Talk:Final Fantasy V

Acknowledgements
Thanks to J.L. Tseng's remarkably detailed guide on the SNES version of the game. See |FFV ALGORITHMS AND STATS FAQ on GameFAQs.com. This includes just about everything you could want to know about the games mechanics including details of weapons, armor, spells, monsters and battle system.

Taking a break
I just spent the last few months working on this guide, and while there is still a lot to do I've completed the goals I started with, namely to actually finish the game myself and to get the walkthough into useable form. But it's time to take a break for a while. I'll still be checking edits and I'll try to go through material to remove the more glaring errors at some point, but I'm not going to make any more additions for while. Anyway, here's my assessment of where we are:
 * Getting started: 50% The character list needs expansion in the way of non-playable characters. The battle system page could use some work as well though the details can go in the Formulas and tables page.
 * Walkthrough: 75% The entire game has been covered, but only for the PS version. There are a few optional bosses that I skipped, but they should probably be added to the Sidequests page since the other guides I've looked at seem to agree that they are not for first time players. It seems that's a common feature of FF games -- no one does all the Marks in FF XII or all the monsters in the arena in FF X before getting to the final boss. Making the walkthough equally accessible for all three versions seems to be an open problem since there are so many name differences. There are screengrabs for the earliest parts of the game but none for the rest. I don't know how to to these myself, so I can't add to the ones that are there, but having them on the first page but not on the others seems a bit inconsistent. What may be more useful are maps, especially for places like the ship's graveyard and the fire ship where it's easy to waste a lot of time by getting lost.
 * Sidequests & Secrets: 50% I started the Sidequests page but there are only a few quests there at the moment. As mentioned above, the optional superbosses could be added here but I'm not sure what else. Maybe the Treasure list can be removed at this point since the info is incorporated into the walkthrough. It uses names from a different version of the game though and it should be compared to the walkthrough check for errors. The formulas page and the bugs page both need to be expanded. This is mostly taken from J.L. Tseng's guide but I've only included a fraction of what's there.
 * Items and equipment: 75% I fleshed out the weapons page, reorganized the armor page. The items page need names from other versions add and the same for the shops page.
 * Jobs and skills: 50% There are still some Jobs which are just stubs and there is a mix of names from different game versions. The mixing section of Magic and skills is a stub and alternate names need to be added here as well.
 * Enemies: stub. J.L. Tseng's guide probably is probably the most complete source for this, but it's for the SNES version only. There are around 300 different enemies in the game, not counting a couple dozen new ones in the GBA version, and J.L. Tseng's guide lists 33 pieces of information (HP, MP, Level, etc.) for each one, which makes around 10000 pieces of information total.

Working on this guide has been a lot of fun and I've learned a lot. So I'll be back when I pick up the game again; maybe after I've played FF VI for a while. --Zuke (talk) 00:07, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Publish dates for mobile
OK, so I'n looking to add the publish dates for the mobile releases, which are 28 March 2013 for iOS, and 25 September 2013 for Android, both worldwide, but the templates don't yet allow for these to be added without messing up the layout. Can this be fixed? Swordzman0611 (talk) 16:19, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
 * No one understands what you mean when you say "messing up the layout." I added the dates and everything is fine. It would also be nice if you could respond to Zuke's comments on your talk page.  Pro cyon  19:45, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

@Procyon: When I started adding the dates, the territory flags for iOS and Android wrapped around to the top of the page, and things started showing up outside the infobox. Glad to see somebody on it. Swordzman0611 (talk) 22:19, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Updating reference points
You guys have probably guessed that the translation issue has been stuck in my craw since I happened upon this guide. I started playing again on iOS because, well, it was the last thing I needed to add to my personal collection.

Anyway, it seems to me that the entire walkthrough should follow the official Square Enix script, since among other things it just looks nicer in a print guide. We now have 2.5 releases in production using this script vs. the EA (Electronic Arts) script on which this particular guide was developed (and in case you're wondering where I'm picking up the half, it's because Amazon published FFV for the Fire tabs in 2014, and the Amazon system is an Android offshoot).

