Final Fantasy V
Brandon g
Final Fantasy V was never released in the U.S. until Square started re-releasing all their old games on the Playstation. Once again, the world is in more danger than it knows, and once again, it's up to a homeless man, an old man with amnesia, a princess, and a pirate to save the world.
There are only four playable characters at any given time in the game, meaning that you never get a choice as to who's in your party. Amazingly, this still allows for strategy and creativity because of the Job system (discussed below), which is a throwback to Final Fantasy III (and a good idea, if you ask me). And believe it or not, each of the characters is actually developed quite well. All in all, this is a pretty enjoyable game (if you're into this sort of thing) with a pretty gripping storyline. But Final Fantasy logic is rampant—more so than any other game in the series. And, of course, that's what this article is all about.
Get a Job
Final Fantasy V was a throwback to earlier RPGs with the return of the Job system. Here's how it works: Let's say you have two knights, a black mage, and a white mage in your party. That's cool. The knights have honed their skills with melee weapons and trained hard to fight with great strength and speed; the mages have studied their arts and know how to summon forth and control the mystical powers unseen in the world around them.
Now, let's say you inexplicably want a dancer in your party. "You," you say, pointing at one of the knights, "you're a dancer." And just like that, the knight is a dancer. You don't like the balance of the party, so you then point at the black mage and say, "And you... you're a ninja." And just like that, your black mage is a ninja.
It doesn't take a lot of thinking to realize that this is really messed up. The black mage that could, until just a few minutes ago, only hold a little stick that he attempted to whack people with is now holding two swords and throwing ninja stars (presumably with his ninja toes) with deadly accuracy at his opponent's eyes. And your knight is dancing. And wearing a dress.
Now, these jobs do come from magic crystals. But still, the jobs change physical attributes of the characters. One of the jobs (the Berserker) even makes you lose control over the character. He just keeps fighting until the cows come home. Then he kills them, too. But the biggest problem with these magical jobs is that some of them really suck. A knight and an archer may be useful in fighting evil; a chemist in a lab coat and a little sissy bard are not. Is that the best that these magic crystals have to offer? No wonder the world is in trouble.
A Series of Implausible Events
This entire game is based on a series of events so implausible that it goes beyond laughable back into a null state of emotion. In the beginning, a vagrant rescues a princess and finds an old man with amnesia stepping out of a meteor that has just crashed into the earth. When they set out to take the princess home, they're attacked—by pirates. It comes out later that the pirate leader is a secretly a girl—and then later, that the pirate leader is indeed the princess's long-lost sister.
They keep this up through the entire game. Seriously, I'm surprised that anyone was left that wasn't related to everyone else by the end of the game. If you find a hair straightener in this game, you can be sure that it's the one hair straightener TO RULE THEM ALL!!! If you have to walk through a pre-school, you can safely bet that monsters have suddenly and mysteriously appeared there. No one can explain it. But no one seems to be that freaked out by it, either. At one point, a random thorn that someone had stepped on turns out to be pivotal to the plot. Really, I'm not exaggerating.
Epic Environmentalists Face a Moral Dilemma
Past Final Fantasy villains have been aliens, self-proclaimed gods, and severely deranged men. This game takes the series in a completely new direction. Exdeath, the villain of this game, is a tree. You wouldn't know it from looking at him—he walks, talks, looks, and fights just like a normal person. But he's a tree. In Final Fantasy IV, we had an embodiment of pure hate that had infected a very powerful creature from the moon. In Final Fantasy V, we have a villain that can be taken care of with some gasoline.
When you go to visit Exdeath's birthplace, he shows up and burns down the entire forest. Ordinarily, this would be considered a monstrous thing to do, destroying his birthplace and all of its inhabitants—except that trees are not sentient beings. Exdeath shows up, chops down the greatest tree in the forest, and burns the rest down. Man, nobody cares. We're playing a video game using electricity from fossil fuels. We print out pages of strategy guides on paper that we have no intention of recycling. You think you can intimidate us by burning down a few trees? Think again, sparky.
Even if gamers do care about the environment, the moral implications of killing a tree are made even more difficult to determine by the tree's blatant disregard for the livelihood of other trees. It's like if you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant. What do you do? In Final Fantasy V, you wait until the animal is done eating, then you kill it. To hell with moral implications, that animal's gonna pay! Maybe this game is what prompted environmentalist themes in later Final Fantasy games.
Final Fantasy Logic Score: 11
This game has nearly everything that every past game has had, and then they made the main villain a tree. Let's face it, this game goes above and beyond standard Final Fantasy logic. The Job system intensified the problem of gaining experience and gold from random battles by adding Job points into the mix: not only do you get stronger and richer by slaughtering various woodland creatures, but you can also become a better dancer.
The only element of Final Fantasy logic that's missing from this game is a prevalence of male characters. Every Final Fantasy game has at least an equal amount of male characters as female characters. By the end of this game, three of your four characters are female. But that's not enough to make up for the blatant abuse of Final Fantasy logic throughout the rest of the game.
