I still don't understand why Kabuki/Asura Musashibou Benkei is called Gilgamesh, of all things. I'm not sure Gilgamesh even has weapons mentioned in his Epic, he was more renowned for his wrestling abilities.
But then I suppose this series also has Shiva being a blue ice lady instead of any of the big pile of things Shiva is associated with, none of which, AFAIR, involve ice. Also I'm fairly certain he's one of the Hindu gods that is explicitly male all the time?
FFV's 30th anniversary means it's been 30 years since I first got my start in game development. To think it's been that long… I struggle to wrap my head around it. Recalling my memories of the time, I didn't care about being a big character designer or director. I was just a monster designer worrying over how what I was working on compared to the wildly popular monsters of the DQ series. I created things like cactuar and tonberry hoping they'd bring some popularity to FF monsters, and amongst them was Gilgamesh himself.
The development process was entirely different back then, and most monsters had visuals proposed first with their backstories handled after the fact. Personally the monster I most wanted to push for in my FFV sketchbook was this multi-armed magical being of sorts named Gilgamesh who carried a different weapon in each hand. And there was another monster called "Benkei" on a different page of my sketchbook, with many weapons on its back. It was proposed that these two monsters be used as Gilgamesh's forms pre- and post-transformation. From there he was added to the scenario, and even given exciting extra dialogue and scenes in battle.
As a new member of the team, I remember being really impressed by the way my colleagues skillfully integrated my design into the title. With that, Gilgamesh was born, not just as some grunt to hack away at but with his own unique personality.
By the way, in those days implementation of visual designs into the game programming was done first, so it was later on that Gilgamesh's visuals came to be based on Mr. Yoshitaka Amano's art.
So it looks like Gilgamesh was originally two monsters; one was a Benkei figure who just looked like Benkei and was named Benkei, and then another was named "Gilgamesh" and looked like Gilgamesh's post-morph form without apparent relationship to the mythological figure, and the two got merged into a single character.
I still don't understand why Kabuki/Asura Musashibou Benkei is called Gilgamesh, of all things. I'm not sure Gilgamesh even has weapons mentioned in his Epic, he was more renowned for his wrestling abilities.
But then I suppose this series also has Shiva being a blue ice lady instead of any of the big pile of things Shiva is associated with, none of which, AFAIR, involve ice. Also I'm fairly certain he's one of the Hindu gods that is explicitly male all the time?
If it turns out the demons of the rifts are actually component souls of the gestalt being that is Exdeath, then I think we officially have found the system which was used to run the hypothetical FFV TTRPG campaign that later became the game, and it's not D&D, it's Exalted.*
*for the purposes of this discussion ignore that Exalted only came out a decade after the game's release
Well, you do play as a bunch of heroes empowered by ancient spiritual relics grafted to their souls and allowing them to excel in any skill they put their mind to, to superhuman levels.
Presumably, the process of mastering a job involves confronting memories of horrific war crimes the previous wielders of light crystals got up to millennia ago, in the golden age of a magitek empire.
I played that one, back in the heyday of FIM when it was in the middle of its second season and it was actually fun. It's... bland. Very bland. "Eating MREs" bland. It only changed sprites and names, which do look nice so there's that, but that's all. It didn't even change any part of the lore or plot (at least not in any meaningful way that stuck to my memory), which is what it would actually have made it at least mildly interesting.
I'm given to understand that Filly Fantasy VI's (yes, of course there are two MLP FFVI romhacks, what a silly question) changes are rather more involved both story-wise and mechanically.
I'm given to understand that Filly Fantasy VI's (yes, of course there are two MLP FFVI romhacks, what a silly question) changes are rather more involved both story-wise and mechanically.
It better be more involved. I checked the Romhacking page and it says it was released in 10 October 2021, definitely looooong after the first one. The summary and screenshots don't give me the impression that the plot has been changed much more though, but I'm not planning to play to to check that. (I already got T-Edition in the backlog anyway )
Just because it's an alternate Pony version of the game doesn't mean you can have a whole conversation about a game I haven't even begun playing in this thread, shoo, shoo!
Just because it's an alternate Pony version of the game doesn't mean you can have a whole conversation about a game I haven't even begun playing in this thread, shoo, shoo!
Just because it's an alternate Pony version of the game doesn't mean you can have a whole conversation about a game I haven't even begun playing in this thread, shoo, shoo!
Each Final Fantasy game previously had been an improvement over the one that preceded it. IV was better than III, III was better than II, and even II, messy as it was on a mechanical level, had story and characterization which, however rudimentary, the first FF could only have dreamed of.
So is Final Fantasy V better than Final Fantasy IV?
I think the answer is going to depend on the player, the context in which they first experienced it, the way in which several aspects of the writing land, and so on. As far as I am concerned, the answer is: Yes… ish?
