A look back at: Final Fantasy V

Hooray more Final Fantasies.

For whatever reason, a lot of this game is still burned in the back of my head. Must be the job system, and the grinding I did to ensure I got the best of the job abilities. Hell, EVERY character manages to get them because I spend a lot of time getting ABP so that all the good stuff is on each and every one of my characters. Worth it though? Hell yeah, always looking to make my games a whole lot easier. Surely this plot follows the same thing that Final Fantasy III does, get four characters who are warriors of Light, get the crystals for more jobs, and stop a rather lame villain.

So if you haven't realized by now, the gameplay is good, but the plot and characters are lame. Wow Final Fantasy V, how did you manage to not make your main cast well-defined? Bartz, or Butz as he was unfortunately called back in the day, is pretty much not the kind of person I would consider a hero, especially since he actually ends up tagging along with two others, Lenna and Galuf. Lenna is a princess, sort that one out. Faris at least has ONE thing interesting in that she's a cross-dressing pirate, but that's about it afterwards. She's at least opposed to princess ideals. Krile, or Cara, is basically Galuf's granddaughter and really has no character development. Okay, so what about Galuf. Here's the sad part. Of the playable characters, he's the most interesting, despite having amnesia. This amnesia saves him from the sirens when the other ones fall at one point. Then once he's regaining his memories, he's all out and badass as hell up to his unfortunate death at Exdeath's hands. And they even made that death scene more than a hundred times better than Aeris's crappy death, by actually showing that it wasn't even possible to revive him with any method. Great job with that.

But what about other characters? Well Galuf was part of an original four-man band of heroes, one of which (Bartz' father) already died, another dies not long after meeting him, and the wolf man manages to not be important but dies anyways. On the villain's side, Gilgamesh is the only one that honestly matters, being a hammy and comical villain, and someone who's honestly more of a fighter than a villain. Exdeath on the other hand is an evil tree. One who feigns death and then decides to be as doomy as possible by sucking up world locales into the void. Hell, you don't even have to visit Bartz own hometown at all in the entire course of the game, so you'll get confused when Bartz goes ballistic over the sucking up of a place you never even saw. But really Exdeath is nothing more than a villain without barely any worth. Damn trees. I could enjoy this game for its gameplay, but not for how lame the plot and characters were.