Much like Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy V has been an entry that I have somehow evaded entirely. Going into this title, I knew less than nothing about it. Nothing about the battle system, the characters, anything that makes this entry uniqiue, nothing. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. In fact, the first time I really noticed Final Fantasy V being mentioned was when I was looking up tips for Final Fantasy III, to which most comments said “skip FF3, play FF5. The Job system is much better in that game”
Narrative Recap
Final Fantasy V starts with the nomadic Bartz, riding his steed Chocobo named Boko. A meteor crashes into the Earth, and upon inspecting the damage, he encounters a young noble girl, Lenna, and an amnesic old man named Galuf. The wind has stopped, and Lenna is on her way to the Wind Crystal shrine to investigate. Galuf knows he should accompany her, as he doesn’t remember anything, but he feels in his heart of heart that he should go to the Wind Crystal as well. Bartz, being the hero that he is, says “Good Luck!” and peaces out. Or at least he tries to, when Boko pecks him for abandoning people in obvious need and sends him back to help.
The party tries to commandeer a nearby pirate ship, but quickly get thrown in the brig. Faris, the captain, notices Lenna is wearing a pendant that is the twin to the one they are wearing, and chooses to join them. When the party arrives at the shrine where the crystal of wind sit, it shatters, fragments spraying everywhere. Bartz, Lenna, Galuf, and Faris are deemed the 4 warriors of light, and the shards of the crystal imbue them with a series of jobs to augment their abilities.
From there on, the party goes on an adventure, seeking out the other 3 crystals, all of which shatter and bestow more jobs upon the party. Faris is revealed to be Lenna’s long-lost sister, but spurns the role of princess, more meteors crash into the Earth, and Galuf is revealed to be from another world, transported by the meteors. He came back to Bartz’s world check the seal on the Villain, Exdeath, which has been weakening, perhaps because Cid has invented a machine to utilize the power of the crystal to make the lives of everyone more comfortable and convenient. When the last crystal shatters, Exdeath is released from his seal, defeats the party, and returns to his homeworld.
Galuf’s granddaughter, Krile, arrives via meteor, and Galuf’s memory is completely restored. He and Krile return to their own world to continue chasing down Exdeath, and with little hesitation, the rest of the party follow to Galuf’s world. They are tricked in defeating the guardians of the crystal in Galuf’s world, and Galuf sacrifices himself to defeat Exdeath and save his friends and granddaughter. Krile inherited Galuf’s abilities, and the party chases down Exdeath, defeating him and merging the two worlds. Exdeath, however, returns, and takes control of the Void, destroying whole towns with his new power.
The party finds four tablets, which unlock the 12 legendary weapons. Armed with the weapons of lore, they travel into the Void, defeat all of Exdeath’s minions, then slay Exdeath at the end, once and for all.
Story and Gameplay
Final Fantasy V’s story is full of twists and turns. The game moves from set-piece to set-piece, using cutscenes to deliver the narrative. There is a current of light-hearted humor running through this game, and the sprites are dynamic and excitied, creating a fairly funny game. That said, some of the scenes are heavy, like when Faris’s hydra, Syldra, dies. Faris tries to follow her into the ocean, but Lenna pulls her back, or a flashback revealing that Lenna almost cut out the tongue out of a wind drake to save her mother from illness, but doing so would have doomed the entire species. Final Fantasy V excels at delivering both heavy, emotional moments, and light-hearted laughs.
While the playable party is set almost right from the beginning, Square Enix obviously took a lot of lessons from the past few games in developing this tale. Each of the main characters have their own motivations, their own flaws, their own priorities. Unlike in Final Fantasy IV where a large cast of characters filtered in and out of your party at almost a break neck pace, Final Fantasy V sits you with the same characters almost from start to finish (with the exception of Galuf getting swapped out for Krile). Where FF4′s characters were pre-established in their skills and equipment, FF5 returns the freedom to the player to kit out their party with whatever jobs, skills, and gear they want to use. With over 20 jobs to choose from, You’re given wide options almost right away.