FFV took me 35 gameplay hours to beat (not counting any uncounted time from reloads), ten hours more than FVIV, and it took me four months to review. I have chewed on this game quite a bit, and as a result this is going to be my longest Conclusions so far. Let's break it down into chunks.
Character Mechanics
At the most basic, experiential level of play, that being "how do I mechanically engage with the game's core gameplay loop," FFV blows any previous game out of the water. It made sense for IV, who was doing a lot of bold new risky things, to stick to a strict advancement path for each character giving them a singular skillset, but that only highlights the immense evolution of V. The job system introduced in FF3 has been expanded and massively improved in every way, by making jobs no longer just something characters move in and out of, but part of a long-term character building exercise. The ability to learn and equip abilities across jobs basically delivers on FF2's promise of characters who would develop over time according to how they were played. In combat, every character is guaranteed to have multiple widgets to play with, to feel interesting to play, allowing for creative personal expression in character building, something incredibly valuable in such early RPGs, culminating in the Freelancer/Mime as the final, customized build of each party.
It's not perfect. The ballooning ABP costs with stagnant ABP rewards may have been designed to incentivize 'shopping around' but they made the mid- and endgame at times quite frustrating and slow in progress. To someone who isn't yet familiar with the game and can't optimize their advancement path like myself, the incentive to play conservatively and focus on mastering jobs for ultimate abilities and passive benefits is very strong. It's quite possible to blow the game wide open, and some ability combos are just plain superior. Towards the endgame, my characters started to homogenize, while Bartz had the 'most correct' build and pulled massively ahead of the pack in raw power. There are a number of smaller hiccups like the Optimize function.
Still, the potential for replayability once one played the game once, to challenge oneself, to try more creative builds, seems amazing. FFV is a game I can absolutely see myself replaying just so I can Get Weird With It. FFV at its best is far more fun than III or IV could ever hope to be.
Encounter and World Design
Aesthetically FFV is once again a step above every game that came before it. Sure, there are plenty of bland caves, but compared to IV's perennial cave problem, setpieces like the Ship Graveyard, the Surgate Fleet, the Ronkan Ruins, Castle Exdeath - even places like the Barrier Tower use visual tricks to make themselves look unique and impressive.
The fun level of encounters, on the other hand, varies wildly across the game. I simply cannot recall off the top of my head which parts had the most interesting and least interesting fights over the course of this whole LP, but the endgame burned me out severely with endless fights against opponents I had long surpassed amounting to essentially just make-work. Its boss design suffers from all the cooler demons with unique names and gimmicks being stacked in a death gauntlet at the tail end of the game when you've either already long grown way beyond their strength, or else face the prospect of an absolutely brutal slog through painful battle after painful battle; for most of the game, the only iconic bosses are like, Atomos and Gilgamesh.
On the other hand, it makes it up in Atomos and Gilgamesh being fantastic, one as a setpiece fight and the other as a character, and in the introduction of the franchise's first proper superbosses, fitting challenges that I enjoyed pushing myself against; and as far as series final bosses, I think Neo Exdeath is the best yet.
But the world, perhaps, may be where FFV shines most. It is a world of adventure of a scope unlike any of the previous games. The sheer amount of optional content, sidequests, places that you can completely miss, location-specific dialogue, unique rewards for exploration… The very first thing you see when you open the game is Bartz riding Boko on an endless plain. I think this might be why the game ends up running such an absurd tally of vehicles and means of transports; because it wants to constantly keep that spirit of adventure alive, that feeling of moving from place to place in bold new ways, riding chocobos, flying on dragons' back, raising an ancient airship, diving under the sea, and so on, always in a constant churn of new ways forward. This, I think, is the game's strongest strength; that sense of freedom and adventure.
Story and Cast
Alright. This is where things get tougher.
The basic skeleton of FFV's story is incredibly simple. An evil wizard called Exdeath who is evil because he just is wants to destroy the world, he must be stopped, and on the way he will send a bevy of evil minions who are all uncomplicatedly evil except the one comic relief. The heroes make many sacrifices and then they kill him. The end. This is, in many regards, a huge step back from IV.
Final Fantasy V doesn't really have character arcs. The difference between Bartz, Faris, Lenna and Krile as they are at the start of the game and at the end is that they have friends now. They do not change; they are static. Galuf's character arc is that he does his job as an older mentor figure from the previous generation's battle and dies heroically to save the protagonist. There is nothing like Cecil's quest for redemption, Edward's embracing of bravery, or Tellah's embrace of self-destructive hatred in V. (Although as a note, these are the three characters with arcs in IV; there are no others, so let's not act like that game is Zola. No, Rydia growing up in a timeskip doesn't count. Kain being mind controlled isn't a character arc either.)
But also they're just… fun?
