Final Fantasy V

Well look at that. I haven't even had a chance to read Sweeney's Final Fantasy XII post yet, but here's the second straight game from that series. I'll try not to ramble but there will be so many opportunities for me to do so. First things first. I loved playing Final Fantasy numbers four and six on my Super Nintendo way back in the day and had all kinds of fun with the seventh installment (the one that broke the series out into the mainstream). So when Final Fantasy Anthology, a compilation for PlayStation that included Final Fantasy V came out in 1999, I jumped all over it. I quickly abandoned the game after what I thought was a solid chunk of gameplay but in reality was about five hours' worth. I blame the miserably slow loading times of the CD-based PlayStation. Oh well. Flash forward to a couple of years ago, when an eight-years-older version of me (on quite the retro kick) found and purchased the GameBoy Advance version of the same game for twenty extra clams. Finally, I'd be able to play this game both on the go and also without those dastardly loading times. And I did so over the past two months, completing the game in just under thirty hours and occasionally assisted for convenience's sake by a walkthrough. I liked it. I'll always have an unfair bias for the aforementioned fourth, sixth, and seventh games in the series, but this ended up being just as good as the fourth game, albeit in different ways. The gameplay was much better. The story was a bit blander, but the character writing was actually markedly improved. In a lot of ways, it felt very much like the transitory game between the classic but somewhat boring Final Fantasy IV and the richly-written character-driven masterpiece known as Final Fantasy VI. And granted, that's exactly what it was. This comparison will fall mostly on deaf ears, I'm sure, but Final Fantasy V can best be described as a Final Fantasy III that did everything better than Final Fantasy III. And I mean everything - story, writing, gameplay, combat system. I've now beaten the first eight games in the series, as well as the tenth, and I'm roughly halfway through both the ninth and twelfth; for those that don't know, the eleventh was an online-only game, and many of us fans of the rest of the series don't really like to talk about it or even consider it one of the main games. Anyway, my point is that this series of long-winded games is actually coming - slowly - to a close for me. I still think Sweeney could easily end up finishing the franchise off long before me. I mean, have you seen the blistering pace he's using? But I do think that with a little bit of focus and commitment, I can be done with Final Fantasies IX, XII, and even XIII by the time 2012 rolls around. That's no promise - I mean, have you seen how bad I am at keeping my logging promises? - but I'm simply saying that it can easily be done. Still, I doubt I'll get to any of those games anytime soon. I'm moving into my own place pretty soon, and although I'm excited for it, I'm sure I'll have many nights in the near future with more pressing things to do than play RPGs. Or log much at all, for that matter. I guess the final season of Heroes is something I could pay ten percent attention to while unpacking and rearranging furniture in different rooms altogether. Am I right?