Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 106: Final Fantasy V

Episode Date: July 3, 2017

Our 30th anniversary deep-dive series continues with the fifth entry in the Final Fantasy franchise, the 16-bit cult obsession Final Fantasy V. Bob and Jeremy are joined by pop culture pundit Shivam Bhatt and Chris Kohler, who wrote the book on the game.

This weekend Retronauts, some men just want to watch the Y burn. featuring me, Jeremy Parrish, and also other people who are not me. Let's go around the table and make it quick. Hey, this is Bob Mackey. I'm a butts man. Oh, okay. You know, like, they're a leg man and their ass man? I'm a butts man. In America, you're a Barts man. Yeah.

Do the Barts man. I don't know how to do them. I'm sorry. Hi, this is Chievin'Butt, and I'm a level five death man. Hi, this is Chris Kohler, and I've been waiting for you this whole time on the other side of this door. What is that even a reference to? Is that Go-Go? No, it's a reference to Gilgamesh.

Oh, okay. So, in case you were wondering, the reason we're talking about butts and doors and why burns, it's because we're talking this week about Final Fantasy 5 as the latest episode in our, what is it called,

a series of deep dives into the Final Fantasy franchise. We did skip two and three, But we've done one and four because those are awesome. And now we're on to five, which might be even more awesome. I guess there will be some debate in the comments, but I am willing to stump for five. What about you guys? I think that Final Fantasy Five should always be considered when discussing what is the best Final Fantasy game.

I'm not saying it's the best. I'm saying it needs to be in the discussion, in the mix, because it could be. I agree. It's really hard for me to decide between four, five, and six. They're just also good for their own reasons. Five is at least a primary candidate. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, see, four has always been my favorite, but after I discovered five and realized how

much tactics was influenced by five, it went way, way up in my list. My morning writing ritual goes something like this. I wake up, put a kettle on the stove, and grind some coffee beans. It's only after I've pressed myself a fresh cup of coffee that I can get to work on my latest Retronauts projects. My words don't start flowing until the coffee does, so I'm pretty picky about what I drink. These days I'm drinking Red Roosters' Ethiopia Worka blend, a single-source selection with a mild, slightly netty flavor. Like everything Red Rooster sells, Ethiopia Warca is made with high-quality, sustainable, organic coffee beans freshly roasted in small batches at the company's headquarters in Floyd, Virginia.

Ethiopia Worka is one of this month's subscription selections, which you can have delivered directly to your door every two to four weeks. Their subscription service is a great way to enjoy fresh world-class coffees at home, no matter where you live. Each month, they choose from rotating fresh, seasonal coffees, and send you coffee based on your specific preferences. To receive your first delivery of Red Rooster's coffee subscription for free, go to Redrooster.comfey slash retro,

and use the coupon code free retro. That's one shipment of the freshest, highest quality coffee in the world delivered to your door for free. There's no commitment to continue, and you can cancel it any time. Red Rooster is so confident that you'll love their coffee, the first delivery is free. Yeah, and another reason we're talking about Final Fantasy 5 this episode is because of that guy right there to my left. Oh, you can't see because you're listening on an audio podcast. But trust me, Chris Kohler is on my left. Well, if you imagine that we introduced ourselves in a counterclockwise,

Which you don't actually have to imagine because that is what happened. Right. Then I would be on your left. Correct. So anyway, tell us. Tell us what's going on. Oh, man. I'm so excited to actually say this in public because I've been working on this for a really long time.

I have actually written a book about Final Fantasy 5 for the publisher Boss Fight books, which is a small press that does, we've probably talked about this on retronauts before, right? They do individual novella length works about individual video games. They've done books on Earthbound, Chrono Trigger. Shadow of the Colossus. Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Sutner. Ana Anthropede did a book on ZZT. They've done some Mario books. But they've never done a Final Fantasy book.

And last year for their Kickstarter, because they do a Kickstarter for each season of the series, fans voted, the fans voted and made their voices heard that they wanted a book about Final Fantasy 6 and they're getting that but also I'm doing a book on Final Fantasy 5

which is actually all like totally in the works already before that happened so this will actually be the second book you've written about Final Fantasy 5 the first being the strategy guide that you wrote that Square Inix or whoever

then scraped together to put together their Final Fantasy 5 portion for Final Fantasy Anthology Strategy Guide is that correct? They certain that is an accurate assessment of what happened, Jeremy. Thank you. Yeah, so, yeah, long story short, and in fact, I do, I will get into this in the book. Final Fantasy 5 was the first game I ever imported because it was, we didn't get Final Fantasy

5 in America. And as a lover of Final Fantasy 4 and 6, it was like, I've got to, what is this game in the middle of these two games? It must be amazing. And it was. I bought it when I didn't know Japanese. And then I was like, we've got to, we've got to bring this, we've got to spread the joy. So I teamed up with other people on the internet. One of whom was Nora Stevens, now Nora Stevens Heath, who's a game localizer, worked on Kingdom Hearts and stuff like that. But back in the neighbor, both just teens playing Final Fantasy on the internet, about in 1995, and wrote the first Final Fantasy 5 FAC to try to help people who didn't know Japanese make their way through this game if they were to import it. And then, yeah, when the Final Fantasy anthology, Final Fantasy

came out, finally came out in the U.S. in 1999, they ripped off the fact for their strategy guide, and like, we made a mistake, and then they printed that mistake. Oh, no. And then I had, I mean, if you know Final Fantasy 5,

which we're going to get into it, you have an incredible amount of customization control over your characters, which means that when I get to the end of a game, my characters, my four characters, and the jobs that they've mastered, the abilities that they have, are are going to be different than you're...

It would be an incredible coincidence, one in a million, if we had the exact same characters at the end of the game. The Final Fantasy Anthology Strategy Guide has a... Here's the characters that we recommend you go into the final fight with. And that is just... They're just my characters from my Super Famicom cartridge that I had at the end of the game that I had written about in the fact.

Did they also reprint the sick ASCII art that you put the top of your... I'm imagining it's like... Probably Chris Culler. Do not steal. Yeah. So then I have a question. If you imported this game of Japanese, Final Fantasy 5 has always been a really systems-heavy game. It's not like a story-heavy game.

But I feel like the system is so complex that if you don't have an entertaining Japanese, how did you even play it? Shivam, I didn't say it was a good idea. So, yeah, it was really like, I thought it was just going to be like, we, you know, if to understand, we didn't know. Like, there was no, there was information about Final Fantasy 5 that was like, one, it's hard. Two, you can change your character's classes throughout the game, which means that one character could be a white mage, and then the next second he could be a dragoon. And you could have four canes in your party, basically.

Like, you have to understand the mentality of the American teenager, but had absolutely no way of knowing, like, how crazy it actually was. And so a lot of the fact was literally just, like, painstakingly transcribed, and this is all done by Nora, lists of here are the jobs, here are the abilities, just to tell you at least to give you a sense of what the abilities are. And we listed them in Japanese characters as well so that the idea would be that you'd be able to look at the game,

even if you didn't know Japanese, try to identify the characters you were seeing on screen and be like, oh, okay, well, that certain set of moon language that I don't understand means, you know, a jump or, you know, Lance. or whatever, right. Yes, it's always fun to kind of make that first tentative step into importing games and realize, oh my God, why didn't I import a fighting game?

I'm way in over my head because my first game was Final Fantasy or Castlevania Symphony of the Night, which I could have waited like six months to play it in English, but at the time I didn't know. I thought, oh, it's 2Ds. This is why I imported DDR first. There's like no Japanese to speak of it. See, she even knows what's up, but we're idiots. So,

in the Final Fantasy series if you're not counting... But he came between two and three. If you're not counting Final Fantasy Mystic Quest which you shouldn't or Final Fantasy legend which that's cute but no.

So Final Fantasy 5, yeah. Or Final Fantasy Gaiden, which of course was Sagan Densetsu, which was Final Fantasy. Does that come out before or after five? Those were both 92. Oh, it probably came out of 91 in Japan actually.

I'm guessing that it was before because Final Fantasy 5 was December of 1992. Okay, yeah. All right then. So... We got tactics in America

before five, right? We did. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. We can get into the sad convoluted history. But basically, like Final Fantasy 2 and 3, the actual Final Fantasy 2 and 3,

we did not see an English version of Final Fantasy 5 until many, many years after its original Japanese launch. And this was the period where RPGs were kind of, you know, not really sticking to the American audience.

And I think everyone was very, very hesitant about what they localized. And that includes Enix, or not Inix, SquareSoft at the time before it was Square Inix. You know, they brought over Final Fantasy 2 and they changed it up considerably, which we talked about in our Final Fantasy 4 episode. Sorry, I mean, they brought over Final Fantasy 4 as Final Fantasy 2 and changed it up considerably in the process. They skipped over two and three, partially because of timing, but also just because I think, think two would have been very daunting for inexperienced RPG players in America to deal with. And three also was very systems oriented.

So I think they probably just, we're talking about the Famicom games. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of it probably also had to do with the changing market at the time. By the time they released Final Fantasy One, it was 1990. Right. Super Famic Nintendo was coming out in the U.S. But like people weren't, this was the first like console generation shift essentially.

So people didn't really know what was going to happen to the market. And, in fact, the 8-bit market, like, plummeted, like, significantly. And I think that may have had something to do with it, like, oh, we need to get out of this 8-bit market because it's not good. Well, I mean, they were able to localize Final Fantasy 4 in a fairly quick fashion compared to the previous games. You know, Dragon Quest 1 took three years to come to America. Final Fantasy took three years to come to America. Final Fantasy 1 came out here in 1990. Final Fantasy 4 came out here in 1991.

Yeah. So they basically just said, hey, why? Why don't we just kind of jump ahead? Was it really only one year between Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy? About a year and like three months. I guess I was so young that it felt like an infinite time between one and two. I mean, it really did feel like Final Fantasy 2, which is what they called it here, because... Well, Final Fantasy was also the scrappy underdog at the time.

I mean, Dragon Quest outsold it by millions and millions of copies. And so in the U.S., they stuck with doing Dragon Quest games on the NES, you know, kind of one by one. But Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy moved to Super Famicom before Dragon Quest did, like, big time, like, pretty far in advance. And I think they wanted to try to, like, you know, leapfrog ahead of them. And so I would guess that probably factored into the decision as well. Like, you know what, let's just, for America, let's just go, Super Nintendo, let's go big, yeah. Yeah, because Dragon Quest 4 came out after Final Fantasy 4 did here. Yeah, yeah.

And that was an NES game as opposed to Super NEO. Right, it was 92. And look what happened. And the Dragon Warrior series just got, it didn't get any more relevant, basically, whereas the Final Fantasy series actually did start to establish an aim for itself. Well, I mean, Final Fantasy 2 when it came out, obviously was just so epically incredible to look at compared to Dragon Quest. And listen to. Right. Yeah.

