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The music came out great, if a little quiet and with a slightly worse hiss. It removes slowdown too, and "The Day Will Come" is now used where it's supposed to, so I can't give a definite "no" to this hack. But it's not a perfect solution if you feel the vanilla ROM sounded terrible. Because all slowdown is removed, the opening music is desynced with the visuals no matter which variant of this hack you use. This is minor though, and the orchestral variant syncs with the visuals a bit better.

The main problem I have with this hack is that half of the sound effects I've heard were actually WORSENED. King Tycoon's wind drake's cries fall apart mid-way through, one of the earthquake sounds is much louder than it should be, the "normal enemy defeated" sound effect ended up sounding bit-crushed, and every single ambience sound has lost their reverb. Granted, these are obviously not ALL the sound effects in the game, and as of this writing I've only gotten as far as the first visit to Carwen. These results were from the mGBA emulator, so these issues will likely be present on real hardware.

If it wasn't for the removed slowdown, I'd say don't bother. If you didn't like the slowdown and/or felt the vanilla ROM's music sounded bad, AND you can stomach the botched sound effects, then this hack is for you.

This patch restored the music and sound effects of the orignal version while fixing the framerate drop.

The songs sound exactly (only a music expert would find a difference) like they sounded on the SNES version, and now the Final Boss doesn't makes the game feel choppy!

After using this patch for a while and listening again the original GBA tracks, I have come to the conclusion that the original GBA tracks sound better overall.

Unfortunately this patch doesn't faithfully reproduce the quality of the SNES tracks as advertised. For example the the reverb and stereo effects are not on par with the SNES version, the volume is lower and has some noticeable hissing.

And while the GBA tracks are different from the SNES ones, they have their own charm. The GBA instruments are lower in quality compared to the SNES but the tracks have been arranged with more instruments to make up for the loss of quality.

I highly respect the hard work Bregalad put into this mod and all its updates, that was truly a heroic attempt. But I think I am still going to drop this patch and stick to the untouched GBA version.

This is a review for version 3.0 of the patch.

The Final Fantasy GBA games, while containing some new content and updates, are notorious for being lazy ports by Square-Enix and TOSE. All of them suffer from various bugs and reduction in quality, but the most terrible is the ruined soundtrack.

This patch restores the music to SNES quality. Having played the game for many hours with the 3.0 patch applied, I've noticed no issues whatsoever. It sounds awesome!

I don't remember the framerate drops in the original version, and to be honest, I didn't play it all that much. However, while I haven't seen any noticeable framerate dropping, there are times during battle when everything will just halt for a few seconds. I'm not sure if it was in the original version or not, but it is definitely there. It's most prevalent when there are many enemies on the screen.

Overall, this is a quality patch, and it is a definite must-have if you intend to play this version of Final Fantasy 5.

(Review for version 3.0)

In previous versions, this patch didn't quite live up to its purpose. Some things sounded better, but there were still quite a few things that sounded off. As a whole, the original GBA sound port was better.

However, version 3.0 breathes new life into the game. Pretty much everything sounds polished and flows very well. Heck, even the cursor sound was improved! As someone who first played the GBA version and got used to the way it sounded, I really love the way the sound was restored here.

The framerate drop elimination is great, I always wondