Final Fantasy V, Part 1, Part A
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Once more unto the breach, my friends, once more.
It's time to venture into the mysterious lands of Final Fantasy V.
Reminder that if you like my work and want to support it, you can still donate to my ko-fi or Patreon!
For the first time, we are greeted not by a simple white background and the menu, but by an actual intro cutscene; the title of the game appears on this wavy, reflecting background, suggestive of some endless sea under a night sky, a beautiful otherworldly picture. Then as that background fades away, the letters themselves become a screen displaying…
…a young man riding a chocobo, running freely in an endless plain, making his way through the title of the game.
It's honestly really cool. As soon as you press a button (or if you let it play out in its entirety), we flash to the traditional white screen with starting menu that we know and love. Of all things, this makes me nostalgic for Pokémon Blue and Red, whose rather simple startup cutscene displaying fighting Pokémons blew my tiny child mind.
So, as a reminder, things I know about this game: The villain is an evil tree called Exdeath. I've seen his visual design at some point, some kind of guy in armor? Also someone joked about a 'Big Bridge' when I brought up playing the game, so I assume this is where we'll be introduced to Gilgamesh. There are other things I know but can't remember off the top of my head, though they're likely to come to me as the game advances.
Without further ado, let's open the game!
The first thing we see is the 'camera' opening on a castle's peaks then panning down to a sleeping dragon, then a man going down to that dragon and waking it, ostensibly with the intention of going for a ride, before a young woman (girl? It's hard to tell sprite age unless we're explicitly told so, but I'm going to assume she's an adult) calls out to him.
That man, we learn, is 'King Tycoon' (with Final Fantasy's naming conventions, this might or might not be that he's the king of a place called Tycoon), and this girl, Lenna, is his daughter. She asks him if he really has to go, and he says regretfully that he must protect the castle. He also delivers what I'm going to guess is about to be one of the most quickly ignored ominous warnings in the history of Final Fantasy:
King Tycoon (this feels weird to type. It's like if he was called 'King Mayor.' Or perhaps 'Fuhrer King Bradley'-) tells her that 'something is wrong with the wind,' and that he must go to the Wind Shrine to check on the Crystal.
So far, so Final Fantasy. Elemental Crystals, shrines, fucking with them does bad things to the weather and the world, got it. I'm wondering when the game will start doing funky things with the formula - I started playing Final Fantasy with older games, and they tended either not to feature the Crystals in the same capacity, or to play around with what they meant, or to introduce them late enough that I didn't reach them. I don't remember any crystals in FFVII or VIII, for instance, and XIV has 'crystals' not as four distinct world fixture, but rather as a naturally-occurring resources that is still tremendously important to the plot but in aggregate, rather than in singular instances.
Lenna tells her father going alone is reckless, and he tells her he'll be fine and to 'have faith,' before climbing onto his dragon and heading towards his Inevitable Parental Figure Demise with panache, if nothing else.
Nothing to say here except that this is extremely cool.
Then the opening cutscene flashes to a number of other characters, who I assume are going to make up the rest of our party.
Only the coolest motherfuckers do the 'standing on the prow of a moving ship' move.
Pretty sure that's a teleporter he's standing in front of.
Well, that's new.
Our Hero being too late to prevent the elemental catastrophe is expected, but the crystal exploding is certainly not. In prior games, the crystals have always remained physically intact - they dim, they're stolen, someone drains their power, and so on, but they never broke before (except the fakeout crystal in FF3). That, uh, seems bad. I don't know how we're supposed to be putting it back together.
But what's this? A wild forest youth tending to a campfire along with his beloved chocobo pet? That could only be our protagonist! Or, well, one of our protagonists, since I assume we're dealing with an ensemble cast. This should be the one they call… "Butts."
Then a giant meteor falls from the sky. Really cool use of the Mode 7 background here, the camera is tilting it this way and that while zooming in to create the impression of 'moving closer' to it while careening wildly through the sky. This is a really clever use of 2D to give the sensation of 3D, which is the kind of trick the SNES era of games was notable for and which I always love to see.
Also, crystal shattering, wind stopping, and a meteorite falling from the sky? That's a lot to be throwing at us all at once, game.
Our nameless protagonist hears the distant impact of the meteorite, and jumps on top of his chocobo to head towards the commotion.
Giving us a chocobo right at the start of the game is a pretty big move, and I suspect it's not going to stick around for long.