Right. So Final Fantasy 4 came out here in America as Final Fantasy 2 in 1991. Final Fantasy 5 came out in Japan at the end of 1992. But we wouldn't see another true Final Fantasy game until Six came here as Final Fantasy game. Fantasy 3 in 1994. So in the interim, what Squarespaceoft did was look at the games that were coming out in Japan and say, maybe those, like this one especially, this really complicated one with all the systems and everything and the high challenge level, maybe that's not really ideal for

the market right now. So what we got instead were Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, a game custom built basically by the team that would create Final Fantasy Legend 3 a few years later as a very much a beginners RPG. It's extremely linear. It's extremely simplistic. It's, you know, it has a little bit of that kind of like Final Fantasy mechanics in it, but not much. It's really, really like Baby's First RPG. Was that released later in Japan as Final Fantasy USA? Okay, I thought so. Yep. We'll start that with just Super Mario. Yeah, Super Mario, USA, Final Fantasy, USA. Yeah. We also got, they localized, like,

they knew Final Fantasy name mean something. So they localized Makaitoshi Saga as Final Fantasy legend they localized Seiken Dinsets as Final Fantasy Adventure which you know fair enough that was actually made as a spinoff of Final Fantasy and they even localized

other companies RPGs they localized Breath of Fire for Capcom We can debate over whether that was like instead of Final Fantasy 5 but they chose to bring that they chose not to bring Final Fantasy 5 so it wasn't necessarily

like a tradeoff, like, we're going to skip five and we're going to bring this breath of fire RPG. They looked at the games and said... It did feel like that at the time for sure, but it's not, yeah, they didn't like have the two of them in there in each hand and be like, well, which one do we do? Right. Just like we didn't get Secret of Evermore instead of Saken Dent's 3. It was more like they wanted to build a business that made sense in America, so they created their own game. I mean, as a kid, it felt kind of like, wait, why did we miss this game? But now as I look back and you look at the market and stuff, you realize that a game like Final Fantasy which was so fundamentally different from the way a lot of the JRP's we had at the time,

would have really confused people like me at when we were like 10, 11, 12 years old, and it would have probably just fell like a rock in the market. I think there was an age gap. I think there was an age difference in terms of I think you actually did have more adults playing Final Fantasy games in Japan versus the U.S. They probably looked at the market and determined it really was a lot of younger kids. Well, yeah, because I mean, those guys got Final Fantasy won so much earlier than we did and the two and three, they grew up with it.

Not even an age thing, just an experience thing because the Japanese market became quickly saturated with Dragon Quest clones. As soon as Dragon Quest hit it big, like every fifth game on Famicom was a Dragon Quest clone. Everyone made their own Dragon Quest clones. Final Fantasy was kind of inspired by that. They said, let's do something a little different.

And so, you know, by the time we got to Final Fantasy 5, well, by the time I got to Final Fantasy 5, there were five Dragon Quests in the market There were four other Final Fantasies. There were countless clones. There was like Megami Tensei. There were, you know, fantasy star games, et cetera, et cetera. Like there were so many RPGs for people to have built experience with it.

That when they looked at the systems in five, you know, they also had three come before that. So that was like five was built on the systems in three, Final Fantasy three. So, you know, so when the game came out, it was just like the next logical progression. Like, hey, here's a game that's even more, you know, complicated and more interesting and more customizable than what you've seen before. Whereas here it would have been this crazy leap forward, especially after Final Fantasy 4,

which is the opposite of this. It is an extremely linear game. It is an extremely... It is a game that offers practically zero customization options. Well, I mean, the difference between 4 and 5, I feel, is one of the fundamental RPG differences in terms of tabletop philosophy. Like, 4 was very much an on-rail's

linear. You are going to follow the path the DM is telling you. Yeah, this is the DM telling you how to play the game. You are going on the story. It is going to go from here to here no matter what. And 5 was very much like the sandbox. Like, okay, your character can be whatever you want. Here's a bunch of plot points you can eventually get to. Like, here's the dungeon

maps. Just go do the thing with your character sheets. The DM will let you do what you want as long as you eventually get to the end. And just in America, I mean, yeah, Western RPGs and gamers and stuff had that kind of feel. But the kids who were playing consoles, maybe didn't have that like 20 years of like a gig.

Yeah, kids who were playing Super Mario, but those were not playing wizardry and the barreds tail. Right. Or Altima or something. Right. I also think if they would have localized this and let's say it released in maybe fall of 93, it would have looked kind of bad for a 1993 game. This is not a great looking game. I mean, the enemy sprites are fine looking. It's arguably uglier than Final Fantasy 4, which is. Oh, I don't think that's an argument.

It's a step backward visually. It's kind of awkward looking, I think. Yeah. And by the time this would be coming out in America, we're moving towards multimedia. We're moving towards, like, you know, these pissing contests about graphics. And I feel like this would have made Square look bad. Final Fantasy 5 or missed. Yes, exactly.

But, I mean, they really were, I mean, and they decided that in lieu of localizing Final Fantasy 5, or that they essentially would just jump ahead, basically, a Final Fantasy game. It's not getting jammed up on that. And from six onwards, it felt like that was when they really were devoted to making the best possible graphics with that and things like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, before that was kind of the same way. I feel like... They kind of found their style. They tried to break away from, with six, the, like, this game looks like a grid of squares.

Right. Yeah, I mean, for sure. Really see the hard, hard edges of the grid in four and five. Yeah. Of course, the Famicom once. With six, I think they really actively, I mean, just from looking at it, I really feel like they tried at every corner to make things asymmetrical, you know, to make the edges of things, you know, jagged or rounder or right. Everyone's much taller, too, not a squat. And everyone's taller, and even just the regular map screen, like, it's always doing mode seven.

So it can sort of play with perspective in that kind of sense. Square loves graphics. Like, a lot of people are like, oh, RPGs are gameplay, not graphics. Squares in section. They like both. They, when they started first making PC games in Tokyo, their whole pitch was like, we are really good at graphics. We, like, our graphics were able to choke out a lot of performance with these amazing visuals that we're doing. Yeah, I mean, even in the early days, they made, they made, they made,

like a Space Harrier clone for Famicom for NES that used, you know, 3D red, red, blue, anostropic graphic, or glasses. So they do that in Radracer as well? Yeah, they did. Yeah. 3D World Runner. Both of those games. Yep.

3D World Runner and Radracer, both of them. So, yeah, there was a lot of technical prowess going on there. Yeah, like I feel like that in between 5 and 6, the Square had like kind of a civil war internally of who wins, the systems guy or the story guy. And it felt like they went with the story guy afterwards because, you know. I don't think that's entirely true. but we can argue about that in some other episode. I do remember when FF7 came out,

a lot of old square fans were kind of eating the sour graves because now the thing they liked was popular, and they're like, oh, square only cares about graphics anymore. It's like, no, haven't you paid attention to all of their S&S games from a certain point? Like, they always like graphics. Yeah, yeah. So Final Fantasy 5, I think you see a little bit of them trying maybe a couple of new things

to make it technologically a little bit nicer than Final Fantasy 4, but really it just looks like Final Fantasy 4. Yeah, I would say the effort in this, game was put more into the expressiveness because your sprites suddenly are, they can do more than just like, look down to be sad. Now they have

like, little bubbles. They can laugh. They can have like little hearts in their eyes basically. Like there's that creep me out when I saw that. This was a I mean, we all remember back in the day Street Fighter 2 was 16 Meg. It's like Street Fighter 2 was a 16 Meg car. It's a first 16 meg

cartridge ever. It's so huge to be able to hold all these sprites. Final Fantasy was a 16 megabyte cartridge. Excuse me. Sorry. Final Fantasy 5 was a 16 megabit cartridge also. It's not get crazy. And they used a lot of that space for all the sprites, but for all the emotive, like that was a selling with all the emotions of the sprites. Not just the replay Final Fantasy 4. All anybody does is look at the camera

and nod for an expression. Or lift up one hand. Yeah. But Final Fantasy 5 they made a big deal about like, oh, they might be shocked or they might have a little love heart appear above their head. Yeah. And you know, in addition to the expressiveness, there was also the huge number of different sprites for each character. And we'll get into that. But every character has, what, like 16, 20 different classes they can be in. And each character, 22, and each character has his or her own look for that class. So this is a long way from, you know, Final Fantasy 3's Onion Knights where every character looks the same.

these are custom design sprites for each character and it kind of gets at their personalities but yeah we'll talk about that later also the people who made how many playable characters are there in Final Fantasy for like a dozen 14 I think yeah okay so now there's literally

22 potential job classes times five characters equals over a hundred it's a lot of sprites character yeah right from the perspective the person drawing them so yeah so it's not as you know as glorious looking necessarily a game as Final Fantasy 4.

It's not the big step forward that 4 was, but it's a different kind of advancement. So anyway, going back to the history of this, you know, even though Square skipped it, there was always this sense of like, we want to bring it to America. They clearly had a lot of fondness for it. Because I remember, I think it was EGM or Nintendo Power interview

when Final Fantasy 6 came out here as three. Ted Woolsey, the localizer for the game, was like, yeah, you know, we skipped over a game And we really want to bring that. So we want to bring it as like Final Fantasy Extreme because it's not as good-looking a game, but it's really, really complicated. And, you know, it's a good challenge

for people who cut their teeth on these games. Like, once you get used to Final Fantasy 2 and 3, quote unquote, then why not try Final Fantasy Extreme? And there was a PC port that was being worked on some time in the interim, like around the time Final Fantasy 7 came out. And I think they, like, halfway finished that because then they used the script in the eventually US release Final Fantasy Anthology

for PlayStation in 1999 and that script is also halfway finished. Yeah, and that's why, so it turns out, that's actually why we even got Final Fantasy 5 in 1999 is because, you know, it all came about because when they released Final Fantasy Anthology, of course, the Japanese version had Final Fantasy 4. And that was not translated for the U.S. at that time.

And the gaming intelligence agency Andrew Vestal wrote to Square to get a comment on this and found out that and then Square commented back and they said we had the Final Fantasy 5 text already translated

from the fact that we were trying to make this PC port so that is 100% that came from the PC port well there you go and it sucks and we can talk about that later but finally the game did come out in America as like I said

part of Final Fantasy anthology which was a collection. I mean, basically, Square released each Final Fantasy game individually in Japan as a PlayStation game. There was four, five, six. I think they knew

that wasn't going to fly here. So they put five and six together. It was like, here's six, the game you love. And also, this other game you never got to play, check out. That was kind of the pitch, yeah. It was the pitch. And I was really excited

to play Final Fantasy 5. And I, you know, despite the emulation problems and the bad load times, I played all the way through that game and loved every minute. We also got a kind of okay soundtrack with that. That was a mix of a five and six music with the anthology. It was kind of okay, although the funny thing is like that that disc did not include.

It was like, oh, all the best tracks from Final Fantasy 5 and 6. Okay, well, the opera's not on there. And Battle on the Bridge. And Battle on the Big Bridge was not on there. So it's like for some reason they left off like the two most popular tracks. Although Battle on the Big Bridge would take a little while to become popular in America, but it definitely did. Right. No, I mean, I remember when the anthology came out because I was a freshman in college and, you know,

At my anime club, we were all like, you know, oh, of course it's Tina, not Tara, and all of that sort of thing. And when Final Fantasy 5 finally came, we were just like, oh, my God, it's here. I mean, it was even more exciting than six because we were all, everybody knew six inside and out. And having a brand new game in English, which even though we were all a bunch of weeboos, we still prefer English to Japanese. But man, that game was just loaded so slowly. Oh, yeah. And it was so weird to, I mean, it was just unexpected. and I think we all kind of just fell off it until way later.

One thing I don't want to pass up is the fact that there was a fan translation of this game two years prior to the official release in America, which was, I think, one of the first major important fan translations ever released. It was in 1997, maybe six months after people figured out SNES emulation in a reasonable way. It wasn't, yeah, I mean, by the time, that game was translated, a lot of Super Nintendo emulators didn't have sound. Yeah. It was, it was, they translated that game before the emulators could even really handle playing that game.

Yeah. But yeah, it was, so it wasn't quite the first fan translation because, oh, not the first, but I think the first one important. Well, it's almost club. I mean, no, no, I mean, somebody had translated SD snatcher. Oh, you're right, yeah. For the MSX, but they were, for the MSX, yeah. But they were, but what they were doing was they, that was a disc-based computer. So they were literally just like copying it on floppy disks and something like that.