One of my frustrations with Final Fantasy III was the fact that you didn’t unlock a second set of jobs until almost 12 hours into your adventure. Final Fantasy V wastes no time in giving you the first 6 jobs. Then, just when you’ve had a chance to test each one out, more jobs get heaped upon you. The Job system is very remincient of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (which I’m sure I’ll touch on at some point on my Final Fantasy journey), whereas you gain ability points in specific jobs, you ‘learn’ skills. Once skills are learned, you can mix and match them with other jobs. It’s quite nice to see the system that inspired one of my favourite video games of all time.
The skills are separated into innate abilites, and actions. While a character is equipped with a job, all the innate abilities for that job will be active. They have one job action that is preset, and one open slot where they can enter in any skill they’ve learned so far, should it be an innate ability from a different job, or another action ability. I had one character designated as the mage for the party, swapping back and forth from white to black mages, making basically a red mage, but with access to the top tier magic of both types. Another character was a time mage/summoner. Perhaps more interestingly, one character was a knight, who can use the ability two-handed to hold a single sword in both hands for more power. He brought that Knight ability to the Mystic Knight class, who can imbue swords with magics for even more power. This character didn’t hit often, but when he did, and there was a elemental weakness to exploit, he did some massive damage.
This freedom was exciting, as was discovering which jobs worked really well together. In kind of the opposite example from the mystic knight, one character specialized as a ranger, earning the ability Multi-hit, which delivers a blow at 50% the characters normal power, but does so 4 times. Then they swapped into a Ninja, who had double hand. While welding a sword in both hands, that multi-hit was doing 50% damage, 8 times. There were a few bosses that fell after only two rounds of my heavy damage dealers really unleashing upon then.
The job system culminates with the Freelancer position, which is the basic class you have at the start of the game. This job can equip any weapon or gear, and has 2 open ability slots, but what really makes the freelancer the end-game job, is that they inherit all the passive abilities from every job you’ve mastered, plus some associated stat buffs, leaving those two slots available for any two action abilities. There’s also the Mime job, which is similar, but has 3 actions slots, and a lot more restrictions on what they can equip. In general, I found that magic-forward characters benefit from the Mime, while physical characters go freelancer.
It took a long time for anyone to master a job, as for the first 75% of the game, battles only give you one or two AP each. In the final dungeons, however, the AP is boosted to 5 per battle, and in the Phoenix Tower, you encounter a magic jar enemy that you can throw elixirs at, and receive 100 AP from, massively assisting you in mastering any job. Before getting to the Phoenix tower at the very end of the game, however, each character had mastered naught but a single job. The progress felt slow during the game, I wondered how the heck I would ever make a freelancer work, but by the time I had my final encounter with Exdeath, I was quite satisfied with how my party had come together.
Conclusion
While Final Fantasy IV has long been firm in my heart as my favourite Final Fantasy game, with its focus on Cecil’s redemption story and half a dozen well crafted characters that drove a serious narrative, Final Fantasy V captivated me in a completely different way. Through experimentation, customization, and the joy of mechanical discovery. The story, while more playful and looser than its predecessor, still managed to land its emotional beats when it really counted. The real star of Final Fantasy V is the Job system. It’s the kind of game that invites you to poke at its edges, get intreagues, then dive in deep and watch in delight as some ridiculous combo absolutely demolishes a boss just two rounds. I went into this experience knowing absolutely nothing, and came out with a feeling that Final Fantasy V deserves a spot at the table, when discussing the best that Final Fantasy has to offer.
In many ways, Final Fantasy V feels like a celebration of freedom. It takes the ideas crafted in III and hands you the tools right at the start. That spirit of freedom and personalization so prevelent in the first 3 games, mixed with some now experienced story-tellers, makes FInal Fantasy V the most purely fun entrie I’ve played so far.
