[PSX] Journey of the Five - Chapter 1

[3lric]

Journey of the Five

• Brand New Story
• New Mechanics
• Quality of Life Tweaks
• Easter Eggs

Cloud, Link, Snake and Dante get summoned into Ivalice?! That's so cliché! Play as Ramza a year after he's gone into hiding, and along with his new best buddies, unravel the mystery of their dimensional transportation while facing perilous threats from other worlds like Ivalice has never seen before! Enjoy the new Mark system inspired by FFXII!

Find out more

https://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?board=66.0

Please click here before posting a review

[Nyzer]

I figure I might as well break the ice when it comes to posting a review of someone's mod. Of course, I'm part of the Jot5 team, but I didn't come along until some time after Chapter 1 was first released, so I don't feel any shame in speaking about my opinions of it.

Despite how the idea of a crossover mod might make people wary, Jot5 avoids all the stigma of such a concept and actually feels a lot like a true sequel to FFT.

This Game is Complete!

Not Completed

Version: Chapter 1 - 1.97e

Overall
Story
Originality
Difficulty
Fun
Balance
Visuals
Replayability

Story: 5 What most people might expect in a crossover fan work would be a lot of shallow fanservice, spreading the narrative extremely thin and ultimately resulting in a mediocre experience all around. Instead, the crossover element is properly balanced with the rest of the story: more time in Chapter 1 is actually devoted to the problems caused by Ramza acting against King Delita's wishes, revolving around the lack of trust the two have for each other following FFT's final scene, as well as the plans of Ivalician criminals to attempt to capitalize on the current state of affairs. In fact, two of the four crossover protagonists have yet to see their own story threads tied in by the end of the chapter. The crossover element is indeed a prominent part of the story, but it takes a backseat to the story, rather than the reverse. All in all, it feels almost exactly like I'd expect a true sequel to FFT's story would - the only real difference is that the general tone shifts a bit away from FFT's ever-present despair, and is a bit more uplifting and humorous overall, but this is appropriate for the setting: war no longer looms on the horizon, nor are the peasants being forced to starve while the rich nobility prospers (at least, not nearly as much as before). Ivalice still has its fair share of problems, including many new ones since the end of FFT, but life overall has improved for its people.

Originality: 5 A lot more of the original aspects of FFT are present in Jot5 than I would expect in a real sequel, but considering that Jot5 is a mod and not actually a professionally produced sequel, that's fair. It's got a new story, new sprites for almost every character, reimagined jobs all around (with the sole exception of the Dragoon & Mime IIRC, not that you'd really be using them in Chapter 1 anyway), abilities are rebalanced around the near universal use of MP... it's hard to imagine any other kind of mod that could feature more originality without just being entirely unrelated to FFT.

Difficulty: 4 Jot5 was originally put together around the time that difficult mods were the name of the mod game when it came to FFT, and it shows. However, there was definitely a major push back against a masochistic difficulty, with a lot of effort put in to carefully toe the line between "challenging" and "frustrating". If you're not a fan of uphill battles, you might not enjoy the difficulty too much (unless you tweak the Five in the Patcher), but if you thought FFT felt too easy outside of its standout battles, you'll probably love this. Random battles, unfortunately, aren't so tightly balanced; some slipped through the cracks of QA testing. One battle often features nothing more than a single enemy with a crossbow, while another features a group of extremely tanky enemies that can mass heal each other for free while simultaneously damaging any of your units in the area of effect, making it nearly impossible to win without using strong status effects (none of which you get by default).

Balance: 4 A significant improvement from FFT, which infamously features Archers and Knights all the way through the endgame. Never even mind the Calculator job. All jobs have their own carefully crafted niche right from the start, and none feel useless. Difficulty balance is as mentioned above. There are two reasons I'm giving this a 4 - one, because while magic jobs are hardly bad here, each of the four crossover protagonists' base jobs are definitely better suited for going down the physical tree, and both Dante and Snake have poor Faith. Cloud and Link have the Faith to be capable casters, but Cloud's skillset is big on close combat, as are multiple skills of Link's (either pushing him to keep close to enemies or to allies, and as mentioned, those allies are likely to be in close combat themselves). And two, because as mentioned with the difficulty, some things have slipped through the QA cracks. Quake, for example, does not target as intended, and even unavoidably hits its own caster.