This, Final Fantasy 5, I believe, was the first, certainly the first RPG, but I think the first, like, console game that originally started as a ROM that had to be ripped, you know, and then was translated back. The birth of ROM hacking, I guess, happened with this translation. It was all around the same time. Yeah. So who was the guy who did, was that Neil Corbett? Was he the guy who did that?

It was the elusive shadow. Yeah. Well, SOM2 Freak also. Yeah, a bunch of people were. It was in and out. Yeah, they're all competing against each other because, yeah, everyone was. was an angry teenager when they were translating games and then they decided to work together

that comes from you know like the demo scene and the cracking scene where everyone was like you know they wanted to put their own little demo in there to say like we did it first that was that was very much a hacker thing from the 80s I remember this belief at the time when they were working on it that it was

that like it was never going to get done that it was too hard that it was way too like there was so much complicated stuff that had to get done to translate a ROM that like it was just never going to happen and it was a pipe dream. And now, now it's like, everything you ever want is translated. Yeah.

But I did play through this version, the fan translation version. It felt like magic. Like, there is an unreleased Final Fantasy game, and I'm playing it for free. And I am like, life cannot get better. And it didn't. So my life peaked in 1997 with playing that emulated game. Yep. Everyone was surprised by that.

It's okay. And honestly, if you look, you know, the interesting thing is the endurance of that fan translation. Like, that really, like, that is people's preferred method of playing that game, a lot of people today. Because, like, you could play the PlayStation 1 version, but that stinks. Yeah, it has terrible low times and a terrible script. Right.

Yes. It would have been nice if Nintendo or somebody had translated Final Fantasy 5 on, like, virtual console on Wii U because it's available in Japan, but that didn't happen. No. So basically, at this point, probably the best way to play it is the fan translation. And a lot of, like, some of the, I mean, one of the major localization choices that they made, the character's name was Curl, K-R-I-L-E, officially, and they were

like, what is this? And they translated it as Kara. And that really, like any resource about Final Fantasy 5 it'll always note, like, oh, you may know this character as Kara. Like, that's really taken hold. Isn't that character has an impossible to transliterate name

like Kool-L-L-L-U or something like that? Yeah. So, okay, so here's one of the weird things that I found out, because I've been, you know, doing a lot of research about Final Fantasy 5. when we wrote the fact the only resource we had was Katakana renderings of her name

which was Kududu and I always assumed that somewhere in the documentation it was spelled out in Roman letters like all the rest of the characters I can't find it I've been over every inch of the Japanese strategy guides I mean the instruction manual

which has nothing but like the strategy guides all I see is it written in Katakana so it's possible it's possible that that name might be in some other piece of supplementary reference material that I don't have like on the back of a trading card or something because yes there were trading cards

but it's possible we just didn't know how her name was spelled until the PlayStation version but yeah we spelled it as K-U-R-U-R-U because that's all we had to go on it and we're just like the hell is that how did they get Kududu out of cry out of Because if you were to try to, because the name is pronounced curl, and so the only way to really pronounce that in Japanese would be Kudududu.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, and it's not, people look at it and they're like, Kuru-ru-ru. No. No, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just a weird name that they couldn't, that's the only way they could do it in Japanese, I guess. Well, and also the main character's name is butts, so. Yes, it is Batsu.

They decided to change that for the official localization. Yes, because jokes, yeah. But although a lot of people, I think, assume, oh, oh, I think it's pronounced boots. It's pronounced boots. No, it's pronounced butts. Yeah. If you look at the Katakana, it's bots.

Or bats. No, it's butts. They could be bats. But it can't. No, no, no, because that's the name they actually do, they officially spell it out. Oh, no, I'm saying like the way it's written in Katakana, it could have been transliterated as bats. But it's not. They went with butts.

The important thing is none of these characters actually have real names. Right. No, anyone else's name. Well, they start, they start with the English names and they're going to do to be jacking. Ferris has two names. Ferris Bueller. Or Farris, Ferris. Yeah, and that's one of my favorite parts of the PlayStation script is, so Farris is, you know, she was, like, lost as a child.

Right. And, like, her name was actually Sarissa. Yeah. But because she was a kid and they were like, what's your name? She mispronounced as Farris. Right. But in the. Fonty Fah.

Yeah. Because she had a list because she was a little kid. But in the original localized version. Instead of Sarissa, they translated that as salsa. Salsa. Oh, for the love of God. Yeah. Yeah.

Princess Salsa. Salsa and the Yburn. She is kind of spicy, though. That sounds like a morning drive time radio, too well. You're listening to Salsa and the Yburn here on 106 FM. Oh, my goodness. It's the Morning Zoo. And we keep referring to this.

And I mean, you know, well, since we're on the subject, I mean, the many, many, many, like, horrible translation errors that they made. And I feel bad because, like, clearly. Such as Nut Heater? Clearly they, no, it's called Nut Eater. Oh, for them. I remember one line of dialogue was an emoticon. It was like a winky face, like Ferris, Winky Face.

I don't think that was the fan translation. I think it was the PlayStation translation. It just took me a back. Like, that isn't an official translation. So, I mean, basically, my read on this is that, like, they probably gave it to, like, one person. And they probably gave them a ridiculous deadline. And they probably gave them, and they definitely clearly gave them no support. Like, they couldn't call up Sakaguchi and be like, what is, okay, I've got Waibat and what is that?

What is that? Because, of course, he'd be like, it's in the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, look it up. But because they were probably doing it with absolutely no support, they looked at Waibon, which is a Wyvern, and they sadly wrote the letter Y and then the word burn. Yep. It's very cute. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about...

Well, have you mentioned the Game Boy one? No, we can talk about that later. We'll get to the versions, the remakes. You don't have to put the book on the floor. Well, I didn't want to put it back on the table. Get that the hell out of here. Put it right in the fire. Take it out.

Make it sit in the hall. I didn't want to be pretty high. It has to stand in the hall and hold a bucket of water. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about where Final Fantasy 5 sits in the, like, the design and development and philosophy at the series. Because to me, it's really interesting just how different it is fundamentally from Final Fantasy 4, the game that came immediately before. We talked about this a little bit, how Final Fantasy 4 is extremely linear, is extremely, you know, like the DM story game.

Whereas this is not. The story is almost like, it's there. You're going to go forward and you're going to do stuff because people are telling you like, hey, this thing is happening, but you're not going to care that much. The real joy of this game is in the systems and the discovery. and figuring out just what kind of crazy things you can do to make your party so amazingly powerful. It was really in a lot of ways a very different approach to the concept of RPGs. You know, you had job systems in games, you know, you had multi-classing way back in, you know, in D&D and then in wizardry. You had Dragon Quest 3, which had the karma, the Dharma temple and, you know, the ability to change job classes.

And then you had Final Fantasy 3. but in none of those games where the jobs and the abilities you had access to so incredibly empowering as they are here, those games were tuned and balanced to be difficult no matter what. I mean, Final Fantasy 3 is a brutal,

miserable endurance test, especially at the very end. Whereas this game, yeah, there's some crazy hard stuff. They started creating super bosses in this game just to challenge you and make you really push your understanding of the skill systems to the limit. But if you understood how everything worked together

in the interactions, you could create crazy powerful characters. And I'm like, you know, by the time I played through this, you know, got to the end of this game when I played it for the first time on PlayStation, I basically killed X death in like three rounds, the final boss. Just because I was like, yeah, I was like, oh, you know, I've got this samurai character and he just got Gil Toss

and I've got all this money, so I'm just going to chuck money with this dude. I'm pretty sure there's no, like, post-game sequence where I'm going to need this money. Yeah. Like, I was just like, you can have all my money, dude. Here, take it. Yeah. But Final 505 to me felt like one of the most modular RPGs I've ever played in the sense of your character is a literal blank slate.

If you're like the freelancer, you've got three slots or I think or two slots. Yeah. The mime gets three slits. The mimic, sorry, have mistranslated. I think originally is mime has three slots. Right. Right. It has two open slots.

Right. And you could take your inherent ability. that you've gained from the various classes and then combine them into your own Voltron and it was like incredible to be able to just do things like, you know, double weapon and then Rangers four attack thing

and it felt almost like a Lego set of just being able to slap on pieces and make your own like gigantic monster. It's been a while since I played three but I remember the job system is not nearly as complex or satisfying. How is it different? I don't really remember.

Okay, so like Shevan was saying there are a lot of like sort of building block philosophies at work here. The freelance class is your base class. That's what you have to like get through the first dungeon in. You can't cast magic. You can't do anything except attack and use items. And there's and there's basically no reason to switch back to freelancer, you know, throughout the course of the game. Because you, you, you, it doesn't have any skills attached.

And when you, okay, so this is a sort of a big innovation in the game is that when you, actually maybe three did this, but when you finish. a battle, you get experience points, and then you get ability points. And the ability points go toward whatever job you're currently classed in. So if you get ability points when you're a freelancer, it's worthless. Like you've just wasted those points that you earned in combat. So, yeah, it doesn't really make sense to become a freelancer until you've explored all these other classes and you've built them up. And then you go back to freelancer. And what you can do is you can take any skill that you've mastered from another class and you can put like three three or four of those into your freelance class.

And basically, two? Two. Well, it felt like three or four in my heart. But you can still make things happen. You basically, you've basically are creating your own custom character. Like they are a multi-class character and they're not learning AP, but it doesn't matter because you've got the skills you want and you're crushing everything in your path. But at that point, at that point, you might as well.

Like, so, okay, I can make a freelancer and he can have white magic and, you know, the ability to slice things up with a katana, right? But at that point, you might as well just make a ninja and give him white magic. Because any character can take on one of whatever abilities you have learned. Didn't the freelancer get extra bonuses at the end if you mastered all the classes?

Yeah, so the only thing with the freelancer is if you master a class, which is you get to the final level and you can no longer upgrade that class, any passive abilities of that class are visited onto the freelancer or the mimic right at the end uh whatever i mean so basically yeah so if you switch back to freelancer and like you mastered white mage all the stat bumps that a white mage would get like oh you know i get extra

you know magic power whatever that gets visited and that's also stuff like um like the geomancer's resistance right yeah anything that's not a thing you have to slot in like one of the moves of that the ability to run yes so i mean if you want to master you probably want to master geomancer with somebody, then therefore, when they go back to freelancer, then they'll be able to walk on lava, the thief will be able to see hidden passages. These are all innate things if you have that person in your party. So all that

stuff counts. The ability to well, two-handed equip, which you brought up, because the classic that everybody does. And in fact, I think in DeCity of Final Fantasy, when Barts, who was in DeCity of Final Fantasy, when he uses his big old special move, this is the move. It's

magic sword, which is you enchant your sword with a magic spell, plus dual wield, which interesting, the freelancer can do a lot of stuff, but the freelancer cannot dual wield, only the ninja can. But if you master ninja, then your freelancer can be wheeled. And then plus the Rangers essentially scattershot ability where they fire four random arrows, which does half damage. So, I mean, this might be a good time for you to mention, because I think we do the same thing when we play Final Fantasy Five, which is we hang out in the Balcastle basement for a long time. And so, yeah, in the basement of this one random castle in the game, where if you look at, if you were able to graph out any, like, Final Fantasy 5 players kind of play through in terms of where they spend most of the time, I would guess about 40 to 50 percent of your time in the game is spent in the basement of this castle running back and forth, looking at these stupid statues, which are happening to be like level 25 or some multiple of five that you could then use the ability level five death, which is an unblockable. instant kill attack

anything that is a multiple of level 5. Exactly. It was like an old trick from Final Fletchy tactics or I mean I guess futuristic trick. It was imported to Final Fancy Tactics.

It was retcon to back into five. It was presaged into tactics. But yeah, no, in Final Fletchy 5, we sat there for hours walking back and forth, summoning these stupid statues, oblitering them and getting a lot of AP out of those guys.