V's main cast don't grow, but they all have clear personality traits, desires, relationships, grief, that can interact and bounce off each other in ways IV's cast never quite fully pulls off for all of its characters. At one point I said of Lenna doing something ridiculously over the top for the sake of an animal friend that she was Being A Lenna About It, and one of my readers commented "wow, that shouldn't make sense but it does," because these characters have well-expressed if simple personalities that shine in their behavior.
So…
Here's the thing: the two things FFV's story has going for it, I think, are comedy and charm. It is constantly delivering comedy beats, using character sprites in funny ways, having characters say outrageous things, playing off Galuf's amnesia or Bartz's obliviousness or… Faris's… Hm. Hold on to that thought. The game is light-hearted and trying to be funny, and it's also trying to be endearing. To make you care for its characters and world not out of complex, layered writing but of broad, fun archetypes full of whimsy. If that doesn't land, I don't think the game lands at all. If the game isn't funny to the player, if the characters are obnoxious rather than charming, then the game has nothing going for it. If Krile registers as an annoying overcompetent kid who gets plot points that should belong to other characters ("why is she the one who gets to talk to animals and understand their feelings better than Lenna?"), if Exdeath lands as just flat and boring instead of delightfully bombastic and hammy, if Faris… (Hold on to that thought), then there's nothing there. The game's a void. It lives or dies on this.
Hmmm.
That's not quite true, though, right?
Okay, let's try something.
Final Fantasy V and the Burden of Legacy, or: What the Dead Owe Us
The core theme of Final Fantasy V is that our parents fucked us over and that we have to fix their shit despite none of the consequences being our fault.
The core fantasy of Final Fantasy V is that our parents give a shit and will actually help us.
Everything, everything about the game is the fault of some asshole who kicked the can down the road and got to escape the consequences.
By the end of FFV, the entire cast is made of teenagers, or at most very young adults. Everything they deal with is the fault of someone older. It starts with the crystal-intensifying machines, designed by Cid with the best of intentions and used by well-meaning kings to bring untold prosperity to their people, only to precipitate the apocalypse. It continues with Exdeath, an evil warlock who brings about disaster because thirty years ago, the protagonists' own parents and grandparents were too weak to truly defeat him and resorted to sealing him on another world, explicitly someone else's world, making him someone else's burden. All this is happening because 500 years ago, an unnamed civilization decided that rather than either finding a way of permanently dealing with their toxic waste evil spirits, or failing that finding a way to no longer produced them, the perfect solution would be to simply shove all these spirits inside a sentient magic tree until it turned into a creature of absolute evil. And the ultimate power which this evil tree is now seeking was born a thousand years ago, when the Ancients defeated history's greatest evil but failed to destroy or sealed his world-destroying Void, and so they resorted to literally breaking the world.
The metaphor isn't subtle, people.
Bartz, Lenna, Faris and Krile are of an age where their only care should be figuring out their path in life, finding themselves in some way or another, entering maturity and defining themselves as adults (well, less so Krile; she should just get to be a kid. Her lot is the harshest of them all). Instead they are burdened with the responsibility of saving a world they didn't break.
How unfair.
Each of the surviving Dawn Warriors and King Tycoon (the wise and just king, who wisely and justly allowed the crystal-amplification machine to be built around the Wind Crystal he had to protect) dies, but why? To some extent it's just the fate of older mentor figure in these stories, but it's so thorough.
They die because they failed, and their failure is their sin. They have to atone for leaving this world and this fate to their children. They must sacrifice to allow them to repair their own mistakes.
The key to Galuf's entire character is that he is amnesiac.He is free from sin. Galuf, for most of the game, is a blank slate. He remembers nothing, and by extension can be held responsible for nothing; he has no guilt. By the same token, he has no attachments beyond those he forms with Bartz, Faris and Lenna; he has no duties, no responsibilities. He gets, for a little while, to be free as these kids are meant to be free, to go on a great adventure with them. And then, when his memories come back, and with them the weight of his faults and his responsibilities, he too must set his affairs in order, and die.
Why does the game kill Hiryu and Syldra, our animal friends? Because that hurts. Because they are, as animals of great intelligence but no 'civilization,' definitionally innocent of all that is happening, and that's why they must die: to hurt the protagonists. To testify to the unfairness of the burden left to them, which will hurt them for no fault of their own. It is unjust.
There are countless fantasy stories where the epic deeds of the Ancients are beyond anything that can be achieved in the modern day. But when you slay Omega, the badge you receive says: "Recognizing wisdom, strength, and courage surpassing that of the Ancients." Bartz, Lenna, Faris and Krile succeeded where none did before, which is another way of saying, where all before failed. Where none were good enough.
In a thousand year cycle they are the first one to refuse kicking the can down the road, and their story almost - almost - ends with them paying the ultimate price for this, for the mistakes of their predecessors, stranded in the Void after having finally succeeded where all failed.
Which is where we find the element of FFV's storytelling that is, perhaps, the most subtly damaging to its integrity.
I keep thinking about ghosts.