Visuals: 5 The game features new sprites for (almost) all jobs and characters, though little else is changed (because, duh, it's a mod, not a canon sequel on a modern console). One big upgrade, though, is one that grabs people's attention very early on in the game - the far more action-packed scenes. There aren't many scenes like this - after all, most of the time, when there's action to be had, the control is put in the player's hands rather than merely just being a scene to watch. But when there is an action-packed cutscene - hoo, boy.

Replayability: 3 My lowest score in this whole review. The big problem with this is that Chapter 1 is fairly short, and the job system is a slow burn. In all likelihood, the player will have barely tasted a quarter of the game's jobs, if that, by the time the credits roll. And aside from going from a physical job playthrough to a magic job one, there isn't too much you can do to change that, as so many of the jobs are gated by the tiers in their job trees. It hasn't stopped me from having replayed it multiple times, but I mostly just do so in order to reexperience the game after having not played it for a while, rather than to try a different approach.

[PrometheusBR]

The best FFT related release 20+ years after the original PSX one.

This Game is Complete!

Not Completed

Version: Unknown

Overall
Story
Originality
Difficulty
Fun
Balance
Visuals
Replayability

Thanks to the hard work and support of the wonderful FF Hackticks Community, Final Fantasy Tactics is stil alive.

The hacks, softwares and resources the community has created allow others to create it's own versions of the game. In a way you have two roads to take from here:
improving the original to your personal taste, keeping it's original story,
or creating your own original story, battles and characters.

This mod went for the second part, in such a sucessful manner, that it is currently the best sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics we've ever got.

First let's talk about it's story. It's a good story, with clever ideas. I totally think Delita keeping Ramza as a sort of hostage, making him a nobble with false idenity under house arrest makes perfect sense, to keep him under control, but rewarding him for his efforts at the same time.
Also loved the way the used Brave Story to show us the fate of other characters like Orlandu.

The new story with Dante, Snake, Link and Cloud, is entertaining, full of great batttes and moments, even if the plot itself is rather simplistic,
but it hits the right mark by adding something not found in the original, its PSP re-release, or any other mod you may find: HUMOR!
The humor in this was very welcome, Dante by far being the best character of the four visitors to Ivalice.

The mod has great hacks, like the mark system, new jobs, new sprites, new skillsets, all done really well. A particular big plus to the brilliant event editing, you don't have to go further than Dante's great action packed awesome intro, to know what I'm talking about.

Well this covers the good part: the story, the humor, the originality, the visuals, the sprites, the mechanics, the hacks in general.

Now I have to talk about the bads, and I should say, these can be easily remedied spending two minutes on FFTPatcher, but unfortunately I have to review the mod in it's natural state, so there is some flaws.

The game is not well balanced, and is grind oriented, and grinding in it is particularly more difficult and time consuming than any other versions.

The great new classes and job system for example: good luck even unlocking them. Classes requirements are high, jp gain is low, and grinding is really hard due to very difficult battles. Specially in the beginning, you have only one or two sites to battle randoms, and you have to pray for the right battle to spawn, or you will get owned before you have any chance to learn skills and develop your characters. Gear and items are very expensive also. To make things worse the five main characters have few support abilities to learn in their base jobs. I'm no rookie, I've finished this patch twice, one this year and the other years ago, when the game was even more difficult, and I still found the difficulty in the grindings overwhelming several times.

But as I said, if you go two minutes in FFTpatcher and change all jobs requirements to 0, and job level 8 to unlock with minimum JP, you just made this 15+ hour patch much more fun. You now have full acess to the entire job tree form the start, and can purchase and experiment the skils with much more ease, and wont need to grind half as much.

I'll give this 4 (very good) out of 5 stars, because despite the (mostly fixable) balance and difficulty issues, where this patch shines, it shines baby. GREAT EVENTING, GREAT NEW MECHANICS, cool sprites and new job system, and above all, DANTE ROCKS!
 

[Valens]

Dude fuck these turtles.

This Game is Complete!

