The June 2017 RPG Reload Play-Along: Final Fantasy 5

Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload Play-Along. Each month, we'll be playing an iOS RPG together, sharing laughs and tears in equal measures. The post on the front page is basically here to announce the game in question and give a few tips on getting started. The real action will be happening here in the TouchArcade forums, where you'll find a thread dedicated to each month's featured game. Sign up if you haven't already, post your screenshots, ask for advice, or just chat about your misadventures with others. We've got a great community of RPG fans here at TouchArcade, so let's make the most of it! As a little incentive, at the end of each month, I will randomly pick one of the participants and send them something small and silly from here in Japan. All you have to do to be eligible is, well, play along with the Play-Along!

Well, Reloaders, we've got a little bit of a fuzzy pickle this month. The featured game is one of my very favorites, Final Fantasy 5. I chose it for June to coincide with the annual Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta so that anyone who wanted to try the special rules could do that. One little problem, though. The pre-registration for the Four Job Fiesta started today, but the actual Fiesta doesn't get going until partway through June. Uh-oh! If you're playing the game the normal way, no worries. But if you want the tasty zest that comes with the Four Job Fiesta rules, you'll either have to start late or get creative.

In case you aren't familiar with it, the Four Job Fiesta is a charity event that challenges players to go through the game with a randomized set of jobs. It's probably not the best way to play Final Fantasy 5 if it's your first time, but those taking a return trip will likely appreciate the challenge. In Final Fantasy 5, you unlock new sets of jobs at certain points in the game. Ordinarily you can mix and match these jobs, and their abilities, as you see fit. The idea is to match your party to whatever the situation calls for, or just to play the game in the way that is most fun for you. The Four Job Fiesta assigns you one job at each point in the game, giving you a total of four when all is said and done. You can use any learned abilities from those jobs with the other jobs available to you, but you must have at least one of each job type in your party at once.

For example, if you pull the Knight from the first set of jobs, you must then switch to four Knights. Suppose you get a Time Mage next. You can have one Knight and three Time Mages, three Knights and one Time Mage, or two of each. Characters can switch jobs at any time, so long as you adhere to the "one of each" rule. The idea behind these rules is to force the player to consider new strategic options. The game is technically winnable with any combination of four jobs, but some of them are certainly more difficult than others. The mobile version of the game has some differences that make it even tougher in parts, depending on your party. Still, it's always possible.

If you want to play these rules for this Play-Along, you have a choice to make. You can wait for the official site and get started very late. The official event kicks off on June 19th, so you might find it to be a bit of a pinch. The game is about 30 hours long, and that's if you're fairly quick about things. If you want to adhere to the Play-Along schedule and play Four Job Fiesta rules, you can get a set of jobs from this unaffiliated site. Personally, I'm going to wait, but it's up to you. Just remember, you don't actually have to finish the game before the end of June. And I promise, July's game is fairly short by comparison. If you choose to wait, you can at least start the game and play as far as the Wind Shrine. That's the point where the first job comes into play.

 

Yeah, Fiesta rules can certainly help those who suffer from choice paralysis. It can be tough in places but having seen your skills in previous Play-Alongs, I'm sure you'll do fine. Plus, this is my favorite Final Fantasy game! You have to play it!

 

Random for each player. The vote is for the party of whoever is doing the kick-off Run this year. Usually people try to saddle that person with the worst possible party, haha.

 

The answer is simple: the concept art used in the dialogue boxes was done by Yoshitaka Amano, a well-known artist who was the main character designer for Final Fantasy 1-6. They are the original character designs, but they didn't translate well to low-res pixel art.

So another artist, Kazuko Shibuya, was given the job of interpreting Amano's art into something that worked in little sprites with limited color palettes. Her work became somewhat iconic and emblematic of the series, so there's a lot of nostalgia for her particular style as well.

The problem is, as you have noted, that as the sprites get more defined, they look less and less like Amano's art. At the same time, his art is legendary, so Square wants to use it. So you get this disconnect, particularly from Westerners who received little exposure to Amano's art until a decade or more after the fact. Really, the most exposure Western players would have had was the character portraits in the status screen, and even those were usually adjusted as much as possible to resemble in-game sprites (see: Terra's green hair). So it seems weird to see Amano's art in a pure form next to the in-game art, even though it has always been there.

 

Yeah, the timing definitely was off. I should have checked with Eric Koziol beforehand. On the other hand, if it were set as July's game, people would have had to wait on starting the Fiesta for 11 days or something. I may just extend this one through two months. The game is certainly long enough.