The spirits of the departed have played a part in the game's story, in some fashion, since FF1 with the Sky Warriors turned to bats. But this is usually either understated (the dead party members appearing one last time to Firion and the others), or rare, singular appearances to offer guidance or perform a dramatic miracle (Unei and Doga opening the gate to the World of Darkness, Princess Anna appearing to Edward to give him courage). FFV unique in that the dead just… Stick around.
"No one is ever really gone" is a line that is much mocked for a reason.
Death in FFV mostly means you turn into a Force ghost who can teleport across the world and directly leverage your spirit energy to perform miracles as needed by the plot. Even Obi-Wan doesn't have it that good. If you're a beloved animal friend, that might even mean you upgrade into a superpowered form that's stronger than Bahamut, leaving your status as whether you're actually dead and whether that means anything ambiguous. Galuf gets to basically hang around from his death to the final moments of the game to provide direct spiritual assistance, while Kelger's death scene is him providing his final power for a spirit bomb and then he, too, shows up again at the end.
The fantasy of FFV's spirits of the departed is that even in death, even after their sacrifice, they will still be there to guide you as needed. To give you the final push to rectify their mistakes. Instead of dying and then being dead, having to simply hope that you'll be strong enough to fix what they couldn't, they get to stay the entire way with you, to watch you and aid you.
It's hopeful. It's optimistic. It emphasizes that our love is stronger than our faults, and stronger than death.
I think it's kinda cheap. It makes FFV more of a light-hearted, heartwarming story, which is not inherently bad, but it does so by blunting the edge of the message at its core, of its most trenchant theme, which I feel is unfortunate.
The unfairness is the point. The dead aren't here to help us. The world they left us is not our fault, but it is our burden.
Alright, I'm almost done. I got all the angry bombast out of my system.
So let's talk about Faris.
Let's talk about Faris
The author is dead. With that in mind, let us dispense entirely with speculating (or reading interviews) about what the writers 'really intended,' and study the text.
I think there are three Faris.
The first Faris is a tomboy who 'disguises herself as a man,' which the story thinks is inherently funny, and who needs to embrace her femininity in some way, as well as an object of desire for male characters, who is more desirable the more feminine she presents, and who must, in some future unexplored by the game, learn to 'accept herself' as a woman, probably by getting a boyfriend, who is probably Bartz.
The second Faris is a gender non-conforming woman, who (mostly, but not universally) presents as male, out of a combination of habit, practicality, personal safety concerns, and aesthetic preference. Her presentation does not change when her gender is revealed because she's not hiding, she is fully herself as this presentation, and while dressing up in fancy feminine clothes makes her more conventionally attractive to some, this is a joke played at their expense, because she will ditch the costume (and it is a costume) the instant their back is turned and jump out of a window cackling to go back to being a dashing butch pirate. This Faris is not the target of jokes, rather others are the targets of jokes in relation to her, such as Bartz and Galuf being smitten by 'her' beauty while seeing her sleeping even though at this time, they still think of her as male; the sexual orientation turmoil this sends them into is their problem, not Faris's. When Bartz sees Faris in a dress and is instantly smitten again, and shortly after decides to ditch her because she is a princess now and has to be doing princess stuff, it is Faris who gets the last laugh on him by tormenting him with the rope, fully in a position of power over him, until he promises to never do this again, that is, to never again treat her like she isn't his fellow adventurer. This Faris is empowered; because she lives in a heteronormative world, she is sometimes faced with incomprehension, struggle, people trying to push her towards conventional femininity, but she is, ultimately, victorious in deciding the course of her life. This Faris is a gay icon.
The third Faris exists somewhere on the trans spectrum. They are some manner of non-binary or transmasc but either way leaning away from 'female,' but they don't have the vocabulary or theoretical background to fully express this or to make it understood to others. This Faris lives a life of suffering. They briefly enjoy a small period of affirmation in the story, when their male presentation (not necessarily their preferred presentation, but perhaps easier to fully present as male than try to visibly embody a more complex gender identity) is taken at face value by everyone else. Then, their biological sex is found out; from there on their life is an endless string of micro- to outright aggressions. They are constantly sent back to the fact that they are 'really' a woman, which is treated as a comedy beat played against them. No matter how hard they try, they can never avoid being faced with they assigned gender for long, chief of which is the fact that people are attracted to them as a woman. Bartz or Galuf peeking on them in bed or Bartz having a crush on them when seeing them forced into a dress are inherently invalidating, because the They that is being desired is the wrong one, the one they do not want to be, and that attraction is unwelcome and unwanted. And the game thinks this is funny, because it fundamentally agrees with these characters that Faris's gender identity isn't real.
