FF5 - So I'm finally in the mood to beat this. Redid all the stuff between Azure Magus (If that's not that boss's real name it fuckin' should be) and Twintania, remembering to steal the Genji Shield this time. Gilgamesh didn't show up for Necrophobe, so no Genji armor for me, but I also don't really care.
I'm bad. I looked up how to beat Shinryu and Omega while bored but without enough time to play. The easy Omega strategy means breaking my soft rule against having more than one character on a job (or just resetting until Faris gets two turns which is boring), and more importantly gets me nothing except ABP, so eff that. Shinryu, on the other hand, doesn't require me to break a rule and gets me... a slightly more powerful sword. Hey, it's something!
I switch Krile to Freelancer with White/Summon, give her the Masamune and a Mirage vest, give Lenna !Guard, then head into battle. Raise ends up being more useful than Arise since folks revive at critical, so auto-cover saves the day. It's a matter of keeping Blink up on Krile and wittling down the superboss from there. Return if I fuck up too badly to recover. I do kind of like the design here, actually, in that it isn't feasible at all to fight him head on, making you have to rely on moves that you may not be using (!Guard/Cover, Berserk/Blink/late-game Raise, etc) to cheese him out. Makes him more of a puzzle than a boss.
That said I don't know how anyone had the patience to figure out his status weakness, and there REALLY should have been a save point immediately before him, not immediately after. Had Shinryu been right next to a save point, that would have minimized the time between failing and retrying, and made it much more palatable. As it is, without FAQing it not only is an uncharacteristically unwinnable-by-normal-means fight, it wears down your patience with each retry. But, with FAQing (and the Return spell. Did I mention that this is the BEST spell in the game? It's kinda superfluous in modern games that let you save anywhere and retry boss fights immediately, but in the 90's-early 2000's style of RPG it is fucking amazing for the game respecting your time and letting you retry (most) things immediately if you fuck up. Probably too good, really, since there's no penalty for fucking up. I think WA3+ hit a good balance in this area, what with it only letting you retry after you've reached the fail-state, and with it letting you choose between blowing a semi-rare currency or spending the time between save point to boss fight, but at this point holy shit am I getting off topic.)
And then it's Ex-Death time. Nothing special here. I will note though that I really enjoy the fact that the background art shows Exdeath's trunk extending up to the boss fight. Really neat touch there. Other than that, really lame final boss. Not the lamest FF Final Boss by any means (that maybe goes to Zeromus? Perhaps Chaos?), but it just died so quickly.
The ending was lame but nobody who likes this game likes it for the plot.
Final thoughts: As much as I shudder to agree with NEB about basically anything, this is a fucking great game. I'll even say it is straight up a better game than FF6. 6 absolutely wins in story, but 5's gameplay has aged way better than 6's story has. The gameplay shows its age, sure, but I still a lot of fun playing around with the classes and trying out skillset synergies. I had more fun with this, at least, than I did playing around with 6's skillsets. The broken setups (Dual-Wield/Spellblade/Rapid Fire in particular) are obvious for the most part, but even the most minimal of self-inflicted restriction opens up the game a lot, and makes each character pretty distinct. I wish the standard battles were harder so that there was some necessity to making broken characters, but you do have to have some leeway for kids/newbies playing the game to not get completely wrecked, so oh well. I'm pretty tempted to do a fiesta challenge now, but I think my time may be better spent playing either FFD or Bravely Default if I want to keep barking up that tree.
The downside to that is that neither of those two games lets me frameskip, which has been absolutely crucial to my enjoyment of both FF5 and FF6.
All of my characters ended up being super useful, though I'd probably say Lenna was my LVP (and I couldn't have beaten Shinryu without her, so...). MVCrystal is easily the Wind Crystal, LVC is easily Earth.
And now onto the most important question... is this anime? Some parts seem very anime. Bartz and Galuf swooning over Faris, Krile's feisty little girl trope, etc. etc. However, these are not exclusive to Japanese media, so you are racist if you think they are anime. Therefore, this game gets a Not-Anime / Anime rating.
