Last time, on Final Fantasy V...

Our aimless vagabond Bartz somehow got mixed up in escorting a pink-haired kid and an unreasonably handsome silverdaddy with amnesia to the Wind Shrine and we're not really sure why anyone is going there. But they all must get there quickly! But due to a series of natural disasters, it seems that the only choice we had was to explore some random cave. But within that cave, we found a pirate hideout, and we decided the smartest thing to do in this situation is try to steal their ship while they're standing right next to it.

But I guess that's okay, because they're sleeping. And they seem to be... ridiculously sound sleepers. In fact, we can walk right up to them and shout, "HUH SLEEPING" right in their ears and they don't even wake up!

So we just walk right onto the ship to find... another sleeping pirate, who even gives us a hint of what we need to do to progress the story! Wow, this whole sleeping thing is way more convenient than I expected...

And so we go to the stern of the boat to set sail. Yo-ho-ho, and stuff!

But there's a bit of a problem. We don't know how to sail the ship.

*insert laugh-track*

But it doesn't matter because we finally get caught anyway. All that sleeping for nothing...

So we meet another guy with purple lipstick, the pirate captain Faris. He's mad that we're stealing the ship, obviously, and implies that we must be pretty stupid. I have to admit, this was pretty stupid.

But before we can be punished, Lenna decides to proceed with her original plan, and pleads for Faris to hear her out. She says that she's the Princess of Tycoon and she needs to get the Wind Shrine, and the only way she can is with this boat.

Galuf and Bartz are of course quite surprised to learn Lenna is the Princess, but Faris only seems amused. In fact, he can probably get a lot of money out of capturing a princess.

She continues to beg for a bit, and even asks for a ride as an official request from the castle or something like that. But as she gets closer to Faris, he notices the pendant she is wearing and his attitude changes. He hesitates for a bit and then commands his lackeys to toss the three of us in the brig.

So now the hot pirate guy is tying up the mustache silverfox. I quite like this game, honestly.

Now we're all bound in ropes and it's complaining time! Galuf wonders what idiot decided we should try to steal the ship, to which Bartz replies, "Look in the mirror, Pops." The original English script said something like "It was you, you crazy old coot!" or something like that and it was so funny. I wish I could remember the exact line, though.

Anyway, Galuf's amnesia conveniently kicks in and he can't remember suggesting the theft.

Lenna apologizes for not revealing her identity sooner, and Bartz finally asks her why she's even going to the Wind Shrine alone. Apparently he didn't care when she was 'just a girl,' but now he must know why a princess would want to go there.

Lenna just says that her dad went there and she got a bad feeling and knew she had to go. So, really, there's not a reason.

Cut to Faris in his cabin. He's wondering why Lenna has the same pendant he does. He faces the screen and there's a huge pendant on him so we can all see it. PENDANNNTTT. It even sparkles!

The next morning, Faris commands his crew to let us go. They are very hesitant and he has to keep threatening them, but we are freed, and Faris agrees to take us to the Wind Shrine.

But we're still confused on how the boat can sail when there's no wind. Faris smugly calls for his friend Syldra to "come say hello."

And a dragon appears from under the water! It seems that Faris and Syldra grew up together, so they're pretty much brothers, and now they explore the seas together. Rather than sailing with the wind, Syldra pulls the boat himself.

Though someone does still need to steer the ship, I guess. We're given control of it for a bit, but then we're shown the bridge again, where a pirate asks us if we'd ilke him to steer to the Wind Shrine for us. If we say yes, the ship will sail there on its own so we don't have to figure out where to go for now. So we say yes, and we're outside the Wind Shrine. Yay!

And with Faris following us around due to the whole pendant curiosity thing, we finally have a full party of four!

Faris comes equipped with a Knife like Lenna, but he also has a Leather Shield in addition to his Leather Armor. Nice! That makes it our first shield among the party.

Heading into the Shrine we find... what I assume are like... shrine-keepers? Or something? Shrine priests? I don't know, but I think they are just always here or something. They seem surprised to see Lenna, and she wants to know what happened at the Shrine and what has happened with her father.

All they know, though, is that he went to the top of the Shrine and has not returned. So "something must have happened."

Faris says that the Crystal is at the top, so we should go take a look, and we decide to all four go together. Even though we were already together.

The other random Shrine Guys tell us that the Crystal upstairs is controlled by an amplification machine, but it seems to have suddenly stopped working. They also have like a jug of that spring water from before that we can use to completely restore the party as much as we'd like.

Heading up into the tower, we start encountering some new enemies. Black Goblin and White Serpent seem to be the most common. What's cool about the bestiary is it lets you know what items enemies drop, what you can steal from them, what their weakness is, and more! So we learn that Black Goblins can drop Leather Shoes, which is nice. We're going to deck everyone out in leather soon...

The tower isn't terribly confusing. It's pretty much a bunch of straightforward hallways or rooms. We find a Tent in a treasure chest, which is an item we can use only in places where we can save that allows us to take a rest and restore the party.

We also find a consecrated circle as we climb the tower. This is a place where we can save and use our tents and stuff, despite the fact that we're not on the world map. It only works standing on the circle exactly, though.

Eventually we get to a place where we can choose a left or right door. The right door has a treasure in it, and the left door leads to a very long circular cooridor that moves onward. When you finally get all the way around, you can see that the other door led to a treasure. Of course, I took the left door fist, walked all the way around, and then realized I had to go back...

And for all our walking, we got... another Leather Cap. But now we have enough for everyone in the party!

