This game didn't make it to America until just recently, as part of the Final Fantasy Anthology.

This game follows FF3j's footsteps pretty closely, except they merged the concept of changing your class with a cast of pre-set characters. This game spans 3 "worlds" and has a pretty good, if not contrived, story.

(The above screenshot shows Butz with "Darkness", he doesn't normally wear "glasses" 8-)

The wind has stopped blowing.... the King of Tycoon decides to go check on the Wind Palace. His daughter Lenna leaves to go to see the palace too. She knows something is wrong. Then a meteorite crashes, startling Butz and Boco. They go check it out, and help rescue Lenna and Galuf. Eventually, they make their way to a pirate's cave, and sneak aboard the ship. They're caught by the pirates, but the leader sees Lenna's pendant and has them taken prisoner, not killed. Faris, the pirate's leader, decides to help Lenna, and joins the group.

The Cast:

After you start out, and get Faris, you have a ship, and the story continues. Somehow, the crystals are being shattered... the crystal chips, though, you can pick up, each one allowing you to become another class.

The story is on par with FF4. There were more world-changing events in FF5, though. The story itself, though, felt more like it was pushing you through events... and you were always a step behind the enemy. Several of the story events were more fun than in previous FF games (like the merging of the 2 worlds, into a new 3rd world.)

They kept the concept of the Crystals of the Elements again. This seems to be a foundation element of the FF series.

Battle
This game featured the Active Time Battle system again. This has become the new standard for "turn-based" RPGs, as it is more realistic, and gives the player more interactive control during battles, able to change your tactics depending on the actions of enemies. There were dozens of new options in battle, given through the wide selection of classes.

Advancement
Through gaining experience, you gained levels again. People like the idea of levels. However, there were now dozens of classes to advance in, each with 8 levels. You gained JP through battle as well, however, you got much less JP than Experience. Usually, you got 2-5 JP per fight. Levels for classes required only hundreds of JP, rather than thousands. (although the Red Wizard's final class level needed 999 JP, but it resulted in the skill of Double Casting (used in FF6 by the Gem Box)

This system of advancement gave players dozens of smaller goals, instead of always looking for experience as the only way to increase your abilities. It also lead to strategy, chosing which class to be at certain times. It also let those who wanted to avoid magic users, do so ;-) I loved my party of BlackBelts. Eventually, once you mastered all the classes, you could become a "Master Adventurer" and at any time, as an adventurer, you can select 2 other classes's skills. Normally, you only get to have 1 other classes's skills useable along with your current class. There was also the hidden Mimic class that allowed you to tack on 3 other skill sets/abilities.

Exploration
Exploring the lands was relatively easy, but they still held on to random battles. This always disorients people, making it harder to keep track of where they're going. If that's part of their goal, it's a bad goal. Thankfully though, the battles were easy enough to win for the most part, so you could move on quickly. Riding Boco the chocobo sped things up, as did the ship and Hiryuu. (Finally got to ride a dragon as a vehicle ;-)

I think this is the point that makes this game so highly rated. You actually DO more in this game than just gain levels and fight. You are gaining job points to learn the skills you want to learn. You are selecting the class to be for each sitiuation. There are just a lot of things going on there, that keeps it more interesting than other RPGs.