the end there are reasons to revisit old dungeons, but they have the same (now incredibly weak) enemies that still spawn constantly, making these return visits an annoying slog with no challenge.

5) Missed potential in the Job system. You can equip one job and one other skill from any that you've unlocked. This ends up being very limiting, especially as in jobs with multiple active abilities, you must equip them in that one slot to actually use them. I really felt that some kind of points-based system allowing you deeper customisation would have been a lot more fun, which is what they introduced in some later titles.



Overall, I really enjoyed the first 2/3rds of the game but felt that it fell apart in the final world.