Final Fantasy V - Review

Review Breakdown
Battle System	4
Interaction	5
Originality	3
Story	4
Music & Sound	2
Visuals	2
Challenge	3
Completion Time	18 hours
Overall
You'd never guess he was a wuss, seriously.

Not being released in the US originally, Squaresoft released Final Fantasy 5 along with 6 and a compilation CD of music from the two as a single set called Final Fantasy Anthology in 1999.

The world is starting to decay and four characters are drawn together. The party sets off in search to save the crystals and help the world. The opening of the story is the basic cliche story, however, the main story itself and the character developement is beautiful, as you find out about the mysterious pirate Faris, the girl Lenna, and the old man Galuf, in which he conveniently has amnesia the third of the game.

Taken from Final Fantasy 3, but more closely following the Dragon Warrior type in the way you learn abilities, characters are able to change classes and customize their characters on how you would like to use them. You start unable to change classes, but farther throughout the game, other classes become availabe allowing many different combinations as the level of these classes grow.

The soundtrack has alot of great tracks, but also, it has alot of bad ones, as one of the worst is the battle theme, which you have to listen throughout the entire game. One may say you can turn the music off and listen to different music, but that ruins the entire feel of an RPG, and even though alot of the music isn't great, or some not even good at all, the music fits great with the game. However, for a later SNES title, the quality of the music didn't do it any justice either, which seems to be lagging even behind titles that came out a couple years before, and actually to the extent that some of the tracks could easily sound the same created on the NES.

Localization has its ups and downs, because it is great during the storyline, with barely any mistakes and it would be hard to notice them, however, there are other mistakes you can't miss, alot that revolve around enemy characters. Then there are the graphics, which are almost exactly the same as the fourth but downgraded seemingly, however the CG movies on the release in Chronicles are beautiful and proves that Squaresoft has mastered the ability to create excellent graphics, if not the best.

I've found the crystal!! Now I'll become unstoppable. MWahahaha.

Also, the game has a few sidequests that you can go do, but most are close to the end of the game, in which you can get secret summons, powerful weapons, a secret class, even a hidden town, and mastering every class in order to find the perfect combination will take you awhile.

Overall, Final Fantasy 5 falls behind a few of the games in the series, but stands far ahead of many newly released Squaresoft games that are out now, as well as a great many others. I'd recommend this game for anyone who is looking for a good RPG.