A sub-par plot and mediocre gameplay make Final Fantasy V among the worst in entries in the franchise.
The greatest problem with Final Fantasy V is indeed its story. Final Fantasy V is, as mentioned before, the story of four men and women who find themselves being chosen to perform the decidedly generic task of saving the world from a great evil. Final Fantasy V's cliched plot takes place in a cliched medieval-steampunk setting, and does next to nothing to differentiate itself from the plot of almost every Role-playing game to have preceded it. Furthermore, it lacks any sort of plot points that do anything to make themselves unexpected or even interesting. Final Fantasy V attempts to make up for it's rather lacking plot by providing a humorous script, but unfortunately falls flat on this pursuit as well, by trying too hard to be funny. This causes the game's script to come off as immensely corny and oftentimes even cringe-inducing much more than it is funny, with amusing lines being few and far between. Final Fantasy also V has a poor cast of characters. The game's protagonist, Bartz, for example, is about as generic as an RPG protagonist can be. Bartz is a young man who was orphaned at a very young age and managed to teach himself how to become an accomplished adventurer and wandered his world before eventually finding purpose in the form of a call from a higher power to save the world. Aside from being cliched, Bartz is annoying, most notably in his attempts to be funny, and despite being likely the game's worst character, gets the most screen time out of any character of the game. The rest of the game's chosen heroes range from generic and boring to mildly interesting. Fortunately, however, the games villains, Exdeath and Gilgamesh, are more interesting that their opposition. Unlike the heroes, Exdeath is somewhat witty at times and, though very much generic, one of the more enjoyable characters of the game, and Gilgamesh is quite likely the game's most funny character, though he unfortunately does not receive a particularly large role. Another notable character is Ghido, who also manages to be somewhat funny, but sadly plays a very small role. Ultimately, Final Fantasy V's plot feels like an annoyance. It is almost completely un-entertaining and the storyline is an immensely overused one. Compounding this issue is the fact that Final Fantasy V uses frequent and lengthy cutscenes to tell its story.
Because Final Fantasy V's story is a huge annoyance that serves to make the game boring, its gameplay would need to carry it well for it to be enjoyable, which is why it is unfortunate that Final Fantasy V's gameplay is mediocre. The game uses slightly unique battle system, known as the Active Time Battle system, which was seen in Final Fantasy IV. Rather than selecting all of the party's actions for a portion of the battle before sitting back and watching the action unfold as seen more commonly, this game's battles have players inputting commands to individual characters over time. This battle system is slightly interesting but it is far from being a dynamic enough change from the norm to make battles in Final Fantasy V stand out as especially enjoyable, and this issue is compounded by the fact that Final Fantasy fans had seen this battle system before.
While Final Fantasy V's battle system manages to stand up to its genre's par, it's terrible "Job System" causes its gameplay to be very boring at times a limits its overall capability. This job system allows players to assign any of a myriad of "jobs", which decide how a character will preform in battle, to each of their four party members. If a character spends enough time with a particular job, he or she will gain additional abilities, which can be assigned to them by the player's choosing (each character can only have one of these abilities assigned to them at once, with the exception of two particular jobs). This system may sound impressive, but due to some major flaws in its formula it becomes quite an annoyance. The first of these flaws and likely the largest is that jobs are obtained as the story progresses. This severely limits the customizabilty that the job system was intended to provide during the earlier portions of the game, and renders the first forty minutes or so of the games battles an exercise in boredom. The battles of the first portion of the game, in which the player only has one job to choose from, involve solely using the "attack" command repeatedly until all of your opponents are slain, and obtaining the first few batches of jobs does not improve this much. Ultimately, having the player acquire jobs as the story progresses makes the earlier parts of the game incredibly bland and lacking in different options. Not only is this boring when being played for the first time, but it makes playing through the game again rather annoying, causing players to miss their full reign over the job system.
But that isn't to say that the job system becomes very enjoyable once the player finally does gain access to all of its jobs. The intention of the job system is to allow customization, and this is something that it should be considered an immense failure at doing. As mentioned before, the job system provides limited customization of player characters because it only allows one ability to be added to the pre-existing set of abilities for each job at a time, but what limits its customizabilty even further is the astoundingly linear progression of abilities the game provides. Each job's set of abilities are learned in an order that has already been set out for you by the designers: if you want to learn one useful ability, you will first need to learn a myriad of abilities that you more than likely wouldn't like to learn at all, which is rather unnecessary and quite an annoyance. Final Fantasy V's system isn't a good one; it causes earlier sections of the game to be immensely boring and fails at providing customizabilty to the game. Fans of this style of character progression's needs will be much better met by Final Fantasy Tactics, which would later perfect this job system and remove all of the major flaws present in Final Fantasy V's version of it.
Though Squaresoft is rather renowned as a producer of Role-playing games, and its work during the SNES-Playstation era is often looked back upon as some of the very best pieces of gaming ever produced, Final Fantasy V somehow or other isn't a worthwhile experience in the least. It's uninteresting, cliched plot and bland cast of characters are given far to much of the players time, and its less than remarkable battle system and awful character progression system fail to compensate for these issues, making this a game that can only be recommended to the most devout of Square loyalists, and even then it would be kind to give them a fair warning before doing so.