Final Fantasy V

• 1. A Meteor Falls

  ›

  Final Fantasy V launched in Japan in December 1992, and within a single day it sold roughly 900,000 cartridges. That opening figure was about 4.5 times the first-day numbers posted by Final Fantasy IV the year before. Japanese authorities grew so concerned about the frenzy that they asked Square not to release the game on a school day, fearing children would skip class to stand in line.

  The game opens with a wanderer named Bartz witnessing a meteor plunge into the planet's surface. Near the crash site he meets an amnesiac old man named Galuf, a princess named Lenna, and a pirate captain named Faris. Their investigation leads them to discover that four elemental Crystals are not merely natural wonders. The Crystals act as a seal on Exdeath, a sorcerer of corrupted spirit who was previously imprisoned inside a tree in the Great Forest of Moore.

  Square assembled a team of 45 people to build the game. They worked within 16 Mbits of storage space to fit the sprites, animations, and detailed backgrounds. The result was a title that topped Japan's sales charts in both December 1992 and January 1993, selling two million copies in its first two months. What drove that hunger was a gameplay system so flexible that players would spend hours experimenting with character builds long after the story's credits rolled.

• 2. The Job System

  ›

  Hiroyuki Ito designed the Job System, working as the game's battle planner alongside Akihiko Matsui. Players could assign any of 22 jobs to their characters in the original Super Famicom release, expanding to 26 in the Game Boy Advance version. Every character starts as a Freelancer, with access to new jobs unlocked by collecting crystal shards.

  The system builds on an earlier version found in Final Fantasy III, reusing and reworking jobs like the Black Mage and Thief while introducing new classes to the series: the Blue Mage, Time Mage, and Mime. Each class accumulates Ability Points separately from regular experience. As job levels climb, characters unlock skills they can carry into different jobs. A character who trains as both a Knight and a Black Mage can, for example, set Black Magic as a secondary command, blending abilities across disciplines.

  Skills vary in type: some are active battle commands, others are passive traits that trigger automatically. The Thief's "Caution" skill, for instance, prevents rear attacks from enemies without any player input. Critics repeatedly singled out this flexibility as the game's defining achievement. GameSpot called it "one of the series' most in-depth and detailed game systems", while Nintendo World Report praised the ability to switch job classes while retaining abilities from previous ones as "groundbreaking". CGMagazine argued that the game "evolved and melded the Job system of I and III with the heavier storytelling of II and IV", providing a foundation that later entries in the series would build upon.

• 3. Battle in Real Time

  ›

  Final Fantasy V was the second game in the series to use the Active Time Battle system, first introduced in Final Fantasy IV. The difference in V was a specific and meaningful improvement: players could now see whose turn was coming next. A time gauge called the ATB Bar filled at a rate tied to each character's speed stat, making turn order visible and tactical.

  This visibility changed how players approached combat. Knowing which character would act next allowed for planning across multiple turns rather than reacting one action at a time. The ATB mechanic with a visible gauge, as implemented in V, carried forward into the four following mainline titles. It became a defining feature of the franchise through the mid-1990s.

  The overworld connecting towns, dungeons, and other locations could be crossed by several means: on foot, by Chocobo, aboard a hydra-guided ship, on a wind drake, or by airship. The airship sequences used Mode 7 effects to make the planet appear to rotate as players moved. Characters grew through experience points gained from random monster encounters, with each level raising attributes like hit points and magic power. A menu outside of battle handled equipment, healing, and job assignment without breaking the flow of the game.

• 4. A Party of Five

  ›

  Five characters appear as playable in Final Fantasy V, though only four can be active at once. Bartz Klauser travels the world with his Chocobo companion Boko and serves as the party's entry point into the main conflict. His strongest attribute is his Strength, and his associated element is Wind. Lenna Charlotte Tycoon is a princess who follows her father to the Wind Shrine; her strongest attribute is Spirit. Galuf Halm Baldesion begins the game without his memory and recovers it gradually; his strongest attribute is Stamina.

  Faris Scherwiz is introduced as a pirate captain who captures the other three when they attempt to steal her ship. She initially disguises herself as a man, a secret the party eventually uncovers. Her attributes are equally strong across all fields, and her associated element is Fire. The fifth character, Krile Mayer Baldesion, is Galuf's granddaughter; she joins the party later in the story when Galuf sacrifices his own life to save the others from Exdeath.

  Yoshitaka Amano designed all character concept art, and he later named his depictions of Faris from Final Fantasy V and Terra from Final Fantasy VI among his personal favorite designs in the series. The monsters were designed by Tetsuya Nomura, who would go on to direct Final Fantasy VII Remake. Nomura later publicly expressed interest in remaking Final Fantasy V and VI. Yoshinori Kitase, who produced Final Fantasy VII Remake, shared that desire and noted that he contributed humor to the scenario to lighten what Hironobu Sakaguchi had conceived as a relatively serious story.

• 5. Nobuo Uematsu's Score

  ›

  Nobuo Uematsu composed Final Fantasy V's soundtrack, which totals 56 tracks. He originally calculated the game would need more than 100 pieces of music before reducing the number to that figure. A two-disc album released alongside the game extended the track count to 67.

  Several spin-off releases followed in 1992 and 1993. Final Fantasy V: 5+1, released in 1992, collected five songs from the original score plus a previously unreleased Super Famicom version of "Matoya's Cave" from the original 1987 Final Fantasy on the Nintendo Entertainment System. In 1993, three more releases followed: Final Fantasy V Dear Friends, a 13-track Piano Collections disc, and the short remix series Final Fantasy V: Mambo de Chocobo.

  Two tracks earned particular afterlives. "Dear Friends" became the title piece of the 2004 concert tour Dear Friends -Music from Final Fantasy-, chosen by Uematsu to reflect his appreciation for the worldwide fan support his music had received. "Clash on the Big Bridge", a battle theme, was arranged by Hitoshi Sakimoto for the Final Fantasy XII Original Soundtrack in 2006. CGMagazine would later write that the game's soundtrack "has always been one of the most diverse and well-rounded in the series".

• 6. Reaching Western Players

  ›

  Square began an English translation of Final Fantasy V shortly after its Japanese release. The project collapsed when Square decided the game's difficulty and tone were too different from the rest of the series for a standard North American launch. Translator Ted Woolsey explained in a 1994 interview that the game was "just not accessible enough to the average gamer".

  At least four separate localization attempts followed over the next several years, each abandoned for various reasons. One plan would have released the game under the title Final Fantasy Extreme. Another involved developer Top Dog Software porting the game to Windows for North America. A fourth attempt was handled by Eidos Interactive around 1998. The repeated failures made Final Fantasy V one of the first games to receive a complete fan translation.

  The game finally reached North American shelves in September 1999 as part of the PlayStation compilation Final Fantasy Anthology, bundled with the PlayStation version of Final Fantasy VI. That release came nearly seven years after the original Japanese launch and marked the first time the game was published outside Japan. The English version introduced a Cornish "pirate" accent for Faris and chose different romanizations for character names, including "Bartz" rather than the Japanese official "Butz". The PlayStation version of the game eventually earned "Greatest Hits" status after selling more than 350,000 copies.

  The Game Boy Advance port, released on the 6th of November 2006 in North America, brought the most praised localization of the game up to that point. Nintendo Power called it the "definitive" version of one of the series' best titles, and GameSpot gave it a score of 8.5, calling it "better than ever". The Pixel Remaster, released the 10th of November 2021, carried forward the Advance translation largely unchanged, with CGMagazine calling it "the best translation to date".