Incidentally, from the plainsy background and surrounding mountains, I'm guessing this is literally the scene being portrayed in the startup cutscene: Woodkid run (boy run)ning through the plains on his birdly steed, headed towards the meteorite.
Quick look at the world map. We're continuing a trend of very heavily mountainous worlds with inhabitable land mostly centering on the coasts. I'm starting to suspect these worlds are strongly influenced by, uh, living in Japan.
That was quick!
You know, I know that FFV uses a job system. I think that kinda has to mean that we're going to get our party together very quickly, yeah? FFIV could afford benching and fielding a new character every five minutes because they all operated on individually-designed classes that would be tailored for whatever part of the game they were meant to tackle (a system which incidentally kind of groaned under the strain when you did things like tackle longer content than intended with Tellah or FuSoYa in the party), but with a job system you kinda have to keep people in the party long-term, or else the job progression system gets all sorts of fucked.
And, wouldn't you know it, I'm right!
Poor Lena has been damsel'd off-screen and is being abducted a bunch of… orcs?
Goblins, got it.
Seeing as they are our very first enemy, meant for a solo battle pre-job in a game designed around party play and jobs, they are hideously weak and die in one hit.
Lena says yeah, she's pretty sure she's alright, and asks the guy's name…
Right, Bartz, got it. I could change it, but this guy's clearly at least some level of character and backstory going, so I'm going to leave it as is, no matter how much it makes me think of Bart Simpson.
Wanderer with a friendly fantasy mount is a great archetype. I hope his chocobo doesn't meet a sad and dramatic end, like in a lake or something.
Lenna is quick to reassure us that she did not in fact fall to the blows of two puny lv 1 goblins, and was in fact knocked out cold by the giant meteorite, which is actually kind of impressive, given I would expect being in the impact radius to just kill you.
And shockingly, she's not the only one!
There's some other geezer smack on the edge of the crater.
I wonder what a meteorite of that size would do in the real world. Well, it's a trick question; it wouldn't stay 'that size' post impact. For a meteorite to remain that size it would need to be much bigger before hitting the ground, although not so big that it would disintegrate entirely. Chixtulub was, what, 1km? We're far from it of course but this rock is like… 15-20 times the width of, let's say, an average 175cm man… Call it 40 meters post-impact? Yeah, I don't think that forest would be standing there after impact. This thing would be standing in the middle of a giant crater after annihilating much of the region.
Unless it was a low-velocity fall, in which case it wouldn't be coming from outer space through the 'normal' process of meteorites, hmm.
Can't say 'sakes alive' is an expression I've ever heard before. In any case, our geezer got hit so hard by the meteorite he appears to have lost all his memories. The only thing he can remember is that his name is 'Galuf.' Bartz and Lenna try to prompt him to recall more, but in vain.
Then Lenna decides she's been delayed enough by these 'first TTRPG session' shenanigans and has to get back to flaunting the singular warning her father gave her about what to absolutely not do under any circumstance:
Galuf says he'll go with her, and Lenna tries to protest (why, though, you need all the help you can get), but he says he has to go there, he can 'feel it in his bones.' So they turn to Bartz to give him the obvious lead, and he gives the most hilariously abrupt Refusal of the Call I've ever seen:
Seriously, this is so sudden it's genuinely funny. Like, Lenna and Galuf themselves seem to be blindsided by that. It's exactly how I would expect the table to react if, after the obvious Getting Together Moment, they gave me my cue to say 'And my axe!' and I just said 'thanks but no' and left everyone completely speechless as to what to do with that.
Lenna and Galuf walk away from Bartz, then Lenna hesitates, turns around, says 'Bartz… Thank you again. And farewell…' before Galuf does the same and wishes him 'Godspeed, and all that whatnot.' Bartz lets the implication just completely fly over his head and head back to his chocobo.
This man is either extremely poorly socialized, or kind of an idiot.
The funny thing here is, since we have free roaming with the chocobo, the game has to block any path towards anything other than the meteorite going there, which in turn means that now that we have left the meteorite, there's nowhere obvious to go - except roaming about the map until we reach a spot where it triggers this cutscene.