As I close the book on Final Fantasy V, I’m struck by how well all of these early games are holding up. Not just as historical artifacts, but as compelling, thoughtful experiences in their own right. With Final Fantasy VI next on the horizon, a game that is constantly at the very tip top of “Best Final Fantasy Games” and “Best JRPGs Ever” lists, I’m feeling trepadacious. I’m excited to re-experience FInal Fantasy 6 with the context of all the games that came before it. And it’s been at least a decade since I played it for the first time, anyways. I’m very curious to see what twists they introduce to really differentiate it from FF4 and FF5.
Unless you’re reading The Last March of the Ents, trees are not often associated with violence. In most media, forest scenes are often accompanied by slow woodwind instrumentals, quiet moments of reflection, with gentle, babbling brooks nourishing the woodland animals who happen to be passing by. Nature, however, is far from protective and nurturing. It’s ruthless, amoral, and truly neutral. And yet, if I had a nickel for every cutthroat tree game in my collection, I’d have two nickels. Which is not a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.
Photosynthesis by designer Hjalmar Hach and published by Blue Orange Games in 2017 is deceptively gentle. You’re growing trees. How bad can growing trees be? You earn light points when your trees bask in the sun and spend those light points to cast seeds, grow trees, and eventually “harvest” your most majestic specimens for victory points. It’s the circle of life, in cardboard form.
The central hook of Photosynthesis, the rotating sun, is quite an elegant mechanic. The sun moves along the edge of the forest board, changing the direction the sun is shining down at, so with every turn, the tactical landscape changes. What used to be covered in light is now cast in shadow. The trees that earned you so many light points just a few rounds ago, are now fallow and useless. I don’t know if you picked up on this rule, but trees cast shadows, and any tree sitting in the shade of a bigger or same size tree does not earn light points. So not only are you plotting your trees and their shade patterns to maximize your light point generation, you’ll be purposefully trying to shade your opponent’s trees, to deprive them of the light they need to flourish.
There’s a moment, somewhere around the start of the second revolution, where you look down at the board, past the whimsical canopy of cardboard evergreens, and realize you’ve become the thing you despised: a cutthroat botanical tyrant. You didn’t mean for this to happen. You were drawn in by the colours. Seduced by the promise of a quiet, serene forest, the relaxing energy of trees basking in the sunshine as you sit in their shadows. But then the sun moves, and your opponent’s prize sapling suddenly casts a long, greedy shadow across half the grove, and you feel something twist in your heart. That’s not just shade, that’s purposeful sabotage. And you swear. Out loud. At a cardboard tree.
People generally come to Photosynthesis with one of two minds. They either want to maximize their own light, or, purposefully, try to minimize the light their opponents get. You’ll find yourself stunting enemy trees on purpose, planting your own just to create shade in exactly the right spot. Not because you need the space, but because it’ll choke out a rival’s main income. I’ve ended friendships for smaller things.
Mechanically, Photosynthesis is as sharp as a monkey puzzle tree. It’s totally deterministic, with absolutely no luck involved. It’s all down to planning. It’s the kind of game where misreading the board state two turns ahead will leave you gasping for light while it feels like else is rolling in solar power. The rules themselves are straightforward, the rulebook is only 4 pages long. But the decisions Photosynthesis offers are dense. It’s chess-like at two players, while being crowded and choking at four. It feels like a different game at every player count.
I do want to mention that the process for buying and growing trees feels a little disjointed. You collect sun points on the south end of the board, but the trees on the north end are the ones that grow? You can’t grow trees unless you unlock them from your player board, and when you replace pieces on the main board, the pieces go back into the locked spots on your player board. There are some interesting cadence decisions, as the size of the tree determines how many light points it collects, but only the biggest trees can be harvested for points. You finally finish your 7 turn project just to pay light points to lose your ability to earn more light points. The timing considerations are intense.
