"No! The US couldn't handle it!"

As we all know by now the reason why we didn't get FFV localized in the glory days of the SNES was because Squaresoft was fearful that audiences didn't "get" RPGs. Lower than expected sales of "Final Fantasy II" worried them (despite it not bombing or anything).

Pretend that someone convinced Squaresoft to release FFV stateside, anyway. Besides obvious changes like it probably being called "Final Fantasy III" and Nintendo censorship, how do you think the release of the game would have went down?

I think that the difficultly would be majorly tweaked and there would be far less jobs, or at least options. It would have probably been easier to get abilities, as well.

The translation might have been worse than it was in the PSX version. I find the idea of the difficulty being tweaked funny. FFV is probably the easiest FF I've played out of the old retro games.

I thought one reason was because it looked too similar to FF4. Maybe they thought people would just buy one of the two, which would mean the game would compete with another of their own titles. That's not always good for business. SNES games weren't exactly cheap either.

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Originally Posted by ToriJ

The translation might have been worse than it was in the PSX version. I find the idea of the difficulty being tweaked funny. FFV is probably the easiest FF I've played out of the old retro games.

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Actually the PSX script from what I've read is based off what was done for FFV back when they did intend to releases it.

I don't really know how much better or worse it would have done. The RPG genre in the West was a bit weird back then but I don't think the game would have nerfed too hard, FFIV's changes and localization were enough to make Square change how they approached doing that, which is why VI's gameplay wasn't altered. Censorship would still be there so some spells would be altered but frankly V doesn't have as many controversial elements like VI did nor was it as grim as IV, so even that wouldn't be a huge change. It might have bumped VI or CT from Square's lineup since it took forever to translate stuff back then but that's just speculation.

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

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Originally Posted by ToriJ

The translation might have been worse than it was in the PSX version. I find the idea of the difficulty being tweaked funny. FFV is probably the easiest FF I've played out of the old retro games.

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Actually the PSX script from what I've read is based off what was done for FFV back when they did intend to releases it.

I don't really know how much better or worse it would have done. The RPG genre in the West was a bit weird back then but I don't think the game would have nerfed too hard, FFIV's changes and localization were enough to make Square change how they approached doing that, which is why VI's gameplay wasn't altered. Censorship would still be there so some spells would be altered but frankly V doesn't have as many controversial elements like VI did nor was it as grim as IV, so even that wouldn't be a huge change. It might have bumped VI or CT from Square's lineup since it took forever to translate stuff back then but that's just speculation.

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Indeed. I do seem to recall that the game was already translated (at least mostly) and they just dug up the translation from the grave when it was localized in the US for the first time.

Also, I didn't think of the ramifications concerning working on releasing more games for localization if they put their time into even one more game. Great point!

I can see that.

Employee 1: "Hey, did you find that translation yet?"
Employee 2: "Yeah, here it is."
Employee 1: "Oh, thank goodness. If I had to redo that I'd probably die."
GBA: Hey yo!
Employee 1: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Square can never escape the endless loop that is "Western audiences don't want RPGs". They're still doing it today, despite "learning" that we do thanks to Bravely Default.

They'd tweek the job system, making it easier to learn some abilities, like Doublecast & Mime. I don't see any way they have abilities that require 999ABP back then.