Final Fantasy V

What it was

A wanderer named Bartz goes to look at a fallen meteor and ends up trying to protect four elemental Crystals, which also happen to be the seal holding back the sorcerer Exdeath. It is a familiar Final Fantasy setup, told with more jokes than most entries, and the plot is not why people love it.

People love it for the jobs. As the Crystals shatter, their shards unlock classes: Knight, Black Mage, Thief, and newcomers to the series such as the Blue Mage, Time Mage and Mime, 22 in all. Each character can switch jobs freely, earning ability points that level the job and unlock skills. The trick is that a skill learned in one job can be carried into another, so a Knight can also cast black magic, or any job can keep the Thief's Caution skill that stops enemies attacking from behind. Fights use the Active Time Battle system, now with a visible gauge showing whose turn is next.

Where it sits in history

Square released it for the Super Famicom in Japan in December 1992. Hironobu Sakaguchi directed and conceived the story, Yoshinori Kitase added humour to the script, and Hiroyuki Ito designed the job system. Yoshitaka Amano did the image art, Tetsuya Nomura designed the monsters, and Nobuo Uematsu wrote 56 tracks of music. It sold about 900,000 copies on its first day and 2.45 million on the Super Famicom in all.

An English version was started and abandoned several times; Square felt it was too hard and unusual for the Western audience of the day. The game finally reached North America in 1999 on PlayStation, inside Final Fantasy Anthology, nearly seven years late and with a weak translation. The 2006 Game Boy Advance version brought a far better script and four extra jobs.

How it plays today

The job system is as much fun now as in 1992. Building a party is a puzzle you set yourself, and experimenting with odd combinations to break a boss is the heart of the game. The music is among Uematsu's best, and the pace is brisk once the jobs open up.

The story is slight and the cast thinly drawn in the early going, though they grow on you. The random encounter rate is high enough to grate, and some bosses and optional fights demand you understand the system rather than out-level it. The original cartridge was only ever in Japanese, so the official re-releases are the easier route.

Compared with

• Final Fantasy III: The Famicom game's job system is the one V improves on, turning it into something far deeper.
• Final Fantasy IV: The previous entry introduced Active Time Battle and leans on its story; V trades drama for freedom.
• Final Fantasy VI: The next entry keeps the ATB gauge; to our taste it tells the better story, while V is the better toy box.

Why it matters

Final Fantasy V's plot is slight, and nobody minds, because the real story is the party you build. A Knight who casts black magic. A Mime who shouldn't work, and does. Every save file holds a different theory of how to win, and a small portrait of whoever made it.

James Paul Gee called this a projective identity: a blend of the real self and the character, shaped by what the player wants that character to be. The job system turns that idea into mechanics. On paper Bartz is a wanderer; in practice Bartz is whatever you decided at 11pm when a boss kept winning. Your stubbornness, your curiosity, your appetite for a daft combination all end up on the screen. That is why comparing parties is half the pleasure. Nobody is really comparing numbers. They are comparing themselves, and finding out there were twenty ways to be clever.

Read: Who you are when you play →

1. Gee, J. P. (2003). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.