final boss
Iām sad that we donāt get to actually fight T-pose Zemus though, itās such a funny sprite:
Heās asserting dominance.
EDIT:
Week 10 - The End
Wow, even got a real HAPPY ENDINGā¢. Enjoying it, I know it wonāt happen in every FF :x
The 3D version was really great. Has a lot of additional content that are a big part of why I enjoyed the game (Augments, flashbacks, fun sidequests (Hemingway and the lost kids)).
Speaking of which, why going the trouble of finding the Rainbow Pudding, you might ask? (for the music? it was so goofy)
Well, after a few more steps in a particular side quest, I acquired the ćØć³ć«ć¦ć³ććŖć Augment. Equipped it for the final dungeon and went straight for the end xD
Really liked the game, it has its shortcomings, but as it has been said, still best FF so far (2nd is FF2). It had a lot of epic moments that a player is bound to remember.
Thank you again @simias for leading the club and for the very helpful posts every week!
I am taking a break from games for now to finish the novel Iām reading, then Iām ready for the After Years! (so, not sure Iāll want to follow a schedule if we do it as a club again, but a place where we can discuss the game would be nice)
Final Boss
By the way, Iām not sure why the twin-cast meteor used by Golbez and Fusuya is called ļ¼·ć”ććŖ:
Apparently in the Easy Type version (that uses simplified vocabulary for kids) itās called ććć«ć”ććŖ. So is the W just used to mean ādoubleā because itās pronounced ādouble uā?
The English fanwiki claims:
In Japanese, the letter W often stands for ādoubleā.
I canāt say that Iāve ever encountered this before however.
Polls
The first time weāve all agreed on something since FF1. Wonder if itāll be the last?
I do have to confess that for the party member poll, I have no idea which one is Palom and which is Porom so I just ordered those two randomly. 
For future game polls, I think favorite summon will probably be a pretty reliable one. Favorite Cid so far could be fun too.
I almost added āfavorite summonā but the problem is that very few of them are really given any sort of interesting background to catch our attention. I feel like Bahamut would easily win? Asura is the only other one that felt a bit interesting.
We havenāt yet reached the point where summons are given a lot of attention, Bahamut notwidthstanding. I think that will change with FF6.
Oh yeah it would 100% be āletās all vote for the cool dragon,ā haha. @Daisoujou would probably vote for Goblin or something weird though.
BTW I already miss the magic slot system of 1 and 3 because in this game (and the upcoming 5) you end up with an array of low-level spells and summon you never use because they become completely ouclassed by the midgame.
I never even had goblin! I do always need to be different though; Iād probably at least go Odin. Maybe Titan if Iām caught in the right mood at the time.
A summon thatās useless against bosses might as well not exist. Itās really unfortunate that Odin is designed that way in most FF games.
I liked it for certain chunky enemy combos near the end like the double big robots. He gets a lot of style points, too.
The real problem is FF increasingly taking off any pressure you feel from random encounters.
Iāve posted the home thread for the IP-infringing The After Years club here. Please vote in the polls if youāre interested in playing!
Shame shame, itās right there in the spreadsheet notes.
Iām pretty sure I saw once a burger chain advertising a W burger but I couldnāt point to it since itās just something I saw in passing.
If its weird, thereās a Legends of Localization article about it. The Letter āWā Means āDoubleā in Japanese Ā« Legends of Localization
Wow, I managed to beat the game within the final week! I have spent the last few weeks on an insane catch-up journey since I only stumbled upon this club while it was already in week 4 or 5 (I donāt remember).
This game club was especially fun for me because this is
- My first Final Fantasy game (and in general the first classic rpg I completed. I never really managed to get into them. I started Octopath Traveler, Dragon Quest IX, Dragon Quest XI and one or two more which I donāt remember at the moment. But I always stopped playing them when I had to grind for a boss or something.)
- My first game I am playing in japanese. I have started learning japanese around two and a half years ago, though I have not been studying as diligently as I would like. So I hope that playing some games in japenese can get me back on track.
