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This mod is pretty impressive from a technical angle; It crams a lot of new features into an SNES rom. My favorite feature is having separate slots for active and passive abilities; This, combined with the option to not take !Fight or !Item, gives you a lot of flexibility in building characters.

Conceptually I like a lot of the other changes. Most classes tend to have a submenu of abilities, which gives them more variety. Items have a cooldown, and they don't get used up; having more of an item reduces cooldown or increases effect. Some abilities also have cooldowns, so that you can include things like X-Fight without it fully breaking the game. Jobs have a sort of combined progression, where it's another xp bar for the character, essentially; rather than assigning ABP to whatever job you have equipped, you have a total job level, and when it increases, you gain a level in whatever job you have equipped. Equipment is now three open slots, and essentially everything is relics.

In practice, things don't really work out that well. Probably the biggest obstacle is that you have to consult excel spreadsheets to find out what all the new abilities do, since there's no description in-game. This also applies to equipment, as it has some other stats (things like increasing max HP) that doesn't show on the equip screen. I tried to think of this as just consulting a manual, but it's too much; get a new class? That class now has 4-8 abilities you've just unlocked, so be prepared to spend a few combats alt-tabbing back and forth to double check what things actually do. The ability designs also often felt uninspired or superfluous; not really surprising when you're cramming 100+ new abilities into FF5's existing framework. The element system I mostly found to be a hindrance; it only seemed to matter when my weapons happened to be an element that an enemy or especially boss took 0 from or absorbed, meaning I had to load from an earlier point and re-equip.

I could go on, but I don't really want to dunk on this romhack; I'm truly impressed by the work that went into it. However, I can't recommend it above the base game or something like Custom Classes. But if you're a big fan and looking for something truly new, this may be it.

A frustrating hack that doesn't know what it wants to be. It is a challenge, but it's messy and unbalanced. It takes the Job System from both games merges them together, power it with the overly complex damage formulas from Bravely Default, empowered by an ever-shifting element system that effects all aspects of combat (def, status effects, item potency, etc).

There is too much going on with this mod and the original game's menu wasn't made to handle so much. Information was cut out and placed on spreed sheets that aren't all that accurate or organized.

The real sin of this mod was the butchering it did to the party customization that both FFV and BD are known for. 'Anyone can be anything' is what the games are best known for, but the creator of this mod did away with that by restricting Jobs. I understand what they were trying to do, instead of just giving the characters the ability to learn all skills from all Jobs they only allowed certain characters to have access to certian jobs. They want the player to feel like their choices matter by limiting by who can do what.

They choose this by what I assume is 'restrictions from characterization', ie. Lenna can't be a Knight or thife because she's not a violent person. A Black Mage that magic nuke large group of enemies? Sure she can do that. If they wanted the player's choices to have consequences a better approach would have been 'characterization with limitations', or all characters can be anything, but some are better at a Job that others. There are ways to balance this out, but it's frustrating, for me at least, to have all these Jobs but I'm locked out 'my team' because of character morals that were never fully explored.

This hack has alot of potential but too much was crammed into it and the execution is poorly implemented. If the creator was willing to put effort into it they would find they could have fit everything they wanted into this mod without the restrictions and overly complex interface and damage calculations. But I understand that would require much more testing, programming and more character sprites to achieve the thing I just complained about.

As it stands now though, I would forgo this mod and try one that just increases the game difficulty or change story elements. Better, just play Bravely Default, FF Tactics WotL or something similar. This mod is just too many things at once without being good at any one thing.

This is probably the strangest hack of any RPG I've ever played. I gave it a good ~8 hours before quitting.

Most jobs have been entirely reworked and some new ones added. Generally every job has a new skill menu containing at least 8 active abilities as well as some passive ones to learn. This sounds cool in theory, but in practice, you will have no idea what almost any active ability does without combing through the included spreadsheet. Most of them are very unintuitive and have little to no use in a majority of encounters. Some jobs felt very underpowered, or got outdated extremely quickly. The new MP system is awkward to use, as paying 100 MP for an additional turn is not an opt-in, but automatic.

If you thought this was the Brave New World or T-Edition of FF5, it is not. I tried legitimately really hard to like this hack, but I don't. It just feels extremely strange and clunky to play.

I was looking for an expanded experience of final fantasy 5 and found this version, which in my humble opinion is a challenging edition and that brought a new life to the game. I sincerely hope that a new update is possible with regard to a redefinition of design only, and that the experience will be further expanded. Congratulations to the developers of this patch for their patience, and effort to bring us this incredible experience!

I wanted to add a review because I feel like some of the other reviews do not do this hack justice, and I'm surprised it's not getting more attention.

First I would like to respond to some of the points in a previously negative review. The redrawn sprites actually look really great to me, and clearly had a lot of love put into them. The interface and icons are different, and are only confusing if you don't take the time to learn about the hack, because it is doing things very different than the original. The in-game beginners house offers very clear explanations of the game systems, and there is included documentation that also explains everything there is to know, so it's not difficult to learn. Also the author of the hack is active in discord and on the forums, clearly passionate about the project, and is always helpful and responsive to feedback.

I think it's important to understand that this mod changes the original game systems and requires a little bit of reading to understand the new mechanics, so it's highly recommended you spend some time going through the information included with the patch, and don't skip the beginners house. I also agree with a previous reviewer that playing the original vanilla version first is probably best before jumping into this hack, because the changes are so fundamental. That being said, none of it is overly complicated to understand at all.

Overall, I feel the new mechanics are done very well and dramatically improve the original experience. I'd go as far as to say it makes the original version of Ff5 feel obsolete in comparison. There's a lot of satisfying character building, and the battles all feel so much more interesting and fun thanks to the element system. Everything feels like how it should been in the first place. The difficulty is perfectly balanced - not too easy, not to difficult, plus there are settings to control the difficulty to match your taste. I especially enjoyed the changes in how items work (there's item cooldowns now, instead of being consumable), and the new jobs are very well designed, and are much better than the GBA ones.

Overall, if you are at all a fan of FFV, do yourself a favor and PLAY THIS HACK!

First off, if you've never played FFV, you should probably play the game "vanilla" first. This hack introduces a large number of changes and new mechanics that will probably be easier if you're already well-versed in the original game. Not to say the game is overly difficult; fortunately, it has both difficulty and encounter rate options that are accessible at any time through the menu. You can even turn encounters off entirely. You might need to read a bit and scan the included spreadsheets to figure out which classes and items to use, but it felt very satisfying finding effective class combos and really dealing out the damage. As far as the story and plot go, there are no changes, so it feels like a sort of challenge hack where you can pick the level of challenge you want. I also have to commend the developer(s). I pointed out a bug and a fix was uploaded that same day.

The redrawn sprites look really ugly. Icon placements are all over the place. Interface is too confusing. Trying so hard to copy another game's mechanics while ignoring almost any aspect of FF5. Readme text is very cringe and selfish. The creator being dismissive with complain/criticism. Just play Bravely Default or some other FF5 mods instead, they're much better.