…
I obviously don't think Faris #3 was conceptualized as such in the mind of the FFV writers. Even saying 'but you can read the text this way' isn't really what I want to convey here. It's more about how if Faris #3 is in any way relatable to a given reader, if this is how they perceive Faris and their writing and they are sympathetic to them because of their personal experience, Faris is going to single-handedly ruin the game for them. If Faris #3 is what scans to a reader, then while Faris themself might be profoundly sympathetic, the game is deeply, deeply mean-spirited about them, and every character in the main cast are assholes. Even Lenna is guilty by passivity, while Galuf and Bartz are deeply, deeply awful to Faris. Krile, at most, can be excused for being a child.
To a lesser extent Faris #1 also kind of sucks. I mean, not as a person, I am sympathetic to her as well, but also she's packaged with a bunch of old sexist clichés and stereotypes about women's place, proper gender presentation, and expectations for girls to 'grow out of' any non-gender non-conforming 'phase.' A friend described it as 'proto-harem anime antics,' and that's basically what it is, and it just sucks.
You may have gathered at this point that I have been consistently fairly positive about Faris as a character, even if I've been critical of some of the plot points surrounding her being 'found out' as a girl or put in a dress. This is because, ultimately, my read, the way the story felt to me, leans largely towards Faris #2. This is perhaps overly charitable, but it's not like it really required a conscious effort of my part, either; it's the read of the story that felt most natural to me, and it also happens to be the one that is the most charitable to the game's writing, even if it was probably not what the writers intended.
I liked Faris, ultimately. I thought she was a great character, and I thought the story treated her (mostly) alright, even if I would change many details myself. Ultimately, the way I remember her is laughing at Bartz from atop the antlion's den, and absconding through the window towards new piratical adventures.
I liked all of these characters, in the end.
In The End
Was Final Fantasy V better than Final Fantasy IV? I don't know. I liked it more in parts, but it took me way more time to finish reviewing, hour-for-hour. Ultimately I am more confident that I could hand FFIV to someone and say "if you keep in mind this game's pretty old and has a lot of weird and baffling issues, the core is a strong drama that anyone would enjoy unless they simply aren't into JRPGs at all," whereas I would recommend FFV to someone only if I knew they wouldn't bounce right off and/or hate the game for its writing and presentation of Faris.
It is perhaps fitting for a direct spiritual successor to FFIII that instead of being peppered with baffling bullshit all the way through (like II and IV), it is mostly alright, and then towards the end it decides to, to borrow an expression from @ZerbanDaGreat, "force you to eat an entire block of unsliced cheese all in one sitting right at the very end," only because V is bigger and better and bolder than III, the block of cheese is three times as large and took me three sittings.
Still, the potential for replayability once one played the game once, to challenge oneself, to try more creative builds, seems amazing. FFV is a game I can absolutely see myself replaying just so I can Get Weird With It. FFV at its best is far more fun than III or IV could ever hope to be.
It's already been brought up a few times, but totally recommend taking a look at the Four Job Fiesta if you ever feel like trying a challenge run of some kind for FFV. Especially might be fun if it makes you dig into some of the jobs that were ignored because they're more difficult to work with or niche, like Blue Mage, Geomancer, or Chemist.
V's main cast don't grow, but they all have clear personality traits, desires, relationships, grief, that can interact and bounce off each other in ways IV's cast never quite fully pulls off for all of its characters. At one point I said of Lenna doing something ridiculously over the top for the sake of an animal friend that she was Being A Lenna About It, and one of my readers commented "wow, that shouldn't make sense but it does," because these characters have well-expressed if simple personalities that shine in their behavior.
I think this is a big part of what always brings me back to FFV to go "yeah, this might just be my favorite Final Fantasy game." Sure, the games adjacent to it do more in trying to have developed characters and stories and growth, but FFV just... has this fun cast of saturday morning cartoon characters, going up against a pure "literally made of evil and is evil for evil's sake" villain. Throw in the flexibility of the job system and you've got a recipe for a great game, imo.
Been a lot of fun following along the FFV LP, even if it took a while longer than expected. Can't wait until we start up FFVI, because even if V is my favorite... VI is still in my top 3 easy, and it's a beloved game to many a Final Fantasy series veteran for many understandable reasons.
I've enjoyed the whole trip, but right now I'm especially interested in the three Farises. I've always felt Faris 2 quite strongly, to the extent that I never had a glimmer of Faris 3 until you pointed it out.
As an enby who presents as masculine just because that's how I look, the fact that Faris does the laughing at the goofuses who can't handle her is something I really admire and kinda envy.
The core theme of Final Fantasy V is that our parents fucked us over and that we have to fix their shit despite none of the consequences being our fault.
The core fantasy of Final Fantasy V is that our parents give a shit and will actually help us.
Oof. I knew you were leading up to climate change analogues, it'd been mentioned as a theme before, but this hits hard regardless. Especially the "parents give a shit" being fantasy, lol.
FFV seems like it was a fun game overall, but suffered from gameplay issues in a few areas (like the endgame dungeon) coupled with some story beats and characterisation which read poorly two decades and change on.
