Postmortem: Final Fantasy V

Well, beating this game got delayed by everything under the sun, but I finally finished it up last night. I remember this being one of my least favorite FF games. I remember being entirely unimpressed by the stories and characters, although I found the Job System pretty cool and fun.

Well, my impression wasn't all that bad, although I'm pretty sure I underestimated the stories and characters.

Let's get to it!

Good:

• First and foremost, the Job System is one of my favorite systems they've put in a numerical FF game. It has the potential problem (if you think of it as a problem) that all characters are basically interchangable, but it has a lot of fun customization, and you get benefits at the end of the game for basically every class you master. Plus, the classes give a nice variety, although since the melee classes scale better with gear, and you get a lot of good gear at the end of the game from the 12 Legendary Weapons, the melee seem to have an edge.
  
• How awesome is Galuf's sacrifice?
  
• The characters are deeper than I gave them credit for. Galuf's the best character, but the others are at least likable.
• The story at least has one decent twist.

Bad:

• So as much as I said the characters are deeper than I gave them credit for, it's still not the deepest bunch in the world. There are five playable characters in the whole game, which is fine if they're developed well. We learn some information about them that we didn't know before, but very little actual development happens.
• The story's pretty much straightforward. We find out that ExDeath is causing the crystals to shatter. And then, uh, well, we have to stop ExDeath.
• The biggest weakness, in my opinion, of this game is ExDeath. After he gets unleashed, he basically is the evil villain who could finish you off a bunch of times but doesn't. He doesn't have any emotional complexity to him whatsoever (and unlike Kefka, he isn't funny enough to make up for it). He doesn't seem to have much in the way of tribulations; he just kind of ignores the heroes and lets them power up, despite his frequent run-ins with them. Other games do it, but they tend to give reasons why they aren't killing the party (Sephiroth and Cloud with The Reunion, for instance; Ultimeccia never really gets a chance; Kuja has uses for Zidane, etc).

My kneejerk reaction: This is going to move ahead of IV. This will probably still be ahead of X, but I can't see it leaping any of the others. I really like VI-IX, and as much as I liked this more than I remembered, I didn't like it more than I remembered liking those other ones. Solid game, though.

Up Next: Final Fantasy VI