That's not all-inclusive. I don't do that. So one group, so if you encounter two of these enemies, you get 4 ABP, which is a lot because most battles in the game give you 1 or 2. If you beat a boss, you might get 4 to 7, 4 to 8,

whatever. Yeah. So they give you 4 to a ton, and also because you have level 5 death, which is not forced into your hands in the game, you have to go looking for it. Also, here's the thing with level 5 death. I believe, I could be wrong on this, I think you can only get it in World 1. Which means

by the time you get to that castle, you can't, oh, I'll go get level 5 death and come back. You can't at that point. You can't at that point. Yeah, but I mean, folks like me who are just hardcore, got to catch them all types, I would make sure to max out everything in all the world. And when I discovered this, I, mind you, I discovered it independently. Did you find this out on your own?

Yeah, and it was amazing. And then when I realized it was like the most universal trick that I ever was. I felt kind of less better, but also at the same time, I'm like, yeah, you found this. That's right. I just remember being really angry at you because you were complaining about how boring the game was because you were just standing around farming level, you know, like ABP from these guys. I was like, well, you know what? you don't actually have to do that.

You can play the game the way it was intended and earn these abilities. But I could match all the classes. Well, so the other interesting thing about that is they, first of all, they pretty much put that there deliberately. Like, they knew what they were doing. But then also, you know if those characters

don't give you very much experience points. Right. So you can stay down there for 10 hours grinding EBP and your character's base stats, you maybe level up a couple of times. So you can't, like, you can't totally break the game. the only thing you can get a lot of EBP, but you still have to think about where it's going to go.

Right. And to me, frankly, that was one of the more fun parts of the game because I love that kind of puzzle of being able to, how do I design my character, how do I allocate this stuff to make a really interesting balanced party? I mean, yeah, you could have all four-year people be identical. But for me, it was more interesting to be able to just really diversify. And I found that, like, I just kind of wanted to get all of the classes and stuff

unlocked so that I could just move on with the rest of the game and then be able to just tinker with it as I went. But it's so, the reward for grinding these guys is so addictive because again I said one, group of two gives you four a group of five, which you encounter a lot, gives you eight. And level five death is it just works instantly across

the whole group. Most of your time is spent just waiting for everybody to die because the death animation. That's essentially most of your time. And you get so much ABP from these guys. And also, playing out on Super Famicom is like, okay, well, I'm sitting in front of my TV and only doing this, you're going to get more bored.

Last time I played this game, I was on the Vita. And it was just like, I'm not even thinking about what I'm doing. I'm literally just pressing buttons and I'm watching TV. And so I pretty much did this in, like, nightly sessions for about a week. And so I probably put about 10-ish hours into it. And I did go for Barts to get that classic. So basically what happens is you get Magic. sword, you get ninja, and you get

the archer scatter shot, and then you turn Bart's into a freelancer or whoever. Yep. And then you pick, you add scatter shot to your list of abilities, and you pick it, and because you have two weapons in your hands, they attack,

he attacks eight times randomly for half damage. So good. So I actually spent so much time in that castle, and this is only, this is just a little after the halfway point. through the game, just a little bit more than halfway through the game, I changed everybody to freelancers, and I never looked back. I forewent all the rest of the AVP, and literally

I could one shot with Barts almost every battle, including bosses, in the game, for the rest of the game. And honestly, you're looking at me really, like, well, that's not fun. It was kind of fun. No, it was kind of fun. No, that's fine. A machine of gas. My only issue is when someone like Shevim says, this game is so boring because you have to grind. You don't, you don't have to do that. And in fact, I never do, and I love the game,

and I have so much fun playing it. But I'm super OCD, and so when you give me something. But that's not a problem with the game, Shevum. Okay, so I played this on Game Boy Advance. That was my first real experience with Final 525. And like Chris said, being able to just sit there and do this whenever you want on the bus ride to school or whatever it was, it was just easy for me to sit there and just kind of grind through this.

and if you give someone like me the ability to grind out and just sit there and max out everything in like no resources expenditure I have no reason not to I was going to put this tool in front of me that says max out the game and the rest of the game is easy

I'm like why would you do that now do that in the post game or something don't just give me the gun and tell me not to shoot it that's fair But I don't know. it's interesting that you talk about like you know Bart's being the sort of

default to turn into the the bruiser character because I yeah it always fairs for me I don't know why but every time I play this I always turn the male characters into like the mages and then I'm like okay girls go for it crush everyone in your path that's what I do now because I grew up

just with the idea like all the women are magic users all the men are the brutes or whatever the warriors but then like I don't know when I became more woke I was like no it's the opposite this time I'm not even woke I just I was just like, it's more fun if the girls kill everything. The funny thing is Final Fantasy 5 actually tricks you on that twice because... It's a fork tower?

No, no, no, no. Oh, no, you're talking about the number of... When you first start the game, you believe that you have three men and one. A party of three men or one woman. That's right. Then you find out maybe after you start specking out Ferris a little bit that actually this guy is actually a woman. So maybe you've already started Ferris on a path that you subliminally were like, oh, well, Ferris is a man, so Ferris

will be the, you know, berserker. And then, later on, spoilers, Gallif dies and is replaced with Curl. Immediately. He's a, his granddaughter who's like 10 years old. So now... And is also the most incredible monk I've ever had. Right, exactly. So now if Gallif was your bare-handed

fistfighter, now it's 10-year-old girl is your bare-handed fistfighter. So the game actually kind of switches things up on you gender-wise twice, which is really interesting. Plus, for me, coming from Final Let Detact, where if you max out the dudes in the mage classes, you get barred, and if you max out the ladies in the fighter classes,

you get the dancer. So I was already used to kind of like, okay, let's kind of subvert this because maybe there's a secret at the end. Actually, my main reason for doing this is, I think just because if you turn Lena into a berserker, she has just like the cutest little outfit. I'm like, I like this little person wearing like a kitty cat.

No, it's like Kitty years is a white mage. Oh, no. But she's got like, she kind of looks like lump, actually. Like tiger skin. Yes. He's got a type, everybody. I do. I think the berserker is...

Love. Alien aliens. That's it. I think that the... I think that the berserker is everybody's wearing like animal like loins. Oh yeah, animal skins. But then if you turn curl into a berserker, she's wearing a full... It's a...

Like kitty pajamas, basically. A onesie. She's wearing a cat onesie. I'm really glad Chris brought up how you are introduced to Ferris as a man, but then you find out that she is a woman. Because this game playing it again is full... Final Fantasy's first game. game moment. It's, well, I think it's

more importantly, well that is important, but I think it's also one of the goofiest ass Final Fantasy games. Like, the tone is all over the place. There are scenes explicitly played for comedy. Final Fantasy 4 had a little goof-em-ups with Palom Porum, but this game is like, here's a wacky anime scene where they're peeping and they're blushing

and stuff like that. It is so anime. I totally forgot all about that. Why do I feel so attracted to this? Yeah. It's so strange. Oh, yeah, gay panic, of course. It's hilarious. But this game is full of comedy, or at least attempted comedy. I don't know if they were just having fun or maybe too much fun, but the story does not take itself that seriously

at all times. Yeah, so I'm looking... I'm looking through the NES guide here, and the Beast Master Class has all these people dress up like sheep? Yeah. It's just like, what is going on here? Yeah, I mean, the costumes in the game

were pretty incredible. Yeah, so on that note, I kind of mentioned this earlier, but, like, we found... There's an interview, it's actually in Schmoplations with Kaziko Shibuya, who was Square's main pixel art designer. Like, when you see, I mean, that's her style of pixel art.

I love that, yeah. And she does all of the, you know, in the boxes of the games in Japan, the 4 and 5, the illustrations, the cutesy, she be illustrations of the characters, that's her too. Yeah. And she basically, in this interview, which was conducted much later, I think it was like 2013, she was just like, oh God, Final Fantasy 5. All I did for a year was draw sprites, battle sprites for the characters. I believe that. That's all I did for a year. She was like, I remember yelling at Sakaguchi telling them there were too many judges.

I mean, that's one thing that did strike me is, like, Final Fantasy 4, the Japanese box art has, like, you know, the main cast rendered in this, like, super cutesy style. And then Five is basically just like, let's just do all of that over and over again. And it basically took the Final Fantasy 4 Japanese box art and turned it into a game. Sure. And think about how many battle animations each character class had on top of that. Yeah, because they have melee attacks and magic attacks. And if you're doing something from a different class, you might need to animate that bit, too. And it's not, it's not, you know, it's not, you know, it's where the, that's where the, that's where.

Make a costume and apply it to the different character models. Oh, no. That's where the graphic data went. I mean, that's where the memory was used. I'm looking at the Final Fantasy 4 box art now, and the weird thing is, like, no character from the game is on the box. It's just these Final Fantasy 1 classes. Maybe Rosa is on the box, kind of.

Oh, Final Fantasy. Oh, Final Fantasy 4. It's like Fighter Thief, Black Mage, White Mage, Chocobo, and like there's a woman who might be Rosa, I'm not sure. Yeah, so that's totally completely not those characters, which is kind of weird. Yeah. That's right. So speaking of Final Fantasy 4, I did want to talk about a few other things.

Like, you know, we talked about how, in terms of Final Fantasy 4, I did want to talk about a few other things. like, you know, we talked about how in terms of game design and just philosophy, this is so different from Final Fantasy 4, but it does build on Final Fantasy 4 in some important ways. The first being the Act of Time battle system, which

it, you know, takes that innovative F1 race concept of a battle system from Final Fantasy 4 and makes it better. It does some really helpful things. I don't think this one, did it give you the ATB meter indicator? Okay, so that's the first time yeah, you get the ATB meter.

So you can actually see how long it's going to be until your character gets a turn. It also gets rid of the delays, like the active delays once you choose an action. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Like when you cast a high-level magic spell, you cast it right away. It's not like in Final Fantasy 4 where, you know, you summon a monster and you're like, please, Radia, don't die before the summon shows up. I don't know. I really like that, though, because that definitely felt like D&D, right?

Like the, you know, you cast a spell and you have to wait around. for that thing to happen because... And there's nothing wrong with that, but it does change the nature of combat and it becomes much faster and changes up, you know, kind of your strategic considerations. I think that's also part of the fact that this is such a class-based or modular-based system that you can't really have weapon speed or casting speed when you've got the ability for a player to be anything because how much extra math would that add? How much extra coding would that be to like, okay, well, the Beastmaster summons slower than Summoner does, but faster than the whatever. does. I mean, I feel like that's just a whole layer of extra just overhead that they don't need. And just giving them like fire and forget instantly seem to solve that problem. Yeah, I mean, I think that would work, but I do think it would, I don't think it'd be too much for the system to handle, but maybe for players to keep in mind.

I think for designers, too, just to consider every possible variable for every class. And this game's already got so much. It does, it does make the game much faster. And it also means that, you know, like if it took a long time to cast a magic spell, but say, you know, the sorcerer class is able to use enchanted swords, like, why would you ever cast magic if you can just, you know, do instant attacks with that other class? So I think it kind of gives every class a level playing field

and allows it to be not necessarily equally useful. I don't know about the geomancer or beast master. It's balanced in different ways. It's not that the casting time is not part of the balance, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. And another sort of similarity that it has, you know, to Final Fantasy 4 and also three is the idea of a world sort of broken up into, like, different chunks.

Like, as you advance through the story, you go to different worlds. And at the end of the game, like, big chunks of the world are actually being destroyed and vanishing from the world map. And then you, like, I think you can, it's been a while since I played, but you can go to the X zone, right, or the new or whatever it's called, and, uh... Moo. Mooh, that's it, new. and like those places are have been trapped within that zone so everything like changes up and

becomes like the evil version so you know final fantasy four had the moon and had the underground final fantasy three were actually in the sort of like isolated fragment of a world and had to restore the rest of it or like discover the rest of it no not really but they they yes ex-death comes in and he he's like ex-death being the big bad of the game um sucks certain villages and places in the world into the void, but then you just don't visit them again. Okay, I couldn't remember if you visited them. But, you know, you do lose that.