FFV as a climate change analogue definitely works, but there's a more obvious and probably more biting critique there of a failed generation of parents who left an overwhelming, crushing burden for their children.
Japan and WWII. Both of the people who wrote on FFV (in terms of credit at least) were born in the 1960s; they grew up in a world that had been intimately and irrevocably shaped by the actions and failures of their parents and grandparents.
Thoughts like these are what make this thread worth its weight in gold (which it isn't much, being an interwebs page an only having a digital existence, but, ya know). Each of them could make for the basics of excellent essays.
"force you to eat an entire block of unsliced cheese all in one sitting right at the very end," only because V is bigger and better and bolder than III, the block of cheese is three times as large and took me three sittings.
I really enjoyed that summary, especially the Three Farises. It's good analysis that hits not just on FFV, but I think makes a strong point about older media in general.
Basically, older media (and even some modern stuff made with older/more reactionary sensibilities) seems rife with examples of characters who were intended to be a dumb, relatively harmless trope (tomboy who refuses to be feminine "like she should"), ended up accidentally producing a really fascinating and subversive reading (Faris Tycoon, Gender Icon), and also gave birth to a more horrible, malicious reading (the misaligned butt of a cosmic joke). I think what differentiates a watchable/consumable piece of older media from one that isn't is, in the course of making the dumb harmless thing, how permissive it seems to be with the good reading or how much it seems like the bad reading might have been intentional or at least the product of indifference. In short, a "is this Dumb or Evil?" sliding scale.
I think I agree with Omicron's perception (using my own framework, apologies if this isn't accurate) that FFV is more good-naturedly Dumb than Evil, which is why I rank reading about it as an overall positive experience instead of an instructive but painful lesson on how a previously enjoyable franchise can curdle into awfulness. I surprised myself by actually really liking Bartz despite his, uh, uncomplicated personality; sometimes people are just happy and straightforward, and that's totally fine. Really, I liked all the main characters, which is sort of remarkable. Even Exdeath made sense and was an enjoyable villain within the context of the game. "The sum total of the world's accumulated sins finally made manifest and out to kill everyone" is a compelling villain concept, just... with the modern context, oof. Maybe a little painful after all.
Honestly, surprised and pleased by a game I previously referred to as an afterthought. Excited to see where we go with FFVI.
I'm going to open with this: My feelings on stories are my own and are probably not shared by you. I simultaneously love tragic backstories, stories with loss, deep ones with stakes.
I also like golden endings and endings that, while they might not be golden, are about as good as you possibly could get with what has happened before that ending. So that's where I'm coming from. And yes, those two things do seem to contrast heavily with each other, but that's just how I work.
With that in mind, I really, really dislike Exdeath and it kinda drags down the whole story in my estimation especially compared to FFIV.
I talked about this a bit with FFIII and Xande, but let me go deeper into both that and this: I want my villains to have motivations and progression. I want those motivations to inform their goals. I want them to meaningfully CHANGE as characters. And when Xande is espousing about his wishes to destroy everything, or Exdeath is talking about throwing the worlds into the void? To me, that's setup without punchline. And what is Exdeath's punchline? "I'm literally just a mass of evil lol".
I don't like that, and to show why I'm going to post 2 examples.
Spoiler for a future game in the series and also for Super Paper Mario:
Two of my favorite villains in fiction have very similar goals to Exdeath in abstract. Kefka Palazzo's a little farther away in terms of a comparison, but he wants to cause wanton destruction and throw the world into disarray. But he goes about it differently, because we can see both his rise and how he was coddled/egged on by the Emperor to become even worse.
Count Bleck is even worse as a comparison to Exdeath, as in he fits Exdeath in window dressing almost to a T: He's one of my favorite villains in fiction, and he has what is close to a one for one copy of Exdeath's goals in this game; he wants to throw the Worlds into the Void in order to destroy everything. It's even also called the Void! But while Kefka's character is improved from Exdeath's via showing his rise from comic relief to God of Destruction, Bleck's is improved by showing his backstory. We get to learn WHY and HOW he became the nihilistic figure who wants nothingness to rule.
Compare this to Exdeath, where the only thing that counts as character progression is him going from Tree to Evil Tree to Evil Tree with the ability to walk and talk.
Zeromus is probably worse as one for one comparison, but Golbez was there to act as Darth Vader for the vast majority of the story; not a perfect replacement for a good Zeromus character but at least a bandage on it. Exdeath is one of my least favorite villains in the series, because his motivations are nonexistent and he has no progression whatsoever. Maybe I'm just not a fan of Man vs Nature stories, and I guess it is somewhat ironic that what looks like a Man vs Man story becomes a Man vs Nature story due to the Evil Man being a tree, but that doesn't change the core problem I have.