The chocobo immediately starts yelling at him, ostensibly over abandoning a girl and an old man to the monster-infested wilds, and Bartz actually looks vaguely ashamed. His answer is also kind of hilarious:
He didn't want to go because of the goblins, which means he let the other two head into a dangerous situation because he didn't want to put himself in danger, which while a realistic reaction for a normal person to have, is hilariously petty and cowardly by the standards of a JRPG protagonist. And now he's being shamed by his own chocobo! Unfortunately, before he can act accordingly and head back to offer his help again, the earthquakes start:
And he hears the voices of Lenna and Galuf crying out in shock or pain. Bartz jumps onto Boko and heads forward, jumping over new chasms as they open, and…
…fighting the world's bravest and stupidest goblins, who've decided to pick fights with armed strangers in the middle of an earthquake. Their headstrong will would give pause to WRPG bandits.
Along the way, we find Lenna and Galuf lying unconscious on the ground (genuinely unclear how they somehow ended up here given that we just rode several miles on chocobo back across the overworld), and Bartz picks them up before escaping the opening chasms.
I appreciate that while waiting for everyone to wake up, Bartz just stands on a cool rock. He's got real anime vibes.
Lenna is first to wake up, and it seems she's aware of what went down, as she tells Bartz she keeps being in his debt, and he tells her not to worry about it. They attribute the quakes/landslides to a delayed aftershock of the meteorite, which is… fair enough, although I wonder if what's happening instead isn't that the Earth Crystal is trying to suffer the same pre-shattering symptoms as the Wind Crystal did when 'something was wrong with the wind.' And, unfortunately, the road to Tule, where the Wind Crystal is located, would appear to be covered in rubble, meaning Lenna can't get there anymore. At the mention of the Wind Shrine, Galuf mutters in his sleep about needing to go there.
Yeah, that refusal of the call didn't last long.
Intriguing! There's probably some kind of destiny stuff going on here. Also, this sounds like we have another orphan. Wonder how plot-relevant that father will be.
I see that Galuf is occupying the Funny Old Man niche.
The group tries to brainstorm a way to reach the Wind Shrine with the road blocked, which amusingly enough leads to them standing around for a while saying "Hrm…" and "..." before giving up and deciding to just run around on chocobo back until they find something.
The answer turns out to be "just walk a little up north and you will find a cave."
Sadly, Bartz decides the cave is too dangerous for chocobos, and tells Boko to wait for them here. I certainly hope we're not going to leave on a massive journey across the world and forget about him completely.
Split for length. I wasn't expecting to have to do this for my very first post, but I've lost my touch at keeping the screenshots in check!
It's time to venture into the mysterious lands of Final Fantasy V.
Reminder that if you like my work and want to support it, you can still donate to my ko-fi or Patreon!
For the first time, we are greeted not by a simple white background and the menu, but by an actual intro cutscene; the title of the game appears on this wavy, reflecting background, suggestive of some endless sea under a night sky, a beautiful otherworldly picture. Then as that background fades away, the letters themselves become a screen displaying…
…a young man riding a chocobo, running freely in an endless plain, making his way through the title of the game.
It's honestly really cool. As soon as you press a button (or if you let it play out in its entirety), we flash to the traditional white screen with starting menu that we know and love. Of all things, this makes me nostalgic for Pokémon Blue and Red, whose rather simple startup cutscene displaying fighting Pokémons blew my tiny child mind.
So, as a reminder, things I know about this game: The villain is an evil tree called Exdeath. I've seen his visual design at some point, some kind of guy in armor? Also someone joked about a 'Big Bridge' when I brought up playing the game, so I assume this is where we'll be introduced to Gilgamesh. There are other things I know but can't remember off the top of my head, though they're likely to come to me as the game advances.
Without further ado, let's open the game!
The first thing we see is the 'camera' opening on a castle's peaks then panning down to a sleeping dragon, then a man going down to that dragon and waking it, ostensibly with the intention of going for a ride, before a young woman (girl? It's hard to tell sprite age unless we're explicitly told so, but I'm going to assume she's an adult) calls out to him.
That man, we learn, is 'King Tycoon' (with Final Fantasy's naming conventions, this might or might not be that he's the king of a place called Tycoon), and this girl, Lenna, is his daughter. She asks him if he really has to go, and he says regretfully that he must protect the castle. He also delivers what I'm going to guess is about to be one of the most quickly ignored ominous warnings in the history of Final Fantasy:
King Tycoon (this feels weird to type. It's like if he was called 'King Mayor.' Or perhaps 'Fuhrer King Bradley'-) tells her that 'something is wrong with the wind,' and that he must go to the Wind Shrine to check on the Crystal.
