Oh, the other kids will be so jealous of me. They're all stuck in freezing old Seattle, playing Zelda Twilight Princess on Wii today. But I got my copy of Final Fantasy V Advance in the mail, and I get to play it while they're stuck out there. In Seattle. Playing Zelda.
This isn't working. Okay, I'd trade places with freakin' Parish in a heartbeat. Luckily I'm leaving for Seattle tomorrow. Better late than never. I've been messing around with it this afternoon, though, and as a certified Final Fantasy V fanatic I think I am qualified to write up some impressions on this one.
Final Fantasy V Advance is fast.
Like, fast. You can zip straight through normal battles just by holding down the A button, and it'll race through the menus. Obviously this won't be as easy to do later in the game, when you actually have to select menu options other than "Fight." But it makes the early going blaze right by.
It's also even faster if you've got a Thief in your party. In the original SNES game, having a Thief was the only way to dash around the field. But now, anybody can B-button dash. Having a Thief lets you go at some crazy ridiculous speed. So fast that you'll end up running straight past doors and treasure chests if you're not careful.
All this adds up to mean that you'll probably really enjoy ripping through FFV again even if, like me, you've been down this road many times before. And you'll really want to do it for the English translation, which is polished, witty, and enjoyable. Buoyed by their success at slipping pop culture references into Final Fantasy IV last year, Square's localization masters have gone maybe a little bit nuts with FFV's minor text.
They're not interrupting major dramatic scenes with Reading Rainbow references. You have to look really hard to find the Reading Rainbow references. But they're in there. You might want to bitch about destroying the purity of the original Japanese, but I say the original Japanese was boring as hell -- plus, I played the first hour and a half or so of the Japanese version of FFVA and the main text, the real meat of the story, is spot-on.
So far this is looking like a more than worthy update. Kudos to all involved.
