Final Fantasy 5

[7800Knight]

Any fans of Final Fantasy 5 here?  I have it on my PS1 Final Fantasy Anthology collection (FF6 is my personal favorite followed by FF9...but that's a whole other thread).

 

It is an honest shame we didn't originally get it in North America as the whole job system was thought to be confusing to American & Canadian players.  I'll be honest - the job system is the best part of the game as besides customizing characters, it adds significant strategy.  You have to have a balance of characters with proper abilities and you need to master a number of classes by game's end to make a really potent party.  

 

The way I went was usually Bartz as my heavy hitter (Knight, Samurai, Berserker, Sorceror), Lena as support magic (White Mage, Time Mage, etc), Faris as attack magic (Black Mage, Summoner, etc) and Galuf/Lena as support and backup (Blue Mage, Ninja, Thief, Bard, etc).  After two failed attempts to beat the game, due to poor planning, I finally beat it last year.  I had two characters as the bare class (with several mastered classes and available abilities) backed up by two Mime classes who mimicked the really powerful attacks.

 

Anyone else play this title?  What do you think?

[Tanooki]

I was, still kind of am, but I can't see myself finishing it again probably.

 

The thing is, I was on the original english translation team in the 90s when it was first patched for people to play as a ROM hack in the mid-later 90s.  The amount of hours going into playing and replaying it to get the bugs out took the bite out of my ability to sit through it entirely ever since.  It's a fantastic game and disgusts me it never came out in the US back in the day as they cut it for other choices.  The game isn't that hard, until the last 1/3, then you can get kind of screwed around the part where you this (uncensored) mostly naked female boss that'll just destroy you out of nowhere compared to every battle before that.  And those after her can be nearly as rotten too in many cases.

[SlidellMan]

Wow, @Tanooki, you have come a long way since then. (Ditto for ROM hacking and Translations in general.) From Challenge Games and Dragon Eye Studios to SMW Central and ROMhacking.net.

[7800Knight]

One of the features I liked was Krile replacing Galuf (yes, I made a mistake in above post) and Krile getting her grandfather's abilities.  Galuf's death is also a gut punch - I was not used to a main player character dying off like that mid-game.  

 

As for the classes, I liked the various fighting classes in the game.  The Knight was a staple character as it was the first fighting class you got.  I kept that until I got the crystals for the Berserker and Samurai class.  Towards the end of the game, when you have all that money and don't need to buy new weapons, the Samurai's coin tossing ability can be very destructive.

 

The Red Mage was difficult but awesome.  It took about 999 ability points to learn the Red Mage's Dualcast ability.  I saved that for near the end of the game and Dualcast comes in handy in the final boss bottle as I can cast multiple destructive spells with that ability.

[Schala]

Galuf's death was a big gut punch. I loved the samurai's finisher move. The ending was great too.

[Tanooki]

@SlidellMan I guess.  I've been online since summer of 1995.  I was initially into an even a channel ops on irc for oldwarez stuff, transitioned into that and more within emulation with 1-2years fully.  I had a smattering understanding a Japanese which helped with FF5 but also my interests in super famicom stuff so I attempted to learn a few words and the kana charts to get by.  That also applied to translating early Japanese emulator menus such as Pasofami(NES/FC) before iNES was a thing, and others including seedier stuff like rom releases and nes header hacking.  Back then I was under another name within the irc 9character limit, have dusty documents still online for a bit of it.  I think just knowing the author along with what I could handle helped get a foot into beta testing that translation and applying pathways to fixes with strange bugs.