I haven't been talking about game systems a lot because there's really not much here that isn't expected, but I guess I'll talk about the battle a little bit. There are a couple of special conditions that randomly occur at the beginning of battle: a preemptive attack in which the party starts with their ATB Gauges already filled so everyone can act right away, and a back attack in which the party is attacked from behind.

When a back attack happens, the party's formation is reversed -- not only on the screen, but anyone in the front row is moved to the back row and vice-versa. The front row has lower defenses with increased attack, and the back row has increased defense but lowered attack. So generally you'll have your more fragile characters in the back, so a back attack will suddenly send them to the front! And a back attack makes everyone's ATB Gauge start out at 0, but the enemies get to attack right away. So it can be a bit scary if it happens at the wrong time...

You can at least use the "Row" command in battle to switch the row your character is standing it, though it does use your action for that turn and resets your ATB Gauge.

Eventually we come to a room where our exit is blocked by some giant bird thing. Before approaching it, though, we can go into a couple of doors on the side. The left one houses a treasure chest containing a Broadsword, so we can finally give a weapon to Galuf

The right room is completely empty, though wall wandering around in it seeing if I could find something, I did at least get into a battle with an enemy called Mani Wizard, so we got another bestiary entry, plus it seems that the Mani Wizards can drop Rods! But even though we fought four of them, we didn't get any item drops.

Finally, we approach Big Bird, who is really called Wing Raptor, it seems. Wing Raptor has an attack called Breath Wing that deals damage to the entire party. It even deals more than 20 damage to everyone, so it can tear through our HP pretty quickly.

But even a Wing Raptor is no match for the Leather Orgy. Before I even got to use a potion, it fell to Bartz's sword, doing this weird... thing... where it turned into little squares that flew away. Yay, death!

When we reach the 4th floor from the staircase behind the Wing Raptor, we can head directly up to the top of the tower where the Crystal lives, or we can kinda roam around the outskirts of the floor and notice there's a treasure chest just... floating in the black void that's outside the normal game map. Similar to the hidden Phoenix Down at the meteor's crash site, we can actually walk behind a wall that isn't apparent just from looking at it and nab the treasure.

And from the box we got a Staff! It's actually stronger than Lenna's Knife (though only barely), so we let her hold the stick so she can whack stuff with it.

When we enter the Crystal's room, we find that it has been broken into pieces, which lie around the floor. And Daddy Tycoon is nowhere to be seen. Bartz turns around in surprised, and suddenly the camera cuts to the other Crystals around the world. Each one makes a little sparkle thing come out, then we cut back to the party, where a sparkle enters one of the members, then we do this with another Crystal, and another, until finally a sparkle comes from where the Wind Crystal once stood and floats into Bartz.

(Dehehe...)

It seems that the "essences" of the Crystals went... into us or something. Faris received Courage, the Essence of Flame. Lenna was awarded Devotion, the Essence of Water. Galuf was warmed up by Hope, the Essence of Earth, and finally, Bartz took Passion, the Essence of Wind.

Daddy just kind of... appears where the crystal was and tells us that the four of us are the four Warriors of Light, and that we must defend the remaining crystals, because a great evil is awakening that wants to return the world to darkness.

Of course, no one really gets it, and then Tycoon floats away in a shiny ball or something???? And Lenna yells for him to wait, but he doesn't.

But after that, the shards from the destroyed Wind Crystal move toward us, and apparently the fragments contain within them the power of warriors of legend... whatever that means. But the fragments like... go into our bodies too lol. And with them, we're granted the ability to channel the powers of the legendary warriors, or in game mechanics terms, we can change our Job.

The Job system is pretty simple by today's standards, but it was pretty amazing when this game was new. You can change to various "Jobs" which alter how your character performs in battles. While you are using a Job, you'll be restricted to the kinds of equipment you can wear and things, but you'll also learn abilities unique to the Job, and later will be able to equip some of those abilities to your character even when using another Job. So it's a method of customizing and training your player characters.

The Four Job Fiesta starts here, which has a pretty simple ruleset. When you register, you're given a Wind Crystal Job. Once you get to this point in the game, you can only use that Job from there on out. Later in the game, more Jobs will become available, and you can update your progress on the challenge which will give you your next Job out of the ones that became available from there. Then you must have at least one of your Wind Crystal Job and one of the next Job in your party at all time, and the other two members of the party have to be one of those two Jobs, too. The pattern repeats for the last two events which award you more Jobs, so that you have exactly four jobs you're allowed to use during the game, severely limiting the variety of abilities available to the party.

There are rule variations you can use, too, and I'm doing the one where you only will be assigned magic-related jobs. And the first we got was White Mage, which is great, because it's one of my favorites. But also not so great because it has pretty much no offensive capabilities, so winning battles may prove a bit tedious. (I can't really say 'difficult,' because, well, it's Final Fantasy.)

I think it's funny how the guys have the same kind of robe and Lenna has some weird robe with no bottom half so she can show off her legs. Gotta show your legs to heal your friends!

I also love all the little details that make each character's White Mage outfit unique, even though they're very similar. Bartz has a pretty plain robe, while Galuf's is much liek his but with a belt and a golden clasp thing at the front of the hood. Lenna has her hood up, and of course LEG. And then Faris is also wearing his hood, but also has like some kind of red strap thing at the front of it. And no leg.

Anyway, we lost our ability to use our Knives and Broadswords and stuff... but we can at least use the Staff that we picked up, and our Leather outfits are White-Mage-approved, too.

So next time, we'll finally move forward with the Leather Robe Harem!

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