Final Fantasy V by Chris Kohler, a Boss Fight Books Review
I’m reviewing all of the Boss Fight Books releases, so subscribe to this channel and click the bell notification icon to be sure you don’t miss future reviews.
I just finished reading Final Fantasy V by Chris Kohler, the 18th book in the Boss Fight Books series, and I’ve got some thoughts.
Chris Kohler’s Final Fantasy V opens with an engaging analogy that compares the presence of Japanese manga books in a few mid ‘90s American comic book stores to magical portals that gave the author a window into Japan when he was a young boy. These portals were rare, yet he had one in his own hometown. Though we have such portals everywhere today—manga is stocked at every bookstore in every town no matter the population—Kohler’s analogy makes me feel like this very book is such a portal, and therefore that I’m a mid ‘90s kid with dreams of visiting Japan. He presents his book like it’s a special artifact, which made reading it all the more special. Very smart, Kohler. Very smart.
The portal analogy is used throughout the book as Kohler becomes more and more enamored with and eventually immersed in Japanese culture. He contributes to an online Final Fantasy V FAQ long before their proliferation on the internet, and he imports anime long before Crunchyroll was an option.
I am familiar with the Final Fantasy series. I played Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation when it was released. I watched my roommate in college play through Final Fantasy 10, or X, I’m still not really sure what it’s called. And I vividly remember that when Final Fantasy XV was announced to feature real time combat instead of the traditional turn-based combat, everyone in the world crapped their pants.
But I know little of the lore and less of the individual character arcs. And frankly, I don’t care to know them. So given the book’s opening and Kohler’s proud otaku status, I worried I’d be drowning in fanboy muck for the duration of the read. But I should have known better. Kohler is a professional. He’s currently a features editor at Kotaku and he’s authored the book Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. He knows the difference between crafting a narrative and simply summarize one, and he knows that the former is much more engaging than the latter. He digs into character backstory only when relevant to another point and he never spends too much time there.
The book spends a lot of time detailing the difficult journey the game went through to arrive on American shores, focusing a lot of time on the translation issues. Perhaps because I only speak one language, the nuances of translation interest me greatly. I loved reading about what localization teams have to go through to get a game translated and localized for an audience outside the native developer’s primary audience. There’s a lot more to it than one might think.
Anyone looking for a comprehensive encyclopedia about Final Fantasy V should look elsewhere. Anyone looking for an engaging story of a childhood spent in awe of and in search of Japanese culture, threaded by his hunt for an elusive video game, peppered with stories of the game’s development and shaky export to the West, should definitely read this book.
Mentioned
- Boss Fight Books review playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMKbK8vtuoicyVRhGfap2QIj5R5mWJioY
- Final Fantasy V from Boss Fight Books: https://bossfightbooks.com/products/final-fantasy-v-by-chris-kohler
Chris Kohler on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kobunheat
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