It's really similar to FFIII in that way for me, which was probably at least a little intentional. The main cast is more varied and interesting than its immediate predecessor, and this time there is some actual character there compared to the NES era. But that villain, that drags the story down in my estimation.
I actually like FFV the least of the SNES trilogy. It's not bad, it's not even average. It's great! But the sticking points for me are just too large. The story and final dungeon especially drag down the game so hard, again like III. And Exdeath I think is my second least favorite main villain in the series behind Xande, and I think he pisses me off more because it's NOT the NES. The Emperor and Chaos/Garland are neat, but not much more than that.
Final Fantasy on the SNES has, well, Zeromus is as nothing as Exdeath, but Golbez is deeper and more interesting by far than anything the series had in a main villain before. And yet he's not the one the entire thread has been waiting on pins and needles for. With that surrounding context, I can't help but dislike Exdeath as a villain and similarly, FFV as a story.
I don't think Final Fantasy has hit higher highs than this game has before. Gilgamesh and Galuf's death scene especially are highlights of the entire franchise, in my opinion top of the line in terms of Recurring Comedic Boss and Death of Party Member scenes across the franchise. But for me, the Rift, both the location ingame and the fact that it's the whole summary of Exdeath's character are too big to overcome to put it above FFIV.
And, well, let's just say the best is yet to come and I'll leave it at that for now.
By the end of FFV, the entire cast is made of teenagers, or at most very young adults. Everything they deal with is the fault of someone older. It starts with the crystal-intensifying machines, designed by Cid with the best of intentions and used by well-meaning kings to bring untold prosperity to their people, only to precipitate the apocalypse. It continues with Exdeath, an evil warlock who brings about disaster because thirty years ago, the protagonists' own parents and grandparents were too weak to truly defeat him and resorted to sealing him on another world, explicitly someone else's world, making him someone else's burden.
You asked me to bring these thoughts to the thread instead of on Discord, so here I am, attempting to collate my thoughts on why I disagree with this interpretation of the story in a way that makes sense. Remember: The incoming incoherence is your fault, not mine, my brain works perfectly fine on Discord occasionally.
I think that you've made a mistake in your interpretation, and that's that you've stated that the Dawn Warriors were too weak to truly defeat Exdeath. I disagree with this interpretation. I think that the Dawn Warriors were too strong to beat Exdeath; but I also think that this kind of misses the mark a bit.
The Dawn Warriors set out on a quest to defeat Exdeath, an evil sorceror who blah blah blah. They set out with the explicit intention to beat Exdeath, and ultimately found that they could defeat Exdeath, they just couldn't kill him. That's a bit of a problem when your enemy can't die! So they beat him down and seal him away, etc, etc, but it's not because they were too weak.
I think this is a very important distinction, because it's not like Bartz and co. were actually stronger than the Dawn Warriors. They explicitly weren't; at no point do any of them actually outpace the Dawn Warriors in terms of strength.
In fact; Bartz and co. don't even kill Exdeath. There's nothing inherent to their crew that made them able to kill him, no items, no special powers, no lineage, etc. Ultimately, they were only responsible for his death in the sense of landing the final blow, because...
Exdeath kills Exdeath.
I think this is really important to the themes of FF5.
Bartz and co. don't set out to kill Exdeath. They don't even really set off with a major goal in mind beyond 'protect the crystals'; most of their journey is one of exploration, born out of a drive to protect precious people and the world around them. Their confrontations with Exdeath are... often incidental? They never really set out with a drive to specifically beat Exdeath, so much as protect the world, and this occasionally meant stopping in to fight Exdeath for a bit.
What kills Exdeath is his own overreach. He tries for too much power from the Void, and the Void turns around and consumes him in turn. It's only then, once Exdeath has actually won and is working toward his goals, once Bartz and co. have also failed in the same job everyone else has set out on, that Exdeath defeats himself and renders himself vulnerable to being permanently killed by the party.
And I think that's because I would probably identify the game's theme a bit different to how you have identified it. You've identified it as a theme about kicking problems down the road for later generations to deal with; but I think that I would identify FF5's themes as being about past traumas and how people deal with them.
Exdeath is, literally, a tree that a bunch of evil things were sealed inside of, but I think that you can also read him as a metaphor for problems that society didn't want to deal with. He's all of that hatred and anger and whatnot set aside, where society doesn't have to see them, but they're still left there to fester, until one day they explode and the world is hammered down and broken by their re-emergence.
In this framework, the Dawn Warriors couldn't kill Exdeath because you can't put societal problems like those to the sword, you can't stop things from being awful with force. The best that you can do is shove them elsewhere, put them out of mind again, where they're left to fester- a repetition of the exact same mistake that left Exdeath free again, except now those problems are also free to fester in a land that hadn't dealt with them before.