But also there are, like, different worlds throughout, and apparently meteors are spaceships. So you travel to these different worlds, like you said earlier, like you can't go back to some of them. The idea is that you're on the first world, and then you find out Gallif, when he regains his memory, because he's an amnesiac for a while, is like, oh, I come from another planet,

and I came here on the meteor to stop X-death because we sealed X-death away on your planet. Like, R.B. Sorry about that guy. Yeah, basically. And now he's breaking out. And then everybody, Gallif leaves and the rest of the party is like, let's follow him to his planet. And then you go to Gallif's planet and X-Deth is there and you fight X-death.

And then something happens. And you're like, oh, we're home. Oh, there's Castle Ticoon. Like, oh, that's cool. And then you kind of realize like, oh, our world's just smashed together. and now, and then you find out that in fact, it's not so much that your planet and Gallif's planet just got smushed together, it's that it was originally one planet

that had gotten split apart. And so then, but then, I think from a gameplay perspective, X-death comes in and wipes out all of the villages that they don't want to deal with anymore for the rest of the game. Because world, you know, the third world or the world that put back together would have a lot of stuff in it for you to do. So then they're just like Bartz, your hometown has been

sucked into the void, so we don't have to deal with writing dialogue for them. And that should be played as a big tragedy, but whatever. Just go kill some stuff. It is. Barts gets super mad. He gets super mad and he jumps in his chocobo and he races around like he's like you know.

They show his emotions as best they can. I know, but. What are they going to do? What are they supposed to do? They're mad. Ex-Sat's been on a murderous rampage for the whole game. Yeah, they're ticked off. They're trying to kill him. I guess. Just in terms of the writing, there's not that much time

given to, like, the rich inner lives of the characters. There's not much time given to very much with Final Fantasy 5. But, I mean, you know, with Final Fantasy 4, as we spoke about on that episode, every character was very much defined by their job. In Final Fantasy 5, you can't

do that because Barts could be a white mage as easily as he could be a ninja, which means that he can't, nobody Nobody really has much backstory of like, what were they doing prior to this? That's why they're all kind of blank slaty type characters, which is why the story is very not character-centric at all. Yeah, it feels almost like Final Fantasy One in the sense of like the characters just ciphers of whatever you want them to be. But the fact that they have to have a frame story of any kind at all. They knew that they couldn't do, they couldn't do light warriors and they couldn't do Onion Kids.

Right. The characters had at this point, Final Fantasy 4 was being, Final Fantasy was so known for its characters. Right, right, right. But it's like every, the games are becoming known for their individual characters. The characters had to have names. The characters had to have certain looks to them. Like, that was a big deal. And they couldn't just be like four randos.

But at the same time, they ran into the problem of, well, what do we say about these characters that, you know, doesn't preclude them from becoming a beastmaster later in the game. Right. And they didn't, I mean, it's okay to say they didn't quite get it right. I mean, they solved it with tactics when they eventually got there. that's the same kind of problem, right? Well, the problem with that game is that most of the named characters who have backstories come into your party

and then, where do they go? They're no longer part of the story. You can get Millie a duel and she's very important until she joins your party, at which point it's like... Now she's just on the third row over there. I'm going to turn her into a chemist and I don't know what else. That's it.

The one other thing that I think is kind of important that carried over from Final Fantasy 4 was Uematsu's use of light motifs. Oh, yeah, big time. The way the, you know, the music was sort of structured in Final Fantasy 4, where it's sort of the main theme being iterated on and explored.

Like, there's even more of that this time. To the point where people are like, there's only one song in Final Fantasy 5, which is stupid. There's two. There's Battle the Big Bridge also. Yeah. But, I mean, yeah.

You're right. The main theme. If you watch the intro to Final Fantasy 5, it, first of all, it's like one of the more complicated things they had ever done story-wise, because you notice if you're trying to read all the Japanese in the Super Famicom game and failing, they're advancing the text automatically

because the intro to Final Fantasy 5 is perfectly synced up with the music. That's right. Because Final Fantasy 4 starts famously on the Red Wings, right? But it just loops, and then when you're done, it fades away. Final Fantasy 5's intro is a specific one-time piece of music that's perfectly timed to what's happening on screen, and it ends, you know, right when it's. ends and it changes based on what's going on.

And to your point, you listen to a head on your way, which is the title theme, da, dun, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da up beat horns. Then you watch the intro to the game and, like, you see like Ferris on the ship and the wind stops blowing and you hear underneath it like, and it's sort of a, you know, like minor key and it's kind of like creepy now. Yeah, like there's, rewatch that intro, because that intro is, if you if you bear in mind like what's happening historically with the series like that's a real that was a real like um it's a step forward it's a step forward for sure yep i do love the the actual pre intro of the game where it's only in the super famicom version it's not in the shitty uh recent uh remake it's not in the gba version it's of the final fantasy five text but it's like boco and barts are writing a chocobo he's writing boc go go go and it's like strolling yeah i mean uh my fan fiction. I can't sell this very well, but

you know what I'm talking about. It's just like a graphically impressive thing. It's not just the logo. It's hard to describe. Yeah. The letter boxing kind of widens up and it shows more of the background. Yeah, it's really cool. And then eventually it kind of Bart takes off and it like warps into the Final Fantasy 5 logo.

It's probably the most really nice. Really impressive thing in the game involving animation. Most games just had the logo on the screen if that with the prelude. It's interesting to note that Square used that same exact thing for Final Fantasy Brave Xias. Oh really? version when you're playing it and you're loading stuff, it's got that same exact Barts is

riding the Chocobo across and then once it finishes loading, he runs off screen and the logo comes on. It's like 100%. It's iconic. I mean, it's memorable. It really, yeah. It sets the tone for the game, too. It's like there's about to be an adventure. I can't wait to go. Yeah, it's super cool. I love

that. One of the big selling points, I remember back in the day, or one of the things people knew about the game that was really exciting was, it was the idea of you have your own chokebo. Because Because, you know, that was something you had to go out and find in previous Final Fantasy games. But the end is like, you start with a Chokebo. And you do.

You start out writing a Chokebo. But I mean, he gets written out really quickly. He does. And then he has babies. Well, I mean, you can't just have a chokebo all the time. But, like, you do start out with writing him around the world. That's kind of fun. That's one of those things where it's like, oh, man, I'm so cool.

I already have a chokebobo. Well, I mean, like in chronological order, right? Like four introduced to chokobos and everybody's like, wow, look at this so cool. Five, you have one. Yeah. That's cool. That would have been like if you had started in Japan and that would have been a really neat feeling, you think? And caller number nine for $1 million.

Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10.

Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus, get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. This week's featured game Final Fantasy 5 is all about changing jobs. It's easy to do that in a video game, but in real life, well, switching jobs is a real commitment.

Don't make a life-changing career move blind. Consult Dice. Dice can provide insight and guidance about new directions based on your skills, experience, and your location. They'll also show you which skills you'll need to make the move, as well as which career paths are currently in demand. Dice has been connecting tech pros with job opportunities for more than two decades, and their full-scale career hub can connect you with the tools and resources you need to manage your career. Whether that means finding your next job, guiding your next

career move, or simply offering you some target numbers for when you ask for your next raise. Dice has insight into more than 70,000 tech jobs, including software development, U.X, and project management. So you can take a peek at your peer salary reports or get a sense of which jobs are heating up in your local market. Learn more at dice.com slash can you hack it and hack your career with dice. Hi, this is Spike Ferrisons from Spike's Car Radio. Here we are again on the porch in Malibu, and I'm here with the great Jeremy Piven. I'm a huge fan of him and his doggy. Is your doggy's name Frenchie? Bubba. Bubba. Well, it says Frenchie on the caller. I know. He forgets who he is, what kind of doggy is.

You know, it's like I have a, we can just have a little something that says Jew, right? So we remember, this is what I am. I don't know. I'm not going to call it a dog a Jew. I can't. They did. Well, we've taken a really a serious turn here on the podcast. Listen now on podcast.1.com, Apple Podcasts for the Podcast One app.

Need to buy a car but feel wary about the reputation used car dealers have for stretching the truth and your shopping budget. In order to feel comfortable that you're getting a fair price, you need pricing context, information that empowers you to feel confident. In other words, you need TrueCar. True Car dials you into actual sales data from a network of more than 13,000 dealers, allowing you to connect with a local certified dealer and more than 700,000 pre-owned vehicles. True Car allows you to find the exact vehicle you want, whether it's new or used. And with the True Car pricing curve, you can find out what others in your area have paid for the same vehicle that you're currently shopping for.

On top of that, you'll be armed with the knowledge of real pricing on actual inventory, plus all available sales incentives, before you even make it to the dealer's lot. That's why, on average, TrueCar users have saved more than $3,000 off the MSRP of their dream car, across more than 3 million vehicles sold. When you're ready to commit to a new or used car, visit TrueCar to enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features are not available in all states. folks drop what you're doing immediately and think about one very important topic in your life your underthings odds are they're not in the greatest shape because that's the one clothing item most people don't get to see for themselves and if your undergarments date back to one of the two clinton administrations why not consider treating yourself to a pair of me undies underwear

quite frankly me undies is the softest underwear you'll ever wear they're one of those products you just have to experience for yourself. I could tell you about them all day long, but feeling is believing. Every pair of me undies is sustainably sourced and made from micromodal, a fabric that's three times softer than cotton. If you're used to buying boring underwear, me undies will change everything,

because me undies come in all kinds of colors and patterns, and they release new limited edition patterns each month, and they always sell out. This month's patterns were designed by the legendary 80s clothing brand, cross colors, with names that live up to their bold design and bright colors, like increase D-P's, you dig, and the OG.

You've got to see them for yourself, and right now you'll save 20% off your first pair and receive free shipping only at meundies.com slash games. There's a reason me undies has sold over 5 million pairs to date. You'll feel it when you put them on. And if you don't love your first pair of meundies, they're free. To get 20% off your first pair, plus free shipping, go to meundies.com slash games.

That's meundies.com. slash games meundies.com slash games. Geo Mentor Dragon Barn, Kimist, Dancer, Samurai. Yes! That's good. What class assassinates JFK, though? That is the... Canineer?

Yes, canineer. There you go. from the grassy knoll so yeah that was my attempt to set all the job classes impromptu to the tune of we didn't insert the fire And you were off and roll on there.

We did an FF Fiver Okay So anyway, yeah I would like to talk We didn't localizer Nice Okay so I would like to talk a little bit about the job classes because this is where the job

class, the job system really came into its own. You know, they did it in Final Fantasy 3 and it was cool, but it just didn't quite work in the way that it does it in Final Fantasy 5.5 is so good because you can do whatever the hell you want, aside from some very limited situations like Fork Tower, where you need some physical attackers in one branch and you need some mages in another. And I did not realize that the first time I played and I took my wrong characters in each, each, each, each, and into each tower and had a hell of a time, but I did beat it, but my God. Oh, really? My God, that was difficult. You can still hotspop jobs, so I mean, you know. Yeah, but I had, like, specialized, you know, so it was like, someone didn't maximize it in the bike.