Not Completed

Version: 1.97e

Overall
Story
Originality
Difficulty
Fun
Balance
Visuals
Replayability

I'm not too experienced with reviews, so I think I'll just split it up into 2 parts.
Story Honestly was very pleasantly surprised with this story which from the initial premise sounds like it should be a cringey fanfiction written by a high schooler. But, once you start it, the story melds together quite well and was actually quite interesting to see how the aftermath of FFT could have played out, and the references absolutely crack me up. There's already this preset notion of being able to summon people from other worlds and Ramza being a hostage of sorts because Delita refuses to kill him because of their past and his deeds also was more fluid than expected. I think with the story I only really have 2 problems which are really just personal gripes.
 1. Snake. I've never payed MGS but I just don't get the feeling like he fits in this high fantasy medieval world of magic and monsters. Someone like Ryu from Ninja Gaiden or something would be my personal choice.
2. At times I felt a bit of a disconnect. As much as I can see it, it seems to me like Delita would just off Ramza and be done with it. He's a chronic backstabber afterall.
but again, minor personal gripes that to me have no reflection on the story.

Gameplay Overall, very fun. Interesting new takes on abilities and better descriptions to actually understand what they do- where in vanilla they can be quite misleading at times. I enjoyed the separation of weapon locks such as Knights equiping swords/ knightswords/ and katana, Dante being a jack of all trades of sorts, made for very interesting situations. The new job changes are for the most part to my liking, especially archer (hunter), though Black magic feels a bit off and unbalanced to me and i'm 50/50 on knights. Magic in general all has much larger ranges which is both interesting and kind of annoying. I think there's a bit of an overreliance on MP which can easily reduce a unit to just being an MP restore bot (Snake in my case get rekt), so personally I'd think reducing some MP costs could be beneficial. Agrias's usefulness is pretty heavily reduced between needing MP and her sword skills also having a much lower hit rate. The largest issue I find with the gameplay itself is the random encounters (not counted in any of my scores because I understand it's being fixed). They are. So ridiculous.I can't. I struggled more on them than any fight in the game besides Sweegy woods (the entire enemy party being able to heal itself there is a bit crap). Also Cloud's Limits are still kinda poop. Again, most of these are small personal gripes that don't actually have much of an affect on how I enjoyed playing this. Besides the random encounters (seriously screw those turtles)

Overall, the work that went into this and the finished product is incredible. The events and dialogue alone could make it worth a try, but any fan of FFT gameplay should try it out too. There's a re-release coming that I think will fix most of the issues people may have. Oh and it's pretty.
Hopefully this wasn't a jumbled mess of thoughts.

[Akashachi]

A masterclass on what is possible to be made when modding this game.

This Game is Complete!

Not Completed

Version: Chapter 1 - 1.97e

Overall
Story
Originality
Difficulty
Fun
Balance
Visuals
Replayability

I'm not someone who is in fanmade stories, and I always avoided JoT5 thinking it was a well developed mod but still akin to fanfic. Boy how I was wrong. The team behind this mod not only have amazing writing skills, they understand well the characters  that the dialogue feels natural and it really sounds like a sequel to the original release. The other members of the five are all written very close to their original characters. The new  characters made specific to the mod are also very well done, and I can't wait to see how their story will shape up in the next chapters.

Gameplay wise, this mod is incredible. The new skills and mechanics are fantastic, even small details like Regen and Poison affecting MP was an incredible idea that I miss everytime I play other mods. The unique jobs from the Five are all amazing and it is pretty interesting on how none of them are completely broken, mostly requiring some other secondaries to complement their kit. The new basic jobs are incredible and their skills are so awesome that makes you wish they were available to be played in vanilla as well.

While I feel that the mod is balanced internally, it is a very difficult mod, especially if you come straight from vanilla or vanilla like mods. It is quite possible to fall in player traps and lock yourself in bad builds, characters focused only in their main jobs with access to very few other resources or spread too deep in too many jobs without any useful skills and equipment. That can prove to be a very frustrating situation especially for new players which may force some to drop the mod.

The mod is not outside of its flaws imo, so you may face annoying RNG, and random battles that will feel pratically impossible to beat (fuck those turtles). Your first grind spot available can be so difficult at first that may take many by surprise. As it is, the mod difficulty starts high and it actually gets a bit higher by the end of it, with a real boss fight, much different than anything you faced in vanilla, which may take some luck and a lot of tries.

But for those who push through you will be presented with one of the best experiences you can have with a mod from this community.

Even though it has been almost 9 years since the release of its first chapter, it still is one of the best mods this community ever produced and I fully recommend it to any one interested into the game. Even if you are not into crossovers, give it a chance, and you will eventually fall in love with this cast.