And while I admire the no-luck, pure strategy design, There’s always the potential of someone getting the short end of the proverbial stick. Bad starting positions and cutthroat players can kneecap someone’s ability to earn sunlight for most of the rounds. While everyone else is pulling in 7, 8, or 9 sunlight, one person is only bringing in 1 point. When you have no income, you can’t pivot your strategy. The rich get richer in the worst sort of way.
And then there’s the downtime. Especially at higher player counts, because the game is so deterministic, every turn can become a grind of analysis paralysis. The board state shifts constantly, And because turns are solitary, as in, one player takes all their actions for the round, then the next player goes, players can be considering 5 or 6 actions at a time. You’ll spend a lot of time in silence waiting for someone to make their decisions, before you start considering what you can do, based on what they just did.
If it sounds like I’m being down on Photosynthesis, it’s not on purpose. It’s clever, elegant, and unique. The aesthetic is gorgeous. It’s the rare abstract strategy game that has a genuine presence on the table. It looks like a dream and plays like a knife fight in a phone booth. I quite enjoy my plays of it, even if I come away feeling like I fell from a height and hit every branch on the way down.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: nothing replaces the tactile joy of sitting at a table with your friends, shuffling cards, rolling dice, and pushing cubes. Or the sense of satisfaction you get when you make the game winning move and everyone at the table reacts to the stunning conclusion (more on that in a later post). But sometimes… sometimes… playing a board game on Board Game Arena (BGA) is just better.
Obviously, I’m not talking about every game. Some games lose their soul when you take away the physical components. But for a surprising number of my favourite games, BGA isn’t just a convenient alternative, it’s become the preferred way to play. Why? Automation. Speed. Clarity. No setup or tear down. No rules mistakes. No cheezies fingers mucking up my cards. Let me elaborate down some of the reasons why BGA elevates the game playing experience.
Why BGA Elevates Certain Games
1. Automation
Setup? Immediate. Scoring? Instant. Shuffling? Never worry about someone with sleight of hand techniques again. Have one friend who insists on rolling dice ON the board, knocking tokens around everywhere? Gone. For games where the fiddly upkeep of tracks and chits can bring your game to a crawl, BGA does the heavy lifting. Memoir ’44, for example, is notorious for its elaborate setup. On BGA, you just click “Start.” The same goes for Sushi Go, where shuffling and managing hands as you draft can slow things down IRL. What about 7 Wonders and trying to figure out how many guild cards go into age 3, or how many points you earned with 12 green science cards? Online, it’s as smooth as butter.
How do the tiles get refreshed in Applejack? Don’t know. It just happens.
2. Enforced Rules and Quick Turns
Games with short turn structures or simple mechanics absolutely shine on BGA. Sushi Go, Azul, and Can’t Stop are pick-up-and-play affairs that run lightning-fast when the platform handles the admin. Want to knock out three games under half an hour? BGA is the way to do it! The platform can also be helpful when learning a new game, from having scripted tutorials, to letting you try to click on everything and ensuring you aren’t accidentally cheating by holding extra resources when you try to undo a turn. As the rules teacher for my group, it is a nice break to have something else keep everyone else’s game in check, so I can focus on my own strategies.
3. Visual Aids and Accessibility
One of the best features of BGA is hover-over explanations. No more searching indexes and appendices for specific cards only for the index to say the exact same thing on a card. Hover over a card in Race for the Galaxy and boom, you know exactly what it does. In Castles of Burgundy, you don’t need to flip through a player aid to decode building effects, It’s all right at your fingertips.
4. Asynchronous Play = Board Games Every Day
Honestly, this is the reason I’m on Board Game Arena in the first place. I generally only have one game night a week, making the rest of the week a slog when I can’t engage with my favourite hobby. Board Game Arena lets me play board games all week long with asynchronous games. At this moment I have 9 games on the go with different groups, meaning throughout the day I get happy little emails letting me know that it’s my turn and I get a tiny board game hit throughout my day.
