Once again, four jobbers set out to save four crystals, but they gave these guys personalities.
A new day dawns, but the land is bereft of any morning breezes. The wind is dying, which means something has happened to one of the four crystals that keep the elements alive. The King of Tycoon leaves to investigate the Wind Shrine, leaving his daughter behind to worry over him. A pirate captain quickly notices the absence of the sea gales. An old man hopes to put a swift end to the crisis, but will soon find himself bereft of memory. And a drifter with his chocobo companion, who had long gone where the wind took them, must set off for a new destination. But things are more dire than they seem already, and the four of them will discover they are the only hope of stopping the oncoming crisis.
Welcome to Final Fantasy V! There’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard of this one before. After the success of Final Fantasy IV, Squaresoft continued on with the ATB system, but this time around they set their sights on the job system from III. On the first go around, nobody but Japan got to experience this new entry, which is a bit of a shame since it’s amazing. Thankfully, we’ve gotten just about every version afterwards, and nowadays this game’s popular enough that there’s a whole charity event based around a specialized run of it. I’ll be playing the Game Boy Advance version of V, but I’ll also be using a hack. The FFa: Custom Classes hack by ludmeister adjusts the amount of things that can be carried into a job, while also shuffling around the order you get some of the jobs. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry. Final Fantasy V doesn’t take long to get to the actual meat of the game, so particular mechanics will be introduced soon enough.
As always, please don’t spoil anything in the story before it comes up.
The Wind Crystal has shattered, but nobody yet knows what that entails. Or even that it happened. But the wind dying down has caught the attention of many people, including our hero Bartz. And if that weren’t already something worth investigating, a meteor also hit the earth near Tycoon Castle. What else is the boy (and his Chocobo) supposed to do but ride out to see it?
Bartz, Lenna, Galuf and Faris have joined forces, which means it’s on to the Wind Shrine! But just awaits the group when they make it to the top? Other than the giant bird which we all knew would be there, of course.
The Warriors of Light are on a mission to save the Crystals! … or at least the ones that are still around. But reaching the next one won’t be easy when we’re trapped in a large circle of land. The only way out is the canal to the east, but it’s locked up tight. So while the team has jobs to use for fights, our first assignment is to figure out how to unlock the canal.
The Wind Crystal is gone, and now so is Syldra. With no way to pilot the ship themselves, the Warriors of Light drift to a ship graveyard, where the undead lurk through the corpses of the other boats. Surely, there’s no greater early test of friendship than fighting ghosts and zombies with people you’ve known for only a handful of hours.
The Warriors of Light manage to escape the ship graveyard, but just where in the world are they? They can’t exactly save the next Crystal if they can’t reach it in the first place, so they’ll need to figure out how they’re going to travel. And as you may have noticed, traveling by land or sea is impossible, so just how are we are we gonna get out of here?
We’ve got a dragon, which means we’re a little less trapped than we were before. We’re still pretty limited though, so the checklist of places to go is short. But since we’re able to, we might as well visit Tycoon and tell everyone that Lenna didn’t die in the wilderness. And since we’re already visiting one castle, why not check out Walse as well?
The Water Crystal is in danger! Thankfully, Hiryu makes the trip to Walse Tower quite a bit easier, but time is still running lower for the Warriors of Light. Worse off, it seems that whatever dark forces are at play are powerful enough to corrupt even the pure soul of Garuda. I know, you must all be weeping at such a thought, but it’s true.
Okay. So we couldn’t save the Water Crystal either. But we will save the Fire Crystal, mark my words! Even if the only way to reach it is by meteor teleporter, which immediately arouses suspicion from the locals of Karnak. And we get thrown in jail. That won’t stop the Warriors of Light, I swear!
Time may or may not be running out for the Fire Crystal. It’s a little hard to tell without a set time limit, but so far we haven’t been doing well with these so let’s hurry just in case. It doesn’t help that the fire-powered ship is a maze of a construct, so navigating it isn’t easy. And what’s on the other side of it isn’t a walk in the park either…
Cid’s in quite the funk, and if we want to continue, we’ll need to find a way to snap him out of it. Word is that Cid’s grandson, Mid, is to the library to the south. So the Warriors of Light are off to the Library of Ancients to comb the place for one, very focused child.
With Mid joining the crew, Cid is back up and running, and now our two nerds have upgraded the fire-powered ship to not need fire to run anymore… or something. Regardless of how it was done, the Warriors of Light now have a functioning boat!
Losing an entire ship hasn’t stopped us from exploring the entire world! Or anywhere you can get by taking a flying bird that only roosts in forests, anyway. But there’s still plenty to see, including the hometown of a certain vagrant we still know so little about.
Alright, exploration’s done. Time to move on! Cid and Mid have informed the Warriors of Light that King Tycoon has crossed the Desert of Shifting Sands on his way to the mysterious town of Gohn. Stranger yet, it seemed that he got across by floating. Since our heroes haven’t learned the Float spell yet, their only choice is to kill a giant worm to move on.
Today, we see if the Warriors of Light can keep a vehicle for more than five minutes as they take the airship up to Ronka Ruins. Which, as it turns out, has become a heavily-guarded technological fortress since it lifted off. Even if they get past the base’s outside defenses, the guards inside aren’t any less dangerous.
All four crystals have been destroyed, and the terrible warlock Exdeath is free. After easily handling the Warriors of Light, he has promptly returned to Galuf’s world to wreak havoc there. Galuf leaves the world with his granddaughter Krile, but can that be the end? Obviously not! Bartz, Lenna and Faris must figure out another way to jump planets for the sake of their friend.