That's right. Some people don't write Zell 5th. Also really helpful. The shit-ass translation of Final Fantasy 5 for the PlayStation told you the wrong towers. Yes. That's what happened. I took my characters into the wrong towers because of the translation. I really like that tower, though, just because the idea of having to force you into classes

is basically their way of saying, okay, dude, we know you max them all out. So now you're going to have to actually try to, you know, unmax them. It's a gentle, it's a gentle challenge for sure. Yeah, like, oh, we're switching it up on you. But Final Fantasy 5 does like to do that because they take, it's like, oh, well, you have four characters in your party, but sometimes they take those characters out of your party. Sometimes they make you fight a boss with one character, and it's like, okay, well, I hope you didn't neglect this character.

I think that was such a... I hope he hasn't just been doing geomancer the whole time. It was such an aware moment on the part of the programmers to be able to sit there and go like, okay, we know you guys are going to like try to max this out. So let's give you challenges that force you to use all of these abilities in a unique way.

Yeah, and some RPGs do that, you know, they try to like say oh, better make use of the characters that you didn't make use of out. Right. Yeah. And they fumble it. Like, Breath of Fire too infinitely has the part where you have to like fight through a really tough dungeon with, I think, the frog character

that no one likes, so that's where a lot of people get stuck. But five, you know, because you always have the four characters, almost always have the four characters in your party, and there's no reason not to swap jobs and, you know, kind of get the most out of your characters. I think it works, unless you

just play a really aggressively counterintuitive style. So that's good. But I would like to do this like this, because I do think we should talk about the jobs, but we don't want to spend too long on it. So I'm going to name a job class, and you're going to tell me why it's awesome or terrible.

But Chris claims that there are no terrible job classes. Only terrible people. Berserker. Berserker is awesome, in part because of Lena's outfit. Anywhere. Or Raina. Do you want to just go? Lina or Rana?

What's the official localization? I can't remember. Is it Rana or Lena? No, it's Lena. Lena. Okay, Rana was like the fan translation. No, Rano was the PS1 translation. But they reverted back to Lennon.

Okay. It's chunky salsa. That's not nice. No fat shaming. Hey, Ferris is my wifu. Out of all the characters, possible. She's pretty awesome. Okay, so Freelancer.

Why is it awesome? Because when you play like I do, freelancer is the best possible class of all classes. Being able to maximize all of the utility from every class and then be able to customize at will is basically, it makes it just by far and away the best. Knight. Oh, come on.

I don't really like knights. Knights better in the early goings of the game to do physical damage and also to cover magic users. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the passive that you get from the night is dual, like a two-handed sort attack? Yes.

To hold one weapon in two hands. Greatly increases your damage out. Yeah. Knights very good in the beginning of the game. There's like a 1.5x damage or something like that. That can be great. Monk. Oh, they hit super hard.

My favorite class. Big HP upgrades if you master them. And it just looks hella cool when you're just punching people. Yeah. I love the animation. Doesn't Ferris wear like a ghee when she's dressed as a monk? Yes. Yeah, so that's awesome.

I look down on my strategy guide. Yeah, she's like Ryu. Beef. They steal things? See hidden passages. Also stealing. Yeah. Stealing the Genji armor from Gilgamesh.

Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Genji stuff. This is like the first game that really had Genji stuff in it too, right? Or was it like, this is a game I never want to say first, but it was

a big part of it, yeah. Yeah. White Mage. You need someone to know white magic. You're always going to have a white mage in your party. True. Black Mage. Fire.

Burn, burn. Blue Mage. Level five death. Level five death. Also, guardian or mighty guard, which is the spell that basically gives you, like, protect and shell and not haste, but something else.

It gives you a lot of good protection. It's all in one. I think it's like protect Shell and Regent at the same time. Yeah. Something like that. Is this the first game with that concept in it, learning enemy skills? I think so.

I believe so, yes. Yes. Yeah, and I love that. I really, like, that, this is my favorite class, actually. I try to make everyone a Blue Mage and learn as many special abilities. Yeah, I love the Blue Magic stuff.

And it also was a weird throwback to Final Fantasy 7 because it felt like, oh, look, I can get mighty guards. It isn't a throwback to a game that came several years later. It's a throw forward. Yeah, well, this really does get to a point of Final Fantasy 5 and that like it's so

geographically like in Japan Final Fantasy 5 was a big breakout hit for the series. It sold almost double what Final Fantasy 4 did. It is incredible. It is looked back on as being like this major, major game of the Super Famicom era. And I did play it in 95, but like

so many Americans played it in after and you keep saying it's a throwback to tactics. It's a throwback to Final Fantasy 7. Like I realize that it sounds so ridiculous when I say a throwback to like games that came decade after or whatever. But it illustrates, it illustrates like how Americans experience it and it's like that's why it's

considered the weird black sheep in America because people didn't experience it in its actual time period's actual moment. Yeah. I mean I found out about the game in real detail by reading Final Fantasy Tactics Previews when it was releasing in Japan. Yeah. And I was like oh this is just like FF5 they're saying

I want to play FF5 and then it came out in fan translation that October so it was an interesting way to learn about the game. Yeah. I mean I put in like thousands of hours into seven in tactics and the fact that like When I finally got to five and you see, oh, this is where all that stuff you love came from, it really was just kind of eye-opening to me. And, you know, a lot more things just than, like, battle modes. I mean, like, Final Fantasy Five wasn't the first game with Mughals because they showed up for, like, a second in Final Fantasy 3.

But it was the first game where they were, like, all over the place. And, like, you know, they had their own town and they became this really popular mascot. And there were a lot of things that Final Fantasy Five did first. Yeah. You know. It just temporarily out of space for us in America, like, by so long. And a lot of what we're in a lot of what we love about Final Fantasy five, is down to the involvement of Hiro Yuki Ito,

who was the systems designer. He also did the job class in three, but this was his shining moment. And he also worked on Final Fantasy Tactics, and he worked on Final Fantasy 12. And so, like, all these games that kind of build off of the job system and the super customization, that's him. And, like, a lot of what we think is, you know, iconic Final Fantasy

was this one guy that you never really hear that much about. He just kind of keeps to himself And he seemed like I said The time that I interviewed him He seemed really amused actually That someone actually sought him out And was like, oh, this guy wants to talk to me Let's talk about football

No No, you made all these amazing systems Let's talk about that instead All right, so one of the interesting things About the job class is that You get the jobs in groups That's kind of taken from Final Fantasy 3 also But each job is associated

With an elemental crystal and there's one crystal that gets shattered and so you don't actually get those jobs until later which you're like, oh, I only get like three jobs this time? No, there's actually more, but you have to go find them. I'm going to push up my imaginary Coke bottle glasses with the tape in the middle of that. Oh, my God.

Oh, what have I done? No, each crystal shatters. The crystal shatters and then you pick up the shards and get the jobs. Yeah, yeah, get the jobs. Each shard is a job or something. But there's the water crystal when it shatters, one of the little shards ends up over a wall

and you can't reach it at the time and you have to leave and later you go back to get that crystal and that's the mimic class. Anyway, so with the water crystal, you have the berserker. It does sick, sick physical damage at the cost of not being able

to literally do anything else. And it's really just handy when you're doing like the later level grinding because it just auto attacks and you're like, okay, you know what, just go. As I said on the FF4 podcast, I just would cast that on Cecil and auto battle and it would just blow everything away.

Mystic Knight, which also is called Sorcerer and a few other things. Just extraordinarily, if you have an enemy that is weak against an element, you want to use Mystic Knight and enchant your sword with that element because it will do even more. Sometimes it doesn't even do 9-999 damage. It's just an instant kill.

No damage pops up and the thing just dies. And if you combine that with the two-swords ability, it's extra sweet. Yes. And if you combine that with the ratings, His ability, as we don't know. We're back to square one. Yeah, that's how you can cast Funder on Omega, one of the super bosses.

And it was also a terrible Celtic-based centai show in America called Mystic Night of Tiernan-Nog. That's right. Thanks. It was like the Irish Power Rangers. Exactly. That was really having people. I remember, yeah. So actually, why don't we talk about Omega?

Because that is a little bit of a diversion here, but it's such, it's become such an iconic and important part of Final Fantasy. Now, the idea of a super boss that you have to really just crack open the systems and understand them on a, like, deep inside your soul. You know, you have to grok them. Right. So let me start up with a history lesson. So this book that I wrote, it's not just me ruminating on Final Fantasy 5. I actually conducted an extensive interview with Hiro Nova Sakbuji, you know, father of Final Fantasy, entirely about Final Fantasy 5. And he was very nice.

We went all the way back and we looked at everything. And one of the things that we, I brought up the super bosses and he's like, ah, yeah, so there's a reason that these optional super bosses, which again started in Final Fantasy 5 and are now a mainstay of the series, he's like, we put that, we did this in Final Fantasy 5 because of this. Final Fantasy 3, we really wanted people to experience that feeling of like making your characters really powerful and then overcoming seemingly impossible enemies with a clever combination of powers. In Final Fantasy 3, we made that the Final Dungeon. And we really got a lot of criticism that the Final Dungeon was way, way, way, way crazy too hard. If they had added save points, it would have been fine. So basically, with Final Fantasy 5, they were like, okay, let's take those super hard encounters and make them purely optional. And so this is where we get Omega and Shin Ryu. And so Omega, the way to beat Omega is he's a machine, which means that he's weak against Thunder because Final Fantasy.

But if you just cast whatever thunder, it's like, you're going to die. Yeah, you're like scratching its surface. He will basically, and it's not even scratching the surface. He has like a heat-based laser that he uses against all four characters, right? Yeah, he can pretty much, he might kill you in the first round, and he'll definitely kill you the second time he uses it. So you got to, you have to beat him quick. This is a, you can't just, like, grind him down. Like, he will, he does way too much damage to everybody too fast.

So you get Ranger, you get Mystic Knight, and you get Nishton. all on one person, and it essentially lets you cast the thunder spell on Omega eight times in one go. And basically, I was able to beat Omega, it was just a matter of keeping Barts who had this ability alive for a second round. If I could get him to round two, so we could do it one more time, I beat Omega that way.

Omega is the one thing in this game that I have never been able to conquer. Interesting. Interesting. I cannot survive one. You've got to spend more time in that basement. No, I refuse. I will not. There's your problem.

I will not. So, Shinruyu, I don't think I've ever beaten Shinruyu. Oh, really? I could go back because, I mean, really, the way to do it is you have four dragoons, and you give them all the dragon lances, and you give them all jump, and you give everybody coral rings, you can absorb his title wave, and then you jump with everybody and hopefully kill him in one round again. Yeah, I did it without jumping. I don't remember.

I did use the coral rings because those absorb the water tsunami attack, which is the only way you can survive that. But he has more attacks. Right. Right. But I don't know. It's been a while since I've done it. I did it on the GBA version.

But whatever I did, I managed to beat Shinry. And I was like, wow, I can't believe I did that. I can take on Omega now. And then I couldn't. Then the great thing is you literally get, after you beat this. Well, if you beat Omega, you literally, you get nothing except for a key item. No, no. No.

You get a key item in your inventory that says, This is a medal you got for beating. Oh, that's what I meant. Like, not Ribbon, like, Final Fantasy. A ribbon is a specific thing. A metal, a metal, like with a ribbon attached. Right, exactly. And it's basically like...

Certificate of participation. It's like an achievement. It's like getting the achievement. That's all you get. Yeah. But, you know, if you have it, then you're awesome. Yeah. One thing I love about the GBA remake is that they were like, okay, Omega.

Yeah, that's tough. But why do we make a dungeon full of Omega's? Yeah. Because they're assholes. Well, yeah. I mean, so you have a dungeon full of them. And by that point, I mean, The extra content in the Game Boy Advance version, they assume that you are.

It's like now they know all your tricks and they assume you're using them. And what's interesting is I think if you look at all the bosses in the extra Game Boy Advance content, they all have a powerful counter to if you use the Scattershot ability. So they're looking for that and they will punish it. I remember the first time I tried that and you get against like Omega Mark 2 or something. And it's just like, oh, we know what you're going to do. And we just screwed you. And that's what I kind of was just like, you know, I think I'm good.