And Bartz and co. didn't defeat Exdeath because they were strong enough to permanently kill him. They defeated Exdeath because they didn't set out to kill Exdeath; they set out on a journey through which they learned to love the land and all the people within it, and the land and all those people within it came to love them back. Their very journey metaphorically empowered them, as their new experiences constantly taught them new things, they were exposed to new situations, and so on.
Exdeath lost not because Bartz and co stabbed him better with a sword than the Dawn Warriors could, but because they didn't set out to beat him. They actually lost; Exdeath won; and all of that awfulness crumpled in on itself until finally, a group of people who had grown across their journey were able to finally deal with it instead of sealing it away where nobody could learn to cope with it or anything.
Two of my favorite villains in fiction have very similar goals to Exdeath in abstract. Kefka Palazzo's a little farther away in terms of a comparison, but he wants to cause wanton destruction and throw the world into disarray. But he goes about it differently, because we can see both his rise and how he was coddled/egged on by the Emperor to become even worse.
Count Bleck is even worse as a comparison to Exdeath, as in he fits Exdeath in window dressing almost to a T: He's one of my favorite villains in fiction, and he has what is close to a one for one copy of Exdeath's goals in this game; he wants to throw the Worlds into the Void in order to destroy everything. It's even also called the Void! But while Kefka's character is improved from Exdeath's via showing his rise from comic relief to God of Destruction, Bleck's is improved by showing his backstory. We get to learn WHY and HOW he became the nihilistic figure who wants nothingness to rule.
Compare this to Exdeath, where the only thing that counts as character progression is him going from Tree to Evil Tree to Evil Tree with the ability to walk and talk.
I can't disagree more. I love Exdeath's hamminess, and his uncomplicated-ness is refreshing. I HATE Kefka's bullshit. In Omi's RPG analogy, the GM cheats their ass off to have their clown DMPC always slip away even though the party easily beats him in combat. This is super annoying and is in fact one of my pet peeves in the entire genre of JRPGs, but whatever, he's just a stupid joke character.
EXCEPT NO he's the final boss, he just snaps his fingers and decides that he's done being a joke character it's time to do some super-magic horseshit that comes out of nowhere, and it's double impossible because not only does it not make the slightest lick of sense, but also this stupid clown should be DEAD because he only lived through repeated GM fiat.
Viewing FF5 as a 'breather game' in terms of plot and characters anyway, I do wonder if it would've fit better had it come out a little later in the FF series, after its plots had gotten substantially heavier and more dramatic? Guess I think this since that was sort of the approach FF9 took, at least up to a point (as did 10-2 to less success). Not that FF4 wasn't heavy or dramatic, given all the deaths, even if none of them hit players as hard as Aerith's death later did (Tellah probably being the closest)
Then again, chances are if FF5 had come out later in the series, people would've pounced on it for being the total opposite of FF7 (not that 7 didn't have humour, it's just not what it was remembered for), I mean that's partly what happened with again FF9.
Also about Faris and other characters that come off as very trans-coded on hindsight, my first thought was George (assigned name Georgina) from those Famous Five books, a tomboy who frequently says she wishes she was a boy. Given author Enid Blyton was not a very progressive person, I doubt George being a trans-man would've been intended, if she even knew about trans people back then (though I've heard people theorise that Blyton may themselves have been a closeted trans-man, though that sort of retroactive speculation has its own issues)
Another character from way back when who comes off as very trans-coded in hindsight is of course Ozma from the Oz books (huh, yet another character who has nothing in common with the FF creature named after them), pretty impressive given she's from even further back than George.
Also about Faris and other characters that come off as very trans-coded on hindsight, my first thought was Georgie from those Famous Five books, a tomboy who frequently says she wishes she was a boy. Given author Enid Blyton was not a very progressive person, I doubt Georgie being a trans-man would've been intended, if she even knew about trans people back then (though I've heard people theorise that Blyton may themselves have been a closeted trans-man, though that sort of retroactive speculation has its own issues)
I never hear about the Famous Five as an adult, and given that they were a huge series for Child Me and Claude (Georgie but in French; they changed all the names and locales) was my favorite character, I appreciate seeing someone of culture bringing her and her whole Gender up.
Exdeath is an incredible villain, so long as you accept that he's mostly just supposed to be the driver of the plot. He's a force of (wood) elemental evil who's out to do evil because fuck you, he thinks it's fun and also funny.
Exdeath is a character put forth purely on the strength of his self-indulgent villainy and gleeful gravitas. There's nothing about him that's supposed to be nuanced or redeemable. He's just fun to hate. He's fun to watch, being an asshole who fleshcrafts his victims into an enchanted castle. He's fun to watch when he deploys the sky holograms to taunt Galuf. And he's fun to watch when the heroes you've been rooting for manage to kick his ass and show him what for.
Dissidia understood this assignment perfectly by leaning further into the ham with his voice acting. In the sum total of things, he's just Xande with nice wallpaper, but it's really good wallpaper, y'know?
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