Because I am a lazy bum I have not really kept up my studies the way I would like. Consequently, I am still around n4. So playing a whole game in japanese was quite the challenge for me. It took me around 45 hours, so about double the time it would take someone playing in his native language. I actually thought it would take me even longer, and my biggest helper for getting through this at all was the script by @simias. Thank you so much!
Also thanks to everyone else in the book club! Reading all of your opinions and thoughts after completing each week made playing through the game a lot more enjoyable!
Thoughts on the game
Like I said, this is the first RPG I managed to get through. This is definitely because I was playing it in part as a learning tool so I was more motivated. But the second biggest reason might be because this game was still rather short. According to backloggd it takes around 20 hours and according to howlongtobeat about 20-25. That is way shorter than the other rpgs I have tried!
I read up a bit on the development of this game. Appearently it was at first planned as an NES title. I personally played the Pixel Remaster version, but watched a lets play of the SNES version alongside it and I think it is very obvious from a visual standpoint. Even more impressive then is what this game achieved despite still being essentially an NES game! Thanks to getting some new writers on the team this game seems to have made leaps and bounds in the story-telling department.
Sadly, despite this progress I didnāt really like the story. Like many others have mentioned already, the visual story telling is quite limited. The developers definitely didnāt manage to squeeze the SNES for all it could have given. But I think the main issue is not the visuals but the script itself. I liked a lot of it: The opening was amazing in setting up the plot and cecils character. All of the party memebers had distinct personalities and reasons for joining forces with Cecil. Golbez was a great - likely darth vader inspired - villain (at least until the end). Although I didnāt like Tellah as a character much I think his sacrifice was telegraphed masterfully and the plot beat felt great to me.
But a lot of the parts in the middle didnāt really work for me. Collecting single crystals only to lose them right after happened a few times to many and got really repetitive for me. Same with all of the party members sacrificing themselves for no reason (apart from Palom and Porom, but even then their sacrifice wasnāt telegraphed and didnāt really impact the story) only to be back in the end. And the end boss was thematically really whatever to me. I think with all the mind control stuff it was rather obvious that Golbez was being controlled himself. But that doesnāt make it any more interesting. Golbez got so much screentime and if his backstory was revealed a bit earlier he could have made for a great final villain. Instead he got benched without us being able to do a real boss fight against him and instead we get a generic evil guy who we know almost nothing about other than that he really, truly, most definitely is the most evillest guy around.
So the story gets a 2.5 out of 5 from me. Its not a trainwreck entirely but I sadly will remember it more for its faults.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed the gameplay. I was really surprised by that, since the other rpgs I have tried have always scared me away pretty fast.
I think I like the ATB system a lot (and Iāve already read that it gets used for the next handful of games, so I am looking forward to them and how it gets further improved in the future). From other comments here I could gather that it got slightly tweaked from the SNES version, so my impression obviously only applies to the PR version.
In general I enjoyed the pressure of having to choose within a limited time. I didnāt activate the active mode (because I am a filthy noob), so going into sub-menus stopped time. But it still felt more dynamic than a completely traditional turn based system.
Most normal enemies didnāt really play around with the system, but a lot of the bosses did. It was always fun for me to find the needed timings for them. Thanks to that added variety almost none of the bosses felt like simple bags of hit points to me. Almost all of them had interesting gimmicks.
I was also pleasently surprised by the lack of grinding needed. I did most of the side content, so I got some extra levels from that. And thanks to that I did not need to grind at any point in the game (again PR version, canāt speak for the others). This felt great. The only two sections that i really, Really didnāt enjoy were toward the end of the game:
- The three behemoth fights leading to bahamut. I didnāt really want to use my items between the fights and there was no save point in the cave (or maybe I missed it?). Maybe I couldve done them all at once, but they wore down my party so much that I felt like I needed to leave the cave after each one to fully heal. Now, this isnāt really the fault of the game, but I didnāt know there were beds in the ship. So after each behemoth I walked my ass all the way to the crystal palace to recover. This was not fun at all, but it also wouldnāt have been all that much quicker if I knew about the beds.
