Final Fantasy V/YMMV

• Americans Are Indifferent: In Japan, Final Fantasy V is one of the more popular installments, more popular there than Final Fantasy VI. Overseas, it isn't as popular, due to its temporary No Export for You status, being the only numbered Final Fantasy game of the SNES generation not imported stateside. on top of being from the pre-Final Fantasy 7 era.
• Complete Monster: Ex-Death. He cannot comprehend anything remotely positive. Oh, and his fortress is made of people.
• Ear Worm: While most of the songs are catchy, the worst is "Hurry Hurry" (which plays during the Karnak Castle escape).
• Ensemble Darkhorse: This is the first game Gilgamesh appears in.
  • Also, Galuf's Dancer costume--a shirt made of frills and orange hotpants--is a hugely popular subject for Japanese fanartists.
• Game Breaker: There are number of these in Final Fantasy V.
  • The most popular is Double Cast Bahamut and then Mime it. Granted, you only get Bahamut at the end of the game, but any and all fights afterwards, sans Shinryuu and Omega, become pitiful fights.
  • The Mime and Freelancer classes automatically get every passive ability from any class you have mastered. There are many applications for this, but the most famous is to get a Mime or Freelancer Bartz who has Dual-Wield, Rapidfire (four attacks on random targets, each at half damage), and Spellblade (charge any swords you're wielding with certain Black or White spells; only need to cast once for the whole battle). The end result is that you can attack a boss eight times in one round, for four times the damage of attacking normally. Also, each attack can be charged with the boss's weakness element, or just souped-up with Flare, Bio, or Drain. How powerful was this combo? Powerful enough that it became Bartz's Limit Break in Dissidia Final Fantasy.
  • The GBA remake adds the Gladiator class's "Finisher" ability, which, at the job's maximum level, has a 3/4 chance of either delivering a critical hit or an elemental-based hit that automatically hits For Massive Damage. Add the Knight's Doublehand ability to double your attack power and you've got a wrecking ball in a human suit.
  • The Chemist class, normally impressively useless due to the fact that the game doesn't actually tell you what the item combinations for Mix are. But if you do know, you can create mixes for halving an enemy's level (yes, even on a boss, in a game where level means everything), increasing your levels by 10/20, and so on. Also, halving an enemy's level makes them automatically susceptible to Level2 Old, which drops their level further...
    • Also, Drain Kiss. Combine a Maiden's Kiss and a Turtle Shell (which are always dropped by an early-game enemy) and you get an attack that deals 1500+ damage at a point where every other class is struggling to deal 500.
  • The Return/Reset spell. If you have someone with Time magic and just 1 measly MP, you can do the whole battle over again. Everything gets reset, including countdown timers ^[1], to however the battle started. This makes stealing unique rare items and figuring out any Puzzle Boss just a matter of keeping the Time Mage alive and patience.
    • Note that this is bugged in the North America GBA release -- timers do NOT reset.
• Good Bad Bugs: The Final Boss battle is scripted to some extent. When Exdeath takes enough damage, he transforms into Neo-Exdeath. But there's one exception: In the GBA version, there's the new class "Cannoneer" with the skill "Combine". It basically allows the Cannoneer to combine bullets with any item For Massive Damage and random effects. If you use a certain combination against Exdeath AND the resulting damage is enough to kill him, it WILL kill him, skipping the whole fight against Neo-Exdeath and going straight to the scene after that.
  • In the Super Famicom version and PS 1 port, this is done by using the Kiss of Blessing on Exdeath (Holy Water and Maiden's Kiss using the Chemist's Mix command).
• Hate Dumb: This game has received a lot of hate for having a decidedly silly, trivial plot, with little to no regard for the gameplay.
• Nightmare Fuel: This is a family of undead enemies that take the form of a floating head with the face ripped off and floating in front of the skull and an elongated tongue feeding from the skull's mouth through the mouth of the face in front (and little stringy bits connecting it to the rest of the flesh on the skull).
  • Krile always faces the viewer in every single battle & menu sprite. It's a little creepy after a full game of everyone else looking at the monsters.
• Nintendo Hard: So much so that this was the reason the Super Famicom version was never released in the US. Some people consider this game to be the hardest game in the series.
• Player Punch:
  • Exdeath's murder of Galuf. Fortunately, right after this happens, you assault Exdeath's castle to take him down.
  • The reunion of the Tycoon family; shortly afterwards, King Tycoon dies.
  • The death of Syldra.
  • When Exdeath sucks All the friendly NPCs and character hometowns into the void. That's harsh.
• That One Boss: Sol Cannon. Atomos. Liquid Flame. It'd be easier to list the bosses that aren't considered That One Boss.
• Woolseyism: Nobody really complained when the main character's name was quietly switched from Butz to Bartz for the U.S. localization. Many of the lines in the Game Boy Advance remake also qualify for making the script more fun to read compared to the rather bland translation of the PlayStation version.

1. ↑ (i.e. The spell is effectively free.)