Final Fantasy V (1992)

My FF playthrough continues. I first played FFV on the FF Anthology for PS1 back in the day. I got in to FF like many folks playing VII and wanted to go back and try the earlier games. Suffice to say, I was in for a rude awakening thinking V and VI would look anything like VII. I tried playing them nonetheless but never could make it too far.

Fast forward to now, I've beaten I-IV and love FF more than ever. With that experience under my belt, V seems like a reprise of III at first. The job system makes a return, but this time with much greater depth. I'm just now grasping at around 15 hours in that I can master jobs and make a subset of their abilities and stats available to the freelancer job. I haven't mastered many jobs at this point and there still seems to be a fair bit of trial and error to get an effective party together that compliment each other properly. All the same, it is great fun. The encounter rate and random battles continue to be my main gripe with the series. Seriously, it'd be nice if there were more romhacks to fix that especially in the older games. But, you get used to it. And playing FF for me is like comfort-food at this point. I can just chill, zone out, but still keep my brain active enough planning out each character's turn. I tried playing the multiplayer a bit with my son having him control two characters and me two characters, but he tends to prefer watching over playing at his age, especially with how challenging some of the encounters can get.

So far, I love this game's story and humor, even if technically and aesthetically it hardly seems an improvement over IV. And narrative-wise and gameplay-wise it is a nice change of pace from IV which was much more narratively dense but lighter in gameplay complexity. I enjoy it much like I enjoyed III. It has quick, good pacing, always has you doing something interesting, and you are rarely at a loss of where to go or what to do. The hardest part is managing your jobs and abilities since you have so many choices at your disposal. Uematsu's soundtrack is excellent and I don't really tire of it. By this point, him, Sakaguchi, Ito, and Amano practically feel like family. The marks each of them made on these epics is palpable.

Unfortunately, I can't get good screenshots of this game. I get a weird graphical bug in the menus on SNES9X, so I've been playing on BSNES which has a weird issue when taking screenshots in Retroarch (with GPU SC off) where it has issues with any green in the shot (which is common).

Beat the SNES version on emulator back in the 90s. I later got the PlayStation version but never played it. This is a game that I would like to play through again at some point but I will probably do the GBA version because of its bonus features.

Bartz was a paladin for most of the game; that being a knight with white magic. I also experimented with magic knight. Reina was a white mage summoner, Kriley was a black time mage and Faris was a ninja thief dancer. I may have experimented with some of the other jobs but honestly cannot remember.

5 is a great game that is near the bottom of the Final Fantasy list; being just above 13 and the NES games. It is very lackluster compared to 4 and 6. The best part of the game was the job system which is superior to that of 3. Other than that the entire game was fairly generic and felt like it had been done before in the other Final Fantasies. But generic for a Final Fantasy game ends up being great compared to other games.

I am very excited to be participating in the Four Job Fiesta this year. It's a charity event benefiting Child's Play in which participants play through Final Fantasy 5 with a specialized set of challenge rules. Since FF5 is one of my all-time favorite RPGs, I couldn't be more thrilled to revisit it while also supporting a great cause!

The Gameplay:

Normally in Final Fantasy 5, each time the party reaches one of the four elemental crystals (Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth), a new set of character classes is unlocked. Effectively mixing, matching, and swapping classes is a major part of the strategy, and that's where the rules of the Four Job Fiesta throw in a monkey wrench. When playing for the Fiesta, players are restricted to using only one randomly selected class per crystal. Being limited to using only 4 of the 21 possible classes throughout the entire game radically changes the way players approach battles and increases the difficulty. Fiesta participants have from June 19th through August 31st to complete their runs through the FF5.

The Charity:

The Four Job Fiesta benefits the Child's Play Charity. This organization seeks to improve the quality of life of children in hospitals and domestic abuse shelters by providing them with games and toys. The Fiesta raises funds for the charity in three ways:

1. Players pledge an amount of money based on certain conditions of their play-through(s)
2. Supporters and spectators can pledge money to sponsor the participants of their choosing (similar to a charity marathon)
3. Players who find themselves in a bind with their randomly selected character classes can re-roll their classes in exchange for a donation

My Participation:

I will be starting my run on June 19th and periodically streaming my play-through on Twitch. I will also be posting status updates and screenshots on Twitter and this blog throughout my run, especially after major in-game milestones.

For my charitable pledge, I will be donating $1 per level of my highest level character when I finish the game (e.g. if my strongest character is level 50 when I beat the final boss, I will donate $50). In the event I fail to finish the game before the end of the Fiesta, I will donate double my strongest character's level (e.g. $70 if my strongest character is level 35 at the end of the Fiesta).

My Auction:

As I announced last night on my Twitch channel, I am auctioning off the naming rights to my player character (whose default name is Bartz). If you would like to place a bid to be the one to name my character, please send me a tweet. I will close the auction and contact the highest bidder at 11 PM EDT on June 18th. Opening bids start at $5 US. Upon confirmation that the donation to Child's Play has been made, Bartz's new name shall be whatever the highest bidder desires! After the end of the auction, anyone who donates or pledges to sponsor my run will be added to the Special Thanks section of my Four Job Fiesta blog posts. Of course, donors are welcome to remain anonymous if they'd prefer.

Note: I won't be able to accept blatantly profane names since the character name will be appearing in screenshots and on my Twitch stream, but other than that, I invite whatever humorous, unique, or creative names the auction winner can think of.

For more information, to sign up to participate, or to make a charitable donation, please visit fourjobfiesta.com. If you have any questions you'd like to ask me directly, please contact me via my Twitter page.

really liking this. so far it's my favorite FF. It's fun to play and grinding is abosolved of some of the pain due to jobs system (you can swap jobs so if you get bored of something you mix it up and level up another job) Also it's much more well done than the III IV and IV after years remakes i played.

I'm hoping that if i lilke this i'll love the new games. Hopefully I'll appreciate them more too having played the older ones. I just hope I dont die before i get there. lol