Scavenger's Reign

 

At the recommendation of a friend, I have been playing Final Fantasy V to stop from constantly refreshing my Kickstarter campaign for Echoes of Mnareth. I never played number 5, having been raised on 1, 4 and 6, and it's been an interesting experience. I have not found myself sucked into it, and have been really trying to put my finger on why. Especially when it came so highly recommended by a person whose taste I trust.

Final Fantasy 5, even more so than Final Fantasy 3 is all about the job system, and I think that might be what's putting me off.

Don't get me wrong, it's a cool concept, and I really enjoyed the first third of the game where the jobs are rolled out. The world is protected by four elemental crystals that are under attack. When the party arrives at each one, the crystals shatter. Since the crystals can no longer protect the world passively, the characters need these crystal fragmets, and the jobs they hold to become the world's much needed active defense. 

With time, and excessive grinding leveling, every character can have every job. The characters still level up as normal, increasing their base stats, and the jobs are a separate track. Jobs only level up a few times. Some may have 4 levels. Some 7. Some only 1. 

As a job is leveled, some of its abilities are permanently unlocked. For example, a character who hits level 1 as a thief permanently unlocks the ability to find secret passages. Hitting level 4 unlocks the ability to steal from monsters. All classes (but a secret one found near the end of the game) allow your character to have one ability from outside their class. For example, a character with job of Knight and 1 level in thief can have all Knight abilities, and the thief's detect hidden passageways. It's cool.

In Final Fantasy 1, characters unlock additional abilities by "growing up" after they clear the Citadel of Trials and bring the dragon god Bahamut a rat tail. Notably this transforms a Fighter into a Knight/Paladin, letting him wear heavy armor, wield powerful weapons, and also use low level white magic. In Final Fantasy 5 a similar effect is achieved by leveling up a few times as a White Mage, and a having the job of a Knight. 

By the time I had reached the end of the first act, and had mastered a few jobs, I found myself beset with analysis paralysis. How should I set up my party? What should I learn next? My knight is quite powerful and feels good, but what class should I unlock to supplement that power next?

The FF5 remaster allows the player to cheese the game and 4x experience gain for jobs or regular levels. If I didn't turn on 4x job experience, I might have DNF'd the game. But even with that, I was surprised by how much allowing every character to do everything diminished my enjoyment of the game.

The Consequences of Too Much POWER

1. For me, I found that splitting jobs and abilities also fractured completely fractured the game's story from its game play. The characters Bartz, Lenna, Galuf, Faris and Krile, and their story arcs are completely separate from their powers and abilities. In Final Fantasy 4 and 6 the character's abilities/job are instrumental to the story itself. When Rosa is kidnapped in FF4, the party loses its healer. Two mage characters, the twins Palom and Porom use their magic to petrify themselves to save the party from being crushed by a trap. Their innate and trained abilities allowed the characters to make an incredibly meaningful sacrifice. In FF5, all the characters feel incredibly generic and interchangeable. Their ties to the world's story rest much more heavily on who they are related to. Bartz' dad was a hero who saved the world, so Bartz is too.

2. It diminishes the joy of finding items. Much of the third act of FF5 revolves around finding tablets to break ancient seals on legendary weapons. In theory this is awesome. It sounds awesome. And the room the weapons are in is awesome. But then as I began unlocking them it was a like... oh, no one in the party uses a bow. Or a whip. Or a bell or a harp. Or katanas. Oh.... oh... =( This happened throughout the game. The different types of weapons need to be in the game because every job needs upgrades and the designers can't know which jobs the player will have chosen, so a little bit of everything needs to be everywhere. One of Final Fantasy's main risks is walking. Walking triggers random encounters that wear down character resources, so the levels are set up to clearly show treasure chests on the screen. In many ways the game becomes... do I push my luck to walk over to that chest, or do I skip it for now because everyone's health and mana are low and I'm out of consumables? That risk vs reward feeling is undermined when it's very likely the thing in the chest you see isn't something any of your characters would use because of the build you've chosen. In a game like FF6, it's exciting to find a boomerang in a chest because you know it is going to be an upgrade for Locke. Even if Locke is parked on the airship and isn't in the party, I still know that I have a specific upgrade for a specific character. In FF5, finding a boomerang triggers a question of: do I have a thief or ninja in the party? Should I change jobs to that if I don't?

3. It feels like it also generalizes monsters. In Final Fantasy 4, there is a decently long period of time where you only have two characters, Cecil the Dark Knight and Kain the Dragoon. Dragoons have a "jump" ability that causes them to be off screen and untouchable for an entire round. It's been a long time since I've played, but I remember certain monsters hitting incredibly hard during this part of the game, encouraging the player to use Kain's jump ability as a counter (i.e., doesn't matter how hard you hit if I'm not on screen to be hit). If the party's ability set is known, then the monsters of different areas can be balanced around those abilities to maximize the challenges and show off those abilities. It can also set up some wonderful story moments, like losing your healer and having to adjust your playstyle to compensate until you can find a new one.

4. It can feel quite cheesy. I felt like FF5 compensated for not know what the party makeup would be by making lots of spiky damage, and allowing more insta-deaths. Leveling up multiple characters as white mages took out so much of the challenge. Even if only one character was set up to use White Magic, it didn't matter. If the White Mage died, once the combat was over, change the ability of a character who knows it, to use White Magic and resurrect the dead character. Then change everyone back. Leveling up the chemist class teaches characters the Pharmacology ability which doubles the effectiveness of potions. So, if a character is getting low on Magic Points, change their ability to pharmacology between battles, drink an ether and restore double points, then change it all back. At first it felt neat. Like I was getting away with something. But as the game went along it made some of the challenges feel almost empty.

Kain, Cecil and Rosa by Yoshitaka Amano