I don't want to see a big slash- or paren-filled mess (e.g. Mellusion/Mellusine/Meryujinu), but what I do want to see is a little more consistency. As in, if we've got all these releases, then use the text that's closest to the original, unless we need to note a pronounced difference. Right now, the EA translation possesses the greatest differential from the original game.

Example: For spells, yes, they did grade with numbers at first because of character set limitations in the 16-bit world. Now, these don't exist, so the Japanese "-ra/-ga/-ja" convention has been used since the other FF that first used them (VIII), also in '99.

Why the EA translation is so funky in spots is anybody's guess. In hindsight, it's laughable. In some cases, it's even unplayable (this is more due to a Sony bug than anything else).

But how can we move these reference points when doing so makes the guide "messy"? Swordzman0611 (talk) 21:28, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm still trying to figure out what you mean by EA translation. The disk I'm using is the from the Final Fantasy Anthology with copyright (1999) by Square Co. Ltd.; there's no EA mentioned. It was that disk, which seems to be solely a product of Square and Sony, that I used when compiling the guide. I don't know how it gets more 'official' than that. It's not the original because the original is in Japanese, plus the SNES translation predates the PS one though I don't know how official it is. Not sure what you mean by unplayable either, I just played through the whole thing to the final credits with no problems. The Knife damage bug and Power Drink bug certainly don't make the game unplayable. Parts of the guide have been worked on by people using different versions, so there is some inconsistency, but the majority of the guide, including at least 3/4 of the walkthough was done by me referencing only the PS version, so I think most pages here are consistent, just not in version you prefer. I wouldn't object to changing all the names to a different version if most of the current players were using it but I don't how you would determine that. It does seem though that gamefaqs.com has guides split pretty evenly between SNES, PS1 and GBA, and YouTube videos of people playing (there are many) are about the same. There has been some discussion (between me, User:Procyon, user:Prod on my talk page) about using something akin to template:Control selector so that readers can select which version to look at, but there are some concerns whether the result would be worth the effort put into it. --Zuke (talk) 17:05, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

During the period between 1998 and late 1999, Square was pre-merger with Enix, and to get some of its games to the US and Europe, it entered into a partnership with Electronic Arts (EA) as publisher. If you look closely at the titles in this period, you'll see "Published by Square Electronic Arts, LLC" right before other logos.

The Anthology version was reportedly translated by Alexander O. Smith. From the looks of it, though, there may have been other, less experienced hands in the fire. It even looks like a bad copy/paste job from FFVI in hindsight, without much in the way of proofing. Nevertheless, it counts as the first official script.

In 2006, Square Enix was fairly well established, and by then may have established its own in-house translation team. The GBA games were the first fruits of the combined company for Nintendo since '94, but Nintendo wasn't really involved except for designing the unique font used in these versions. Having played both the RPGe patched game and the Square-EA collab before that, I felt that the second effort on the GBA was much improved over the first on the PSX.

People may have come and gone, but it certainly looks that, as I dig into the 2013-14 mobile ports, SqEnix stuck with the GBA port as a base, and so they took everything with it and adapted it for touch.

My main point is that the PSX script is now trumped 3:1, and so I think we should figure out how to make the GBA the current reference point without necessarily dumping the PSX version. The numbers don't change, but the text looks much nicer. Swordzman0611 (talk) 01:44, 29 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Technically speaking, Swordzman0611 does make some valid points. The best interest of the site is to present the guide in the fashion that the majority of readers will recognize.  Since the translation that he is referencing is both the most recent translation and the most frequently used, it would make sense to try to use this as a basis for most of the text in the guide.  That's not to say that the PSX translation doesn't have its place, but it should be considered the most likely one that a reader of this site will recognize.  That being said, it's still quite a bit of work to adjust the names, and still maintain the quality of the work that's been laid out by Zuke.   Pro  cyon  03:00, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Conventions for localisation names
What's the convention for referring to things in the pages? For example, "Protes" was what the original SNES "translation" used, but that has since been changed to "Protect" in the GBA version. The guide however seems to be using the first one. Should this be changed? SirMoogle (talk) 19:06, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
 * There's different levels of extremes when dealing with this. You can see how Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior III each deal with this a little differently.  In the end, try to be thorough and cover both releases, but only do as much as you feel you can do.   Pro  cyon  21:44, 22 April 2020 (UTC)