One of my friends really loves the asynchronous play, as it lets them sit and puzzle over the board state without other players heckling you to take your turn faster. Being a moron, I don’t benefit from this feature, but if you’re of average intelligence, perhaps this is a boon for you too.
It’s also worth mentioning that for a lot of heavy games, they don’t hit my table very often. So many complex games competing for table space with my one game night a week means that a great, but heavy game like Carnegie or Praga Caput Regni can go years between replays. But on BGA, there’s no time limit, so I’m content to take my one turn each day and still get to play with some of my favourite systems.
5. SO MANY BOARD GAMES & So Many Players
At the time of writing there are 1087 games available to play on Board Game Arena. With another 150 in alpha and at least one new game hitting the platform every week, you’ll never be wanting for games as long as you’re on the platform. Sure, specific games are missing, such as Splotter’s Food Chain Magnate(but it’s available online at Online Board Games) or Stephan Feld’s The Oracle of Delphi (available on Yucata though). As long as you’re willing to pony up the $48 (CAD) per year for the premium membership (or have a friend who’s subscribed start all your games for you), you’ll always have something new to play.
Alongside those 1,000+ board games, there are over 10,000 members connected at almost any time. Of course the players online ebbs and flows as the sun sets on the North America region, there are a lot of very active communities on BGA, offering opponents on almost any game.
Hot Picks: Games That Truly Shine on BGA
Let’s run through some specific examples where the digital version arguably outperforms the physical one.
Race for the Galaxy
Symbology cheat sheet built in.
Zero shuffle fatigue.
Games finish in under 10 minutes. Seriously.
Active player base
Ticket to Ride
Destination tickets auto-highlighted.
Instant route scoring.
Trains tracked visually and accurately.
Can’t Stop
Dice roll mechanics are 100% automated.
Just click and go. No math, no mistakes. No staring at the dice searching for something that you can use.
Memoir ’44
Setup and scenario prep handled for you.
Dice rolls animated but quick.
Great for casual or solo play without the hassle.
Azul
Fast turns, clear interface.
No need to track discarded tiles.
No cleanup afterward, redistributing tiles is instant.
Praga Caput Regni
Firehose of resources and benefits? Auto-calculated.
Notoriously long and complex games feel almost breezy when you don’t need to manage all the rules on your own.
Lost Ruins of Arnak
No more sprawling piles of resources, or trying to fit the giant board on a small table.
Resource tracking, deck management, and hover-over tooltips are a dream online.
Railroad Ink / Welcome To
Drawing and smudging your previous turns? Not a problem with you just click
Play a full game with multiple players in 10 minutes or less.
Castles of Burgundy
Full board visibility at a glance.
Hover for explanations on every building tile.
Clicking a die highlights everything you can do with that die
Pick your art version! Different players can have different art sets applied.
Feast for Odin
No more bits flying everywhere (especially if you have cats).
Pieces on your board don’t accidentally shift one space to the left because you have sausage fingers (might just be a me problem)
Great for large-table games in small-table homes.
7 Wonders Duel
BGA does all the resource calculations for you
Never be confused if a card shifts slightly in the pyramid and wonder which other cards it’s supposed to be covering up.
Final Thoughts
Look, I love my physical games. I love punching tokens from their cardboard sprues, re-boxing expansions, and pushing cubes up tracks with friends in person. Given unlimited time and money, I’d choose to play in meat space every single time, every single night. Unfortunately, I live in reality, and so given the opportunity to not spend 45 minutes setting up Carnegie, I’m going to take that chance. I love not doing math in my head every round of 7 Wonders Duel. And I especially love not sweeping up tiny cardboard chits after a cat decides the Feast for Odin board is her new bed.
So here’s my hot take: for many games, especially those with heavy setup, math, or intense iconography, BGA isn’t just a backup, it’s the proper way to play.