- The pink princessses fight to get the pink tail. I think I had to fight them about 30 times to get it. I did not even attempt to get more because I was so pissed by the procedure. I think I spent a bit more than an hour on that because I had to heal at a save point a few times.
Because I didnāt want to read japanese like I nerd I didnāt fiddle around with the menus. That led to me not knowing that I could rearange the spell options which would have made casting high level spells a lot more convenient. But I canāt really fault the game for me not wanting to read.
Overall I had a lot of fun playing through this, so gameplay gets a 4 out of 5 for me.
The score was alright to me. I liked the red wings theme and Rydias theme. I didnāt really dislike any song, but I also wonāt remember most of them. This is a perfectly average 3 out of 5 for me.
Overall then the game lands at a 3.5 for me. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I almost feel that the developers bit of more than they could chew. Personally I think the game could have been better if it was quite a bit shorter and the developers would have put the extra time into some more character sprites (there were quite a bit cutscenes that in my opinion suffered greatly form the limited sprites) for example. But I know that this is more on the level of old man yells at cloud than an actual critique. āWhy couldnāt they have made the game more to MY liking?! Those damn developers!!!ā
I am hoping that I can play along the V club from the beginning and plan on being more active in that discussion. I am definitely looking forward to the first FF that was planned from the beginning to run on the SNES. This next game is especially interesting to me because I know basically nothing about it (same with IV actually). Since I am on the internet I have a rough idea about VI, VII, VIII and so on, but I think I never heard anything about V. Probably because it isnāt most peoples favourite.
Some time ago i added together a lot of rankings for the FF games and Saw that V was basically behind everything except the NES games, XI, XIII, and XVI (although that was still pretty new at the time so a lot of the rankings I used were from before its release and therefore didnāt include it).
But since I basically havenāt heard anything about it at all I will still go into it with an open mind. Since my research leads me to believe that I-IV basically all improved on each other I certainly canāt imagine V to become worse now. But thatās enough rambling. Iām looking forward to the next FF club!
If youāre talking about the Google doc, itās all @JupiterJesus !
More than a handful, itās used all the way up to and including FF9, so if you enjoy this system you have a lot to look forward to!
Yeah menus are always annoying to navigate and often use tricky vocab, the first game I played in Japanese was FFVIII and when I reload a save a little while ago I noticed that my config was super weird. Clearly I just tweaked the wrong options back then, not understanding what they did.
V is a bit divisive. Personally I consider it the best one of the Famicom/Super Famicom eras, but many people would (and probably will, when the club is running) vehemently disagree.
I also feel like the western fanbase has warmed up on V over the years. For a long time it wasnāt discussed much since it wasnāt originally released outside of Japan unlike 4 and 6, so most westerners discovered the game much later, after games like FF7 which probably made it look very dated and irrelevant. I think there are other factors at play, but weāll revisit this discussion in a few weeks I thinkā¦
This club? Arguing about FF games? I can hardly imagine. 
I only just started this weekās section today, and wow the final dungeon is long. I took a crack at Dark Bahamut, but after three attempts it was clear that it was impossible at my current level.
Week 10!!
I FINISHED 
I really wanted to finish within the week and I managed to complete the game Thursday night!
Compared to the 3D version, I do think I prefer the 3D version overall, but I donāt think the 2D version is an inferior game like I do with FF3 lol. The 3D version just has some really nice additons that I think makes the experience even better; augments, voice acting, the stupid rabbit, etc. The 2D (not PR) version meanwhile has great art! This isnāt one of my favorite FFās but I do understand why people like it (or also dislike it!)
Fullspeed ahead for 5!!
Yeah, this was the first one where I decided I didnāt need 100% completion. I could see myself going back to finish it some day, but these achievements felt like theyād take a bit more grinding than the first three games, and I didnāt really enjoy the process of finishing FF3ās bestiary.