5. Final Fantasy V (1992)
Final Fantasy V was the last Final Fantasy game we westerners missed out on back in the day. Square USA simply didn’t release it. In fact, it retitled both IV and VI to pretend the one between them didn’t exist. But between an early fan translation in 1998 and 1999’s popular if flawed Final Fantasy Anthology for PlayStation, we finally got to taste the forbidden fruit. It was pretty tasty, but not without its quirks.
Honestly, I found it kind of mid in some ways. The story was whatever, its graphics were SNES generica, and its soundtrack wasn’t Uematsu’s best. Where Final Fantasy V made its mark was its gameplay, with a wonderfully flexible “job” system that let you train your characters in one of 22 roles (26 in later releases) and then mix and match gained abilities between all your mastered classes. It was a beautiful evolution of the more constrained, less interesting system introduced in Final Fantasy III (incidentally, another game denied us for years). This granted Final Fantasy V remarkable replayability that was reminiscent of the original, more free-form Final Fantasy but on PEDs.
As such, this fifth game has a reputation as the Final Fantasy fan’s Final Fantasy, and it’s one of the developers’ favorites, too. Perhaps most impressive is how fans keep it alive today with an annual charity event, in which players sign up to complete runs of the game after being assigned four random, often inharmonious character classes. That sounds like so much fun.
In our 2016 retrospective on the game, former Kotaku staffer Jason Schreier wrote, “I wish I had played Final Fantasy V in the ‘90s, so I’d remember it as fondly as the Final Fantasies that came before and after it.” I feel similarly. I respect Final Fantasy V more than I love it—perhaps that will change, when I play it more in the future—but its fans will attest that it deserves a high placement in any series ranking. We feel pretty good about putting it here. — Alexandra Hall