I think Final Fantasy 5, we are good. Yeah, but it's interesting how each game has its own take on the super boss. You know, it started here. But, you know, Final Fantasy 6 has, it has a few different things. It has, like, DoomGaze and Fumbaba, like these, or not, I guess not Fumbaba, but DoomGaze. A few others, like these recurring enemies, you have to fight multiple times. Seven, of course, has the weapons. Eight just has Omega.

There's Omega again, hanging out in a castle. the way, he'll destroy you. Did we mention four had one of those? It had Ogopogo. And, like, Neo-Bohama. Or whatever. In the final dungeon, you can get the crystal sword or something by fighting. When you open the treasure, you fight a huge, like, crazy boss in the moon.

Yeah. There's at least one of those. Well, the thing with Omega and Shinrui is that, I mean, with Shinrui, you can get Ragnarok if you beat him because it's in the treasure chest and that's the best sword. But at that point, you don't really need the best sword. If you can beat Shinruyu. And Omega, Omega is, there is no reward. It is purely, and it's also not a random encounter either.

Like, you choose to encounter, and you get, you get nothing. You get nothing but the pleasure of saying that you were able to do it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we talked about that a little in the Final Fantasy Four episode about, you know, Ogo Pogo and, like, these extra elevated bosses in higher difficulty, but they're not on the same tier. Oh, for sure. Yeah, they're not nearly as difficult. Right. Well, Sherry and Megga are more difficult than beating X-Stath. I mean, I think.

And Ogopogo and whatever, like, yeah, they can. be difficult, but, like, they're not harder than zero. You can brute force them. Right. Yes. That's the thing. They're not puzzles. You cannot, you cannot grind your way through Omega and Shinru.

They are designed to test your knowledge of the intricate gaining system. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Is that Omega Shinryu, we're basically meant there to be like, you've spent 100 hours on this game, you've learned our system, now can you put it into use? Do you know how to take this and work it properly to? beat the hardest possible thing. And as like a gamer, if you're that specific type of spiky gamer who

really wants a min-max and perfect it, it's just, that is the challenge you want. They're like, show me that you've mastered my system. And I think that's phenomenal. I think it was a fantastic idea. And also super hard. All right. We need to speed on through and get to the end of this because we're running a little on time. So, time mage. Why is it

awesome? Haste. Haste. Summoner. Ah. Yeah. Kind of a... Cool animation. How about that? Right. Really cool anime.

Okay. Red Mage. Nice hat. Red Mage gives you dual cast if you master it, right? Yeah, but you have to like use... It's like 999 AP. But then you get dual cast. Okay, fine. I don't know.

Dual cast is pretty great. Useful in the beginning of the game. I only mastered it just to have it mastered. Yeah. Ninja. Dual wheel. Yeah, dual wheeled for sure. Dual wield.

My favorite was going monk with dual wheeled for ninja just to go punch twice. I mean, that's, again, a legacy of my Final Vucy Tactics is, but yeah, It's just, it's fun. Dual-wielding is great. It always feels good. Beastmaster. You can control enemies and then force them to cast spells on you. They otherwise wouldn't use.

So it's great for Blue Man. It's almost like a supplementary class. Yes. Yeah, it's good for completionist. But I do like, like, you know, capturing an animal and then unleashing it on the bad guys because you get sort of unpredictable effects and abilities that way. It's always kind of like a surprise. Like, all right, I'm unleashing my, my,

slave machine or my slave monster now. Let's see what it does. How different is that from Gao? That sort of functionality. I never used the Beast Master. I know Gao. Well, Gao is berserk. So once you use a rage, you can't control Gao. But he like jumps

on an enemy in the battle ends and then he comes back I think. Yeah, this is totally different. Like you capture an enemy in combat and then it like is kind of inside your party. Not usable but you just have kind of it on retainer. Okay. And then you can unleash it for a one time, Special attack.

Interesting. I never, never touched it. Okay. Ranger. Scattershot. Well, I mean, the best ability in the game, right? Right. Hands down.

Bard. Bard is sick. Bard has Requiem, which does major damage to undead characters. So if you go into the Great Deep, the underwater dungeon in World 3, you just wreck everything with a bard so hard. If you went and found Requiem. But that's the one that has the mini game attached, right? No.

Oh, no. It's not the piano one. Oh, what's the piano ability? The piano one races your levels. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a good song to have. Right, okay. Yeah.

You can jump, and then all your other characters get attacked instead of... Cool. Which is sort of good and sort of bad. Sorry, guys. And you can use the Dragonlance, which, as a longtime Dragonlance fan, I was totally on both. Of course. Sumerai. Cointoffs.

Yeah. I mean, a... Guilt. An element-neutral multi-target attack that only costs money? That's great. Is that historically accurate? It is. It actually throw money at people.

I don't know. Did they? Well, it was weird for me because I come from the old school of, oh, my God, you don't want to spend money in the RPGs on anything. You might need it. But again, you get the next death, and you're like, I don't think it really just how much damage it does. And it's like, okay, whatever, dude.

I know. And then you came out of the Baucastle basement. And because those things give you a lot of money, too. Right. And you're like, whatever. Have it all. This whole podcast is full of gamers telling you to stay in the basement.

Also, I'm curious if you're hitting them with the coins so hard that it hurts them or if you're just bribing them to go away. Hey, X-death, I'll give you some money. If you'll not destroy the planet. If you'll die, here's a thousand gil. Go buy yourself a nice car. I always thought of it like a nail gun of just going,

ding, ding, ding, ding. I think so. So here's a job that after playing Final Fantasy tactics, you know, because I also did reverse chronology on this, I was really surprise that it's one of the most advanced and powerful classes, which is chemist. Chemist is

kind of amazing in this game, but it's really complicated, and I think the only game that has a similar approach to the chemist class is Final Fantasy 10. But you have the ability to, like, create your impotions and combine objects. Right. And some of the combinations,

like you don't know what they are until you try them, but they're crazy. Yeah. And you can do things. There's like the hero drink, right? Where you like raise your levels or something. Yeah, yeah, you can double everybody's level. So, and you can double everybody's level, you can double everybody's HP, and you can spend time during the, the, uh, ex-death boss fight, you know, in the beginning, kind of just doing that. You, you can, I mean, you can do things to enemies.

You can, I think you can, you can, you can berserk X-Deth. If you, if you want them to stop casting that thing. You can only do it with chemists. Like that, it lets you do things that enemies otherwise wouldn't let you do. Yeah, I love the caption in the, The guide is like, when you run across an item that you have no idea what it's for, don't sell it. Just hang on to it because your chemist can do fun things. Also, here's Chris's crappy translation corner. All those items were translated as cures alchemy.

Cures alchemy. Cures alchemy? So it's basically, it's like, this is to be used in chemistry. But instead, they said, this item cures alchemy. So if you have it alchemists. Right. You can get rid of them. If you catch the alchemy, you can drink this to get rid of it.

That's literally what it says. I keep turning lead into gold. Can someone help? Yeah, please help cure me. Yes. Cures Alchemy. Cures Alchemy. And then finally, Mimic.

Very good if a character was a mage for most of the game and wants to cast a bunch of spoh, or even, in fact, wasn't, because it essentially just lets you mimic whatever the last action taken by a different character was. So, like, one person can cast Flair, and then another person can you go, mimic, and just cast Flair, too. But does that carry over passive ability? Like if you have scattershot and dual wield and stuff, you don't get eight attacks by mimicking, right? That's an excellent question. I'm thinking no.

I think I tried doing that and I was like, oh, whatever. Right. I'm going to, yeah, maybe it's probably, it's probably no. It's, I think it's no. Yeah, they've got to have those abilities or whatever. Yeah, I mean, much, yeah. All right. So anyway, that's, yeah, I think we've kind of gone through the systems.

I did forget the geomaster, but answer, but doesn't everyone? Yes. walk on lava avoid traps there's good for passive traits where there's a couple of like X-Sat's Castle at the end of world too is full of lava it's full of holes it's full of traps it's full of spikes

I love the geomancer in Final Fantasy tactics so I was looking forward to getting the geomancer in this one and I was like that's exactly what my reaction was as well I was just like I love that guy almost for the entire game and yeah it's weird how some of the classes that are super useful in five become pretty much use less

in tactics. Mog is a really fun character in Final Fantasy 6, of course, because he's a dancer slash geomancer. Slash-Berser. Slash-Berserker. There's a lot of berserking.

So basically they took all the jank classes of five and made him amazing. Yeah. Yep. Cool. All right. So I think we've gone through

most of this, but I do want to talk about Gilgamesh because he is such an iconic part of this game and has become woven into the fabric of Final Fantasy. Beginning with Final Fantasy 8.

Is Enkidu in this, too? Yeah, he does have his little buddy. Is it a chicken? In 14, it's a green chicken. No, he's like a, he's like a demon or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a little goblet or something. I couldn't remember what Enkidu is in other games because he's in 14.

But yeah, so Gilgamesh is, you know, based loosely on the hero of lore, the... Literally one of the first stories. Very loosely. But in this game, he's kind of this rogue element. who sort of works for X-death, but really he's just doing it because he's on a quest to discover the eight legendary weapons

and claim those for himself. And he has eight arms, right? So, like, the idea is, at the end, he's going to have the ability to wield all the legendary weapons at a time. He's basically, like, the dude who wants to become super awesome.

And, you know, so he sounds, like, really ruthless and menacing, and the first few times you encounter him, you're kind of like, whoa, he's really rough. But the further you get into the game, the goofier he becomes. And in the end, he ends up sacrificing himself to help your party. So there's kind of this, yeah, I don't know, like it's the first sort of... And Amato's artwork makes him look like a weird, like, samurai clown.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. But it's the first of the sort of like recurring goofy villain characters, not like the Four Fiends in Final Fantasy Four, who you take seriously the whole time, but more like, you know, the Scorpion Army and Secret of Mana or, you know,

the Turks in Final Fantasy 7 or Cyphers, Discipline Squad and Aid, et cetera, et cetera. Yep. He's great. I mean, and then he shows up the second time, and he's just like, I found it. I have the Excalibur and he uses it on you and does one day. I know it's Excalapur.

Yeah, the funny, I mean, so in Japanese, ex-cabi bah, so, I mean, if you know Japanese characters, Ba and Pa are, are, they look very, very, very much like. identical, but for the diacritic mark. Right. So basically... Which in pixel art is almost the identical.

So you could... If you look at the name of the item in your item list, you might mistake it for exhalibah, but it's actually exhali pa. If you look really close, it's a difference of like... It is literally a difference of two Super Nintendo pixels, right? And so that's the joke, and they translated it very well. It's a very good translation.

Excalipore. But it's... Now, the interesting, even... You know what? even the humble Excalipur has a use. Because the Excalipur always does one damage, but there are enemies that have one HP and an extremely high evade rate.

But the Excalapur always does one damage. So the skull eater squirrels, which have one HP when they run all the time, the Excalapur will kill them. And then they give you, I think, 580s or something with that. They're very valuable. But they're also very dangerous. They're very dangerous, unless you have, of the Excalibor.

And Final Fantasy, Brave Xeus, again, had the battle on the bridge with Gilgamesh. And he gives you Excalipors if you beat him. And if you beat him all the way, you get the Excalibur. But it's just, I love that throwback to the fact that this weapon does nothing. Well, Gilgamesh became this recurring character throughout the series. And it actually works within this game's story because he sacrifices himself by basically falling into limbo and to a void. And so he starts popping up throughout the series.

the first time he reoccur is in Final Fantasy 8 when you're fighting, I believe, Odin and I'm trying to remember exactly what happens but basically, wait, what are you fighting? No, it's when you're fighting Cypher and if you summon Odin or something like that anyway, Gilgamesh comes out, he's like, hey, what's up? He becomes like your summon.

