Final Fantasy V Wiki



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Final Fantasy V is the fifth installment in the Final Fantasy series by Square Co., Ltd., originally released for the Super Family Computer (Super Famicom) in 1992. The game was ported to the Sony PlayStation, and this version was translated and marketed in North America and Europe as part of the Final Fantasy Anthology collection. The game's SFC version is notable for being one of the earliest fan translations to reach completion, by RPGe in 1997. Final Fantasy V was later released for the Game Boy Advance, as part of the Finest Fantasy for Advance compilation.

The game centers on a group of four strangers brought together by circumstance to save the Crystals that have mysteriously begun shattering one by one. The one behind the phenomenon is the villain Exdeath, as part of a plan to release himself from imprisonment and to gain the power of the Void, a realm of nothingness, which could bestow absolute power on one able to resist being absorbed by it. The four Warriors of Light turn their attentions to defeating Exdeath and stopping the Void's energies from consuming their world.

Final Fantasy V was the first Super Famicom Final Fantasy to incorporate the use of kanji in the Japanese text; previous Final Fantasy titles had originally only used hiragana and katakana script due to character-space limitations. Final Fantasy IV was the last to do this (despite kanji script having been possible at the time), and is the most visibly connected to its predecessors in style.

In 2013 Final Fantasy V was released for mobile platforms. This version was developed by Matrix Software, and has new graphical style but otherwise remains the same as previous versions.

The anime, Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals, is an OVA sequel to Final Fantasy V taking place two hundred years after the game's events.

Gameplay
The main gameplay feature is the revamped job system allowing all characters to potentially master up to twenty-two jobs. The player starts out as "Freelancer", and as they travel to new Crystal locations, the party acquire new jobs.

A separate form of Experience, ABP, is introduced for the advancement of the characters' job levels, while they continue to earn regular Experience Points. The system introduces a streamlined method of "multi-classing", allowing each character to learn job-specific abilities and carry one or two over when they change their class. After Final Fantasy V the job system was absent in the series until the Final Fantasy Tactics series, Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy X-2.

Battle innovations include reworking the Active Time Battle system, so that the player could, for the first time in the Final Fantasy series, see whose turn would come next. Other Final Fantasy conventions, such as the Blue Mage, are introduced, adding new elements to battle.

Final Fantasy V features the series' first recurring mini-boss, Gilgamesh. Bartz and his friends fight him several times during the game, a concept the series continues to use.

Characters
The game stars a crew of five unique characters. The initial four remain together for much of the game, until one is permanently replaced by the fifth character.
 * Bartz Klauser is an adventurer and the "main character" (he is the first person the player controls, and is often representative of the party). He becomes embroiled in the adventure at the very beginning, when he comes upon the crash site of a meteor with Boko, his chocobo, and meets Lenna. Bartz's name is Butz in both the original Japanese and the fan-translated versions.
 * Lenna Charlotte Tycoon meets Bartz at the meteor. She is the daughter of King Tycoon. Her name was transliterated as Reina in the Western PlayStation versions.
 * Galuf Halm Baldesion is a mysterious old man with amnesia discovered unconscious at the meteorite. His past is initially unknown, but is revealed as the story progresses.
 * Faris Scherwiz is a pirate whom the party meets when they try to sneak aboard her ship. During the game's first portion Faris disguises herself as a man. She has a connection with Lenna that is later revealed.
 * Krile Mayer Baldesion is Galuf's granddaughter and aids the party several times. Later in the game, she takes Galuf's place in the party. Her name is Cara in the fan-translated version.

Development
The original Super Famicom version of Final Fantasy V was never released in North America. As translator Ted Woolsey explained in a 1994 interview, "it's just not accessible enough to the average gamer". Plans were made to release the game in 1995 as Final Fantasy Extreme, targeting it at "the more experienced gamers who loved the complex character building", but this never materialized. Woolsey had almost all of the game translated, but Square opted not to ship it because they didn't feel the US market was ready for a second flagship RPG after Final Fantasy II (released as Final Fantasy IV in Japan) and they felt they needed something else to get people trained up on that style of gaming; this vision actualized as Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.[1]

In 1997, video game studio Top Dog was hired by [http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Square_Co.,_Ltd. Square] to port the original Super Famicom game to Microsoft Windows-based personal computers for North American release. Although a good deal of the game was completed, ultimately the communication problems between Top Dog and Square's Japanese and American branches led to the project's demise. During the same year, an English fan translation patch for the Final Fantasy V ROM image was released on the Internet by RPGe. The release was well received, and until 1999 was the game's only widely available English language version.