V Down, I to Go

 Well, that's the penultimate entry in my Pixel Remaster run of the early Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy V is a great game - I honestly don't know where I'd rank it compared to IV, which I consider good praise. Mechanically, the game is certainly more complex than IV, but the Jobs system in V takes the ideas introduced in III and really makes them work a lot better - though that is not to say that there isn't room for improvement.

Ultimately, when I got to the final dungeon (which, at least in its first half, is actually a really cool trip, taking you through what at least was the 16-bit equivalent of a surreal journey through locations both familiar and semi-familiar) I had most of my characters going as "Freelancers," gaining all the passive benefits of their various classes. This wasn't quite as crucial on Bartz and Lenna, whom I had using, respectively, Black and Time Magic and White and Blue Magic (as cool as Dualcast was, I really couldn't go in without someone that could cast Curaga, Arise, and Esuna). Faris and Krile had mastered several classes (I did actually get the latter's Mystic Knight mastered in the final dungeon) and so Faris was my biggest damage-dealer, using Spellblade and Rapid Fire while dual-wielding I think the Brave Blade and either Excalibur or Ragnarok. Krile I had Spellblade on but rather than having her Rapid Fire she took care of Summoning magic - and honestly, Golem's Earthen Wall and Odin's Zantetsuken both played important roles in the final fight.

Exdeath as a villain is actually a kind of cool inverse of your typical Final Fantasy bad guy. In a lot of cases, you have some ambitious and arrogant human (or human-adjacent fantasy person) who has been transformed into a hideous abomination through some magical corrupt. Exdeath, though he appears through most of the game as an armor-clad knight (not unlike Golbez in IV, whom we discover near the end isn't really the bad guy), turns out to be not even remotely human, and is instead a great tree that was used as a kind of dumping ground for evil magic and essences, which then amalgamated as this singular entity.

Thus, the final boss has two phases - the first one has you face off against Exdeath, no longer bound in armor and appearing as a monstrous, branchless, twisted tree-trunk with a nasty face. Even then, though, you can see that the wood (twisted to have multiple mouths) is just barely covering up the demonic presence inside. When that is beaten (which took me shockingly little time - I might have been a little overleveled, but not by a ton) the wooden facade is stripped away, and we get what I think might be first really true Final Fantasy body-horror amalgamation final boss, where a bunch of demonic entities are kind of melted into one another, trying to pull all reality into the void (a void out of which it is reaching - a cool and scary visual).

In fact, the boss has four targetable points to attack, some of which are weak to certain effects - like one can be Petrified and another can be insta-killed by Odin.

I've noticed that, since my mother died seven years ago, I've been more sensitive than before about any kind of emotional element in pretty much any medium. So even with old 16-bit sprites, I'll confess that Krile mourning her grandfather (and the rest of the party mourning their friend) kind of got to me. Galuf and his Dawn Warrior companions are a kind of cool element in the game - you can imagine some unmade prequel that was the story of their defeating Exdeath the first time. (We don't need that prequel, or... you know, most prequels.)

I think some folks at Squaresoft regretted not releasing this one in America, and I think it probably would have been well-received.

The game is also way longer than previous ones - IV was certainly a step up in narrative, but still a relatively tight story. I put 30 or maybe more hours into V, which feels like a decent time for a modern game (I bet I spent less time in Alan Wake II, at least on my first play through it). Part of that time was definitely grinding (I spent a long time trying to steal Murasame off a Rukh, and there were moments where I turned the Pixel Remaster's ABP boost all the way up and fought enemies to master various Jobs - my rule was that I only used the boost when I was grinding anyway, though I broke that rule with the Magic Pots in the Phoenix Tower) but I also think there's just more content and story to get through. I was intrigued by the game's two worlds - I love that when you arrive in Galuf's world, there are different enemies and the environments all look a little different. I kind of love that feeling of "new world means a whole new set of fantasy elements to discover" and then I was fairly shocked when those two worlds merged into one (I never beat that freaking turtle in the Gil Cave, which vanishes after the worlds merge). Seeing the maps fit together was really cool as well - the notion that this merged world was actually the original one, and that the two other worlds were so similar yet different because they had been separated. It's genuinely a cool fantasy concept. I might have liked a phase of the game where you could travel between the two before they merged, but it's already a long one.

Anyway, with this under my belt, I'm eager to move on to VI, which is my best friend's favorite game of all time and one that I believe goes farther off the beaten path of traditional medieval fantasy. Mechanically, I get the sense that it kind of gives you the solid character-mechanics of IV but with some customizability in the form of Magicite that was maybe a kind of evolution of the Jobs system.

Given that I beat V at around 11:30 tonight (last night?) I decided not to embark on VI until tomrrow.