And then he shows up in Final Fantasy 9 as just like a dude looking for lore in the library. He's an NPC that you don't fight. But, you know, Final Fantasy 12 is there, et cetera, et cetera. He's just become, like, resurfaces through the series, and he's always on a quest for these legendary weapons. Yeah, and when you fight him in 14, it literally plays the FF5 song, not rearranged, just the actual composition from that game.

Yeah, they did that in 12 also. It was like a Hitoshi Sakimoto arrangement of Battle on the Bridge. And that music right there when you're... So that's actually a really interesting fight scene just within the context of the series because it's like this ongoing continuous fight. You're like being chased by Gilgamesh across. a bridge trying to escape from a castle. Right.

And so it's like, as you run, you're constantly being harassed by enemies, and the music doesn't change. It's always like this very iconic sort of upbeat, almost like a, it's like kind of like a tango almost. It's very like... Yeah, I would call it rousing. Yeah. Well, it's like a, it's kind of, it has sort of an ethnic feel to it.

Like, yeah, it just does sound. It does sound, dun, dun, dun, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And also because it just plays throughout the entire sequence instead of starting and stopping when the battles play, it just keeps playing. That is like easily the most cinematic part of this whole game. Yeah, yeah, it could be. Thank you.

Okay, I'm dying to talk about the final fantasy five anime people. Oh, I'm losing my mind here. Okay, we'll talk about two more things. Okay, that'll be it. The anime and the fiesta. Okay, sure. The anime is okay. I haven't watched it in maybe 15 years, but it was released in 1994.

It was actually produced by the studio Madhouse, which is a pretty esteemed animation studio. They released four episodes. Yeah. It's directed by a director named Rintaro, who has directed a lot of high-profile things, including the Osamu Tezica version of Metropolis, which was an animated movie in 2001. The anime is weird, and it takes place 200 years after the events of Final Fantasy I don't remember a lot of it outside of the fact

that the main villain is destroyed when the female character summons chocobos and she just launches a ton of chocobos at the villain and the chokobos in the anime are like plucked turkeys. They look nothing like absolutely nothing like how they look in the game. And the other thing I remember is

that because it's an anime from the 90s, whenever they find a crystal, the girl absorbs it into her body and then her butt lights up. And that's really what I remember. But the animation is glorious and it looks really good. I don't think the story is great and they translate things in a strange

way, but it was released on two VHS tapes in America in 1998 so a year before we got the official release. So yeah, here's the thing about weird chronology. When that thing came out, I remember because I was a diehard high school anime fan and I was like, they're the Final Fantasy anime and I saw it and I was like what in the hell? They came here years before the game.

Yeah, and I had no idea that there was like, I thought it was like the Dragon Quest anime Dino Diobokin, which was just a random original story. I had no idea that it was related to Final Fantasy 5 until like 10 minutes ago. and it just blew my mind. But also, like, I mean, God, that that anime is bad.

It's not good. It's not good. The animation is really good, though. Yeah, I can see liking the quality of the animation. It was an OVA, an original video animation, which is higher quality than TV. And it does have good people working on it, but God, the story was so dumb. Yeah, I'm not going to back for the story.

No, God. And you're right. I mean, basically, like, just, like, it starts out with, like, as many panty shots as they can possibly get to get them. And then once you thought, that, like, even that was not far enough. Yes, the crystal, the wind crystal is like,

oh, I'm going to take up residence in your butt. I'm going in your butt. And so, whenever the wind crystal glows, everybody all gathers around and looks at her butt for, like, you know, a good couple of minutes. At least there's a narrative reason for it. Yeah. Be ashamed of your words and deeds, Chris.

Right, right, right. Yes, exactly, exactly. It's just, it's not great. And then, of course, showables look terrible. It's like, they didn't, I don't know. They didn't really, they didn't get Final Fantasy. Yeah, it's weird to make a version of it 200 years in the future, but with all different characters in a world

that looks nothing like the original world that they're basing everything on. They just wanted to make their own thing, and they had licensing, I think, and that was basically what they did. I think so. So there's a lot that I would really love to just keep talking about with this anime, or this game, but we're totally out of time. We're going to do an episode on the anime. But, yeah, I mean, I could just keep going.

We got a ton of letters from people, and we're not going to have time to read any of those, and I apologize. Please look for them on the blog. I'm going to reprint them there, because there were some really great comments, and we just We're literally out of time. The one last thing I do want to mention is that this game has become a force for good, thanks to a guy named Eric Koziol, who I think I pronounce his name, right?

Yes, exactly. Who has created a thing starting on NeoGaf, and it's really expanded beyond that, called the four-job fiesta. And the idea is to basically play through Final Fantasy Five as a group once a year or twice a year, and you sort of pledge, like, I will... You know, I will give this amount of money each time I get a crystal or something like that. Yeah, I mean, you can do it in many different ways. You give money to charity, but basically, yeah, the idea is that, yeah, you play through the game and you don't get to control which of the four classes you play as.

But with each crystal, you are basically given, like a bot on Twitter gives you an assignment. Like, you can only use this job. You can only be white mage. You can only be barred. You get one job per crystal. One job per crystal. And then you have to beat the game. First Bristol, you have a party of four

whatever that is that happens to me. Maybe it's four white mages. Yeah. And it's become this thing that has been going for years and people jump in every year and contribute money and each year it brings in a little more money. It's a really great thing. And not only is it a cool thing for charity, I think it has done wonders

for the image of Final Fantasy Five, especially here in America, because now that people are playing it and being forced to use job classes outside of their comfort zone, it's really shown that like, you know, Final Fantasy 5 is this amazing, amazing system. There are very few games that could have supported a concept like that,

that have the strength of design and the diversity of design to make that possible. And it forces you to learn about all the ways you can use the different classes and really plumb the depths of everything. And people have found out you can beat the game with any arbitrary group of four jobs that you just stick with. Like, it is totally possible. Somebody only just recently, this happened a couple of years ago, but somebody beat the game with four berserker.

Wow. God, that must have been brutal. It was not thought to be possible, but he figured out a way to do it. Damn. Yeah. God, can you imagine forkedower with Pizzar? Oh, God. The thing is, the class challenge for the Fiesta is such a wonderful way to force you into it,

like, restricting your ability in such a deep, it shows the real depth of the system of Final Fentany. And this game just is, I think, maybe the only game that you could do it with, except for tactics. And even in tactics, it's easier. It's an example of restraint, like creativity emerging from restraints. It's like you would never think to like, okay, well, what can I do with a white mage and a blue mage? But then you'll figure that out. In Magic the Gathering, the lead designer's favorite phrase is restrictions breed creativity. Yeah.

Which is literally this game. It's like, okay, you've got a berserker, you've got a bard, and you've got like a chemist. Go to town. Right. So finally, to wrap up, this game did see a few remakes after the initial American PlayStation release, which was bad. The first was on Game Boy Advance, which got a new localization, a good localization. And also got the bonus dungeons at the end, plus two new classes, which are weird, and I don't really know what to do with them. Four new classes.

Oh, four? Yeah. There's cannoneer. There's Necromancer. And what are the other two? Gladiator and Oracle. Oh, I forgot about those. Yeah, like, you really have, I don't know.

I didn't really get a feel for those because you use them sort of in the post game. Yeah. Well, it's taking something that's perfect and then throwing four. more things in there. Yeah, it's kind of what Tose did with all of those Final Fantasy remakes. They're just like, let's just throw on some extra crap. I like the stuff they added to four, but all the other games is kind of like, at least they cared enough to do that, which is not the case for the other remake.

Tell us about it, Bob. It's utter trash, probably made by children in slave labor. Okay, like I've seen RPG maker projects literally made by high schoolers that have a higher level of quality than these Final Fantasy 5 and six remakes. You're talking about iOS and Steam? Yes, it was an iOS remake, and then it was a... They put it on Steam, and as with all those iOS remakes for PC, they just are... They look even worse, obviously, on a TV.

And the only saving... Like, it's literally, it's still designed for touch controls. Yes, yes. But it's on your PC screen. That is awful. They just graft an awful UI to it, like, with the most cheap, generic font. It looks bad. To their credit, they at least try to follow the mono designs,

but that just means, oh, all my characters have white hair, and they still look bad. But the only saving grace was... I got this on Steam. I was like, I'll give it a chance. I know, I know it's going to be bad. This is the most convenient way for me to play this game. I started out.

I was like, oh, this looks bad. I can't even look at it. The menus are terrible. And then eight minutes in it crashes. I'm like, oh, then I try playing it again. Eight minutes in it crashes. I'm like, okay, I just saved myself. I dodged this bullet.

Then I downloaded the ROM for the GBA version. I played it that way. And I like, this is fine. So once again, stealing was the correct answer for retro games. Speaking of white hair, one of the weirdest little quirky things about this game was the old status. Old. We've got to mention that, but your characters can turn old and that makes them

weaker, right? Well, so it actually, thank you for asking, Jeremy. Old, old reduces an enemy's level over time and there's level five death and there's level two old. So if you cast level too old on somebody their level starts to go down.

That's so weird. And if they had like an, you know, then you can wait until their level is a multiple of five and cast level five death on them. That is some combo right there. That's like that's the like crazy Japanese speed runner kind of thing. That reminds me if how FF7 has like sad and hyper status and I still don't know what those are. So anyway, we'll talk about that in the Final Fantasy 7 episode.

Unfortunately, speaking of time, we're out of it now. So we need to wrap up. Hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish. This has been my hosting on this episode. You can find me at Retronauts.com because that's what I do. I'm on Twitter as GameSpite. Thanks. Hi, I'm Chris Kohler.

I'm the author of a forthcoming book called Final Fantasy 5. all about Final Fantasy 5 for Boss Fight Books. If we timed this correctly, the Kickstarter for Boss Fight Books Season 4, which includes my book, is online right now, probably bossfightbooks.com. And so you can, if you want to spend the money before you've seen the goods,

you can pre-order the book essentially through Kickstarter. So if you're listening to this episode, you probably want to read this because there's some good stuff in there for you. Hi, I'm Sheven Putt, and these days I'm kind of a cultural commentator, and you can find me on Twitter at Electrotel, And if you want to listen to me, talk about magic and or politics.

Oh, and I'm Bob, of course. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I do a comedy article for Something Awful.com every Thursday at somethingoffal.com. And the other podcast is Talking Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. Every Wednesday, it's a new episode in order. And we recently had the great Bill Oakley on our show as a guest. He was the co-show runner of season six and seven and wrote for the show for five years.

So he approves of us and so should you. So every Wednesday at Lasertime Podcast.com or TalkingSimsonson.com. Thank you. And, of course, Retronauts, you can find us on iTunes or on Podcast 1. We are supported through your love via Patreon.com, Patreon.com slash Retronauts. Also, by ads, if you subscribe on Patreon, then you get the episodes a week early and also without ads. So how's that for a prospect? Anyway, your support keeps us alive.

Your listening keeps us alive. It's awesome. We love you. We love Final Fantasy 5. You should play Final Fantasy 5 because we love you both. Thanks for listening. We'll be back again in a week. with another episode and stuff.

I'm going to be able to be. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Tollas. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate.

Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones.

boost makes it easy to switch switching makes it easy to save the muller report i'm edonoghue with an api news minute president trump was asked at the white house if special counsel robert muller's russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town i guess from what i understand that will be totally up to the attorney general main susan collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of president trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall becoming the first republican senator to publicly back it in new york the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others.

The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.