So far, so Final Fantasy. Elemental Crystals, shrines, fucking with them does bad things to the weather and the world, got it. I'm wondering when the game will start doing funky things with the formula - I started playing Final Fantasy with older games, and they tended either not to feature the Crystals in the same capacity, or to play around with what they meant, or to introduce them late enough that I didn't reach them. I don't remember any crystals in FFVII or VIII, for instance, and XIV has 'crystals' not as four distinct world fixture, but rather as a naturally-occurring resources that is still tremendously important to the plot but in aggregate, rather than in singular instances.
Lenna tells her father going alone is reckless, and he tells her he'll be fine and to 'have faith,' before climbing onto his dragon and heading towards his Inevitable Parental Figure Demise with panache, if nothing else.
Nothing to say here except that this is extremely cool.
Then the opening cutscene flashes to a number of other characters, who I assume are going to make up the rest of our party.
Only the coolest motherfuckers do the 'standing on the prow of a moving ship' move.
Pretty sure that's a teleporter he's standing in front of.
Well, that's new.
Our Hero being too late to prevent the elemental catastrophe is expected, but the crystal exploding is certainly not. In prior games, the crystals have always remained physically intact - they dim, they're stolen, someone drains their power, and so on, but they never broke before (except the fakeout crystal in FF3). That, uh, seems bad. I don't know how we're supposed to be putting it back together.
But what's this? A wild forest youth tending to a campfire along with his beloved chocobo pet? That could only be our protagonist! Or, well, one of our protagonists, since I assume we're dealing with an ensemble cast. This should be the one they call… "Butts."
Then a giant meteor falls from the sky. Really cool use of the Mode 7 background here, the camera is tilting it this way and that while zooming in to create the impression of 'moving closer' to it while careening wildly through the sky. This is a really clever use of 2D to give the sensation of 3D, which is the kind of trick the SNES era of games was notable for and which I always love to see.
Also, crystal shattering, wind stopping, and a meteorite falling from the sky? That's a lot to be throwing at us all at once, game.
Our nameless protagonist hears the distant impact of the meteorite, and jumps on top of his chocobo to head towards the commotion.
Giving us a chocobo right at the start of the game is a pretty big move, and I suspect it's not going to stick around for long.
Incidentally, from the plainsy background and surrounding mountains, I'm guessing this is literally the scene being portrayed in the startup cutscene: Woodkid run (boy run)ning through the plains on his birdly steed, headed towards the meteorite.
Quick look at the world map. We're continuing a trend of very heavily mountainous worlds with inhabitable land mostly centering on the coasts. I'm starting to suspect these worlds are strongly influenced by, uh, living in Japan.
That was quick!
You know, I know that FFV uses a job system. I think that kinda has to mean that we're going to get our party together very quickly, yeah? FFIV could afford benching and fielding a new character every five minutes because they all operated on individually-designed classes that would be tailored for whatever part of the game they were meant to tackle (a system which incidentally kind of groaned under the strain when you did things like tackle longer content than intended with Tellah or FuSoYa in the party), but with a job system you kinda have to keep people in the party long-term, or else the job progression system gets all sorts of fucked.
And, wouldn't you know it, I'm right!
Poor Lena has been damsel'd off-screen and is being abducted a bunch of… orcs?
Goblins, got it.
Seeing as they are our very first enemy, meant for a solo battle pre-job in a game designed around party play and jobs, they are hideously weak and die in one hit.
Lena says yeah, she's pretty sure she's alright, and asks the guy's name…
Right, Bartz, got it. I could change it, but this guy's clearly at least some level of character and backstory going, so I'm going to leave it as is, no matter how much it makes me think of Bart Simpson.
Wanderer with a friendly fantasy mount is a great archetype. I hope his chocobo doesn't meet a sad and dramatic end, like in a lake or something.
Lenna is quick to reassure us that she did not in fact fall to the blows of two puny lv 1 goblins, and was in fact knocked out cold by the giant meteorite, which is actually kind of impressive, given I would expect being in the impact radius to just kill you.
And shockingly, she's not the only one!
There's some other geezer smack on the edge of the crater.
I wonder what a meteorite of that size would do in the real world. Well, it's a trick question; it wouldn't stay 'that size' post impact. For a meteorite to remain that size it would need to be much bigger before hitting the ground, although not so big that it would disintegrate entirely. Chixtulub was, what, 1km? We're far from it of course but this rock is like… 15-20 times the width of, let's say, an average 175cm man… Call it 40 meters post-impact? Yeah, I don't think that forest would be standing there after impact. This thing would be standing in the middle of a giant crater after annihilating much of the region.