Try it. You might just find your favourite game plays even better when the computer handles all the boring and tedious bits.
I have a complicated relationship with the gods. On the one hand, I appreciate a good mythological framework. Raise a temple here, slay a monster there, deliver some precious cargo to appease Zeus’s divine whims, sure, I’m down. But on the other hand, when my entire fate hinges on the fickle roll of some brightly colored dice, I start wondering whether the Oracle and I are due for a bit of a heart-to-heart.
The Oracle of Delphi is Stefan Feld’s answer to the question: “What if a Feld game wasn’t about points?” That alone made me raise an eyebrow. I mean, his middle name is practically ‘point salad’. But in The Oracle of Delphi, there are no points. Only tasks. 12 tasks, to be specific, and none are more important than the other. The whole game is just ‘first to finish all their chores and get back home to Daddy Zeus, wins!’
If you’ve been around the board game block, you’ve likely played a couple of games by Stephan Feld. And if you’re reading this, I’ll bet you’ve played at least The Castles of Burgundy. So the premise of a Feld game, a master of Euros, that doesn’t feature points at all, should have you intrigued. Perhaps even more so when you learn it’s a pickup and deliver, action efficiency game. And early on, it is exciting! The map is modular and sprawling, dotted with tasks of inequal importance. You’ll set off in a little ship, ready to collect offerings and erect statues, your mind dizzy with the things you want to do quickly, while procrastinating some of those harder tasks. It feels whimsical and exciting when you start playing.
Then, the dice come out.
Every round, you roll three custom dice. These are your “oracle dice,” the divine guidance you’ve been given from on high. The Oracle of Delphi sports an impressive 12 different actions, most of which are affected or dictated by what colour dice you’re using. You want to move to a blue spot? You’ll need a blue dice for that. Want to load or unload a yellow cube? Hope you rolled a yellow. Want to slay a red beast? I think you know where I’m going with this.
Now, to Feld’s credit, this action selection system isn’t a total crapshoot. There are a lot of mitigation factors available here. From divine favours, to various god powers rendering a specific colour as wild, to a deck of dice cards that you can hold in your hand until you’re ready to use the specific colour, there’s a suite of clever ways to wiggle around the fate you rolled for yourself. But the core tension remains: this is a game about action efficiency, but it’s full of randomness. You are never in full control. You are managing chaos, politely negotiating with the gods for efficiency.
The Oracle of Delphi does have its charming moments. The round where you roll the colours you need, fly across the board, complete two tasks, use a god ability to fly to another spot, and use one of the dice cards to complete a third task. When the game flows, it’s awesome. It helps that the objectives are clear and obvious, nothing is obfuscated or difficult to figure out how to get it done. The only question is how do you get it done, quickly?
But when the fates decide to play against you, your game grinds to a halt. You’ll be stuck in a corner without any of the right colours, or you’ve invested 6 fate tokens into monster-slaying and still manage to roll a miss, The Oracle of Delphi can be maddening. This is doubly frustrating because the game is a race. You’ll have a clear lead, but one bad turn can put you several actions behind. It sucks feeling like you’re the clear winner, only to have your turn absolutely stymied by a bad roll, then your opponent managing to roll perfectly and rocket on past you.
It’s also a bit dry. Thematically, it sounds like a mythic journey, from erecting statues and temples to slaying beasts. But the gameplay really is just an optimization puzzle with some thin divine window dressings. The description on the back of the box casts all these actions as heroic acts, but most of the time it feels like you’re just figuring out what set of actions your dice will allow, and figuring out how to spend them most efficiently.
And while I’m being negative, the potential to lose a whole turn exisits in this game. Like, straight-up skip-your-turn punishment. I think this aspect his here to be a push your luck element, do you make a mad dash for your objective, or waste an action clearing these injury cards. If you happen to have 6 cards total, or 3 of a single colour, you spend a whole turn not playing. For a game that’s already built around pacing and tempo, this feels like a brutal punishment.