Unless it was a low-velocity fall, in which case it wouldn't be coming from outer space through the 'normal' process of meteorites, hmm.
Can't say 'sakes alive' is an expression I've ever heard before. In any case, our geezer got hit so hard by the meteorite he appears to have lost all his memories. The only thing he can remember is that his name is 'Galuf.' Bartz and Lenna try to prompt him to recall more, but in vain.
Then Lenna decides she's been delayed enough by these 'first TTRPG session' shenanigans and has to get back to flaunting the singular warning her father gave her about what to absolutely not do under any circumstance:
Galuf says he'll go with her, and Lenna tries to protest (why, though, you need all the help you can get), but he says he has to go there, he can 'feel it in his bones.' So they turn to Bartz to give him the obvious lead, and he gives the most hilariously abrupt Refusal of the Call I've ever seen:
Seriously, this is so sudden it's genuinely funny. Like, Lenna and Galuf themselves seem to be blindsided by that. It's exactly how I would expect the table to react if, after the obvious Getting Together Moment, they gave me my cue to say 'And my axe!' and I just said 'thanks but no' and left everyone completely speechless as to what to do with that.
Lenna and Galuf walk away from Bartz, then Lenna hesitates, turns around, says 'Bartz… Thank you again. And farewell…' before Galuf does the same and wishes him 'Godspeed, and all that whatnot.' Bartz lets the implication just completely fly over his head and head back to his chocobo.
This man is either extremely poorly socialized, or kind of an idiot.
The funny thing here is, since we have free roaming with the chocobo, the game has to block any path towards anything other than the meteorite going there, which in turn means that now that we have left the meteorite, there's nowhere obvious to go - except roaming about the map until we reach a spot where it triggers this cutscene.
The chocobo immediately starts yelling at him, ostensibly over abandoning a girl and an old man to the monster-infested wilds, and Bartz actually looks vaguely ashamed. His answer is also kind of hilarious:
He didn't want to go because of the goblins, which means he let the other two head into a dangerous situation because he didn't want to put himself in danger, which while a realistic reaction for a normal person to have, is hilariously petty and cowardly by the standards of a JRPG protagonist. And now he's being shamed by his own chocobo! Unfortunately, before he can act accordingly and head back to offer his help again, the earthquakes start:
And he hears the voices of Lenna and Galuf crying out in shock or pain. Bartz jumps onto Boko and heads forward, jumping over new chasms as they open, and…
…fighting the world's bravest and stupidest goblins, who've decided to pick fights with armed strangers in the middle of an earthquake. Their headstrong will would give pause to WRPG bandits.
Along the way, we find Lenna and Galuf lying unconscious on the ground (genuinely unclear how they somehow ended up here given that we just rode several miles on chocobo back across the overworld), and Bartz picks them up before escaping the opening chasms.
I appreciate that while waiting for everyone to wake up, Bartz just stands on a cool rock. He's got real anime vibes.
Lenna is first to wake up, and it seems she's aware of what went down, as she tells Bartz she keeps being in his debt, and he tells her not to worry about it. They attribute the quakes/landslides to a delayed aftershock of the meteorite, which is… fair enough, although I wonder if what's happening instead isn't that the Earth Crystal is trying to suffer the same pre-shattering symptoms as the Wind Crystal did when 'something was wrong with the wind.' And, unfortunately, the road to Tule, where the Wind Crystal is located, would appear to be covered in rubble, meaning Lenna can't get there anymore. At the mention of the Wind Shrine, Galuf mutters in his sleep about needing to go there.
Yeah, that refusal of the call didn't last long.
Intriguing! There's probably some kind of destiny stuff going on here. Also, this sounds like we have another orphan. Wonder how plot-relevant that father will be.
I see that Galuf is occupying the Funny Old Man niche.
The group tries to brainstorm a way to reach the Wind Shrine with the road blocked, which amusingly enough leads to them standing around for a while saying "Hrm…" and "..." before giving up and deciding to just run around on chocobo back until they find something.
The answer turns out to be "just walk a little up north and you will find a cave."
Sadly, Bartz decides the cave is too dangerous for chocobos, and tells Boko to wait for them here. I certainly hope we're not going to leave on a massive journey across the world and forget about him completely.
Split for length. I wasn't expecting to have to do this for my very first post, but I've lost my touch at keeping the screenshots in check!
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