The Oracle of Delphi is a strange, bold detour in Stephan Feld’s career. It ditches his usual point-based mathematical intricacies for a pickup and deliver race. It has an air of chaos at its heart, and that chaos can be thrilling. Choosing to push your luck while holding 4 injury cards so you can hit the ultra efficient action can make you feel like a genius if you pull it off. But the luck in the game can also leave you utterly stranded and frustrated.
I’ve enjoyed my time with The Oracle of Delphi. The puzzle is compelling, the pace is generally brisk, and the game system rewards clever planning. But every play leaves me wondering if I won because I played well… or because the gods just tilted the scales to my favour.
Then again, maybe that’s the point. After all, no mortal reaches Olympus without a little luck.
Whenever the topic “What’s your favourite Final Fantasy?” comes up, I’ve always had a single answer. Final Fantasy IV. On the SNES as a kid, it was my first JRPG, and I just remember the music, the story, and the characters really speaking to me. It inspired me to seek out dozens of JRPGs over the years until that genre became a part of my identity.
I’ve replayed portions of Final Fantasy IV over the years. I’d usually get to the part where Cecil becomes a paladin, or even as far as Palom and Porom turning to stone, but generally I’d be playing on an emulator on my phone or something else non-ideal, and I’d end up dropping the game before too long, so I was quite eager to reach this entry on my Final Fantasy playthrough.
The Story
Final Fantasy IV begins with The Dark Knight Cecil Harvey on an airship. Having just completed a raid on the village of Mysida and claimed its crystal at the behest of his king. He fulfilled his duty, but his internal monologue has doubts. Some of his men express doubts, but being the loyal leader that he is, he silences them quickly. Suddenly, monsters attack, although The Dark Knight dispatches them with ease.
Upon returning home to Baron and handing the crystal to the king, Cecil asks if the force is necessary. The king admonishes Cecil for questioning his rule and strips him of his rank as commander of the Red Wings as punishment. Cecils childhood friend, the dragoon Kain, stands by his friend’s side, and receives a similar admonishment. Cecil is then tasked to deliver a package to the nearby village of Mist, with Kain to accompany him.
In the moments that follow, you’re also introduced to Cid, the excitable engineer, and Rosa, Cecil’s love interest. She tries to comfort Cecil, but he’s emotionally closed off from her. The next morning, Cecil and Kain go to Mist, slaying the Mist Dragon guarding the pathway to Mist. Upon arriving in the village, the package is revealed to be a bomb ring, sending bomb monsters to raze the village. Cecil and Kain, horrified at the attack, rush to save a child, crying over the body of their mother. They quickly learn that the mother didn’t succumb to the bomb attack, but fell when her summon, the Mist Dragon, was slain. Cecil and Kain try to get the girl, Rydia, to safety, but she panics, and summons Titan, who causes an earthquake and landslide, cutting Cecil off from his path back to Baron.
When the dust settles, Kain is nowhere to be found, and Cecil is alone with Rydia. He carries her to a nearby inn, and vows to keep her safe. Even when Baron guards appear at the inn, dispatched to finish the job of slaying the summoners, Cecil fights back.
What follows is a tale of redemption. Party members come and go, from royalty of destitute castles, to magical prodigies, to old friends, characters come and go from Cecil’s quest, each one lending unique abilities to help him overcome his trials. Cecil himself travels to Mt. Ordeal to cast off The Dark Knight moniker and become a paladin instead. Cecil’s task of gathering the crystals is taken over by a fearsome foe named Golbez, who has some ability to control the minds of others, as he manipulates Kain to torment Cecil. Cecil, however, forges alliances with people all over the world to fight back against the forces of darkness.
The Generational Jump
The jump to the SNES was obviously significant for the Final Fantasy series. The expanded hardware gave the team more of everything to utilize. From sound, to colours, to just the number of pixels you could use to create a character, everything was expanded. While still restrained and limited in certain areas, like how most sprites are unable to physically interact, instead opting to just have characters stand next to each other, and perhaps raise an arm or two, or to just have a sprite spin in place to show excitement, Final FantasyIV manages to convey a surprising amount of emotions within these constraints, except for the one moment where Rose and Cecil embrace, which switches to a specific sprite for that moment. It was surprisingly powerful, especially when you’re used to emotional moments having fully animated cutscenes.
I find it quite fascinating that moving from Final Fantasy I, to II, then III, there has always been an emphasis of freedom in how you build out your party. You could always choose to have a very rounded team, or a brute force squad, or even make every party member a mage if you wanted to. Final Fantasy IV removes all of that freedom. For the entire game, your party is based on which characters are with you, and each character has a defined role, including specific abilities and equipment that cannot be swapped between characters. The most jarring part of this adventure for me was when the white and black mages Palom and Porom are in your party, and then you’re joined by the Sage, Tellah. Having such a magic forward party is generally not my preferred way to play, but in Final Fantasy IV, you have to work with what you get.
I can’t say that having teammates locked to certain equipment or skills is such a negative, however. If you’re new to JRPGs in general, it does give you an easy on-ramp to typical character archtypes and builds. The characters flowing in and out of the party works for the story too, as generally, a character leaves your party by sacrificing themselves, much in the vein of Final Fantasy II, although here, most of the characters miraculously survive, even when leaping from an airship holding a ticking bomb, which can undercut some of the dramatic moments. As always in media, if you don’t see the body, you can’t assume they actually died.
The difficulty in Final Fantasy IV is generally pretty easy, and I give partial credit to having the party built for you, and built for each specific dungeon. There were a few moments where my whole party got wiped out, particularly reaching the moon for the first time, or getting totally paralyzed by gold dragons. But I never felt like the difficulty spiked particularly badly. There’s also a much less emphasis on equipment here, with most characters only having 4 or 5 different weapons throughout the entire game. No longer are you buying a new sword in every town, you really just pick them up in the dungeons as you go along, and wouldn’t you know it, the chests in the dungeons contain loot specifically tailored for your party.
The magic system has been overhauled as well. You’ll never need to buy spells from the towns, instead each character learns spells as they level up. It’s a fine system, but it, again, feels like it’s stealing freedom from its players. These characters will learn their skills at their pace, and you just have to accept it.
The real big change in Final Fantasy IV is the Active Time Battle system. instead of queueing all of your attacks at the top of a round, and them having them execute one after the other, then take an enemy beating, now each character has a timer. Faster characters will act more frequently, sometimes twice as often as the slowest enemies. It made the battles feel much more dynamic and exciting. Especially during the battles where I was desperately waiting for my healers bar to fill up so I could revive or heal someone else that was close to death.
Conclusion
Final Fantasy IV is the first time I’ve really felt like I’ve been playing a Final Fantasy game since I started this little adventure down memory road. Perhaps because characters and story have become such a mainstay of the series, that the first 3 games felt like empty shells rather than the full Final Fantasy experience I was expecting. Final Fantasy IV has its problems, namely the lack of freedom in building your party, railroading the characters in your party, the lack of side quests or optional dungeons to really test your mettle, but it’s still a great game. I think that Final Fantasy IV is the best place for someone to start if they wanted to experience Final Fantasy for the first time, or even JRPGs for the first time. It delivers an emotional story while taking away some of the nitty gritty details of party building and inventory management. Players won’t be looking up class guides to min/max their stats, and rarely will they even need to look up directions. I loved my time with Final Fantasy IV, I almost never felt frustrated or lost. I was happy to be back with old friends, re-experiencing a tale of redemption that has been buried in my psyche since I was a child. As of now, Final Fantasy IV remains my favourite Final Fantasy experience, but only time will tell if it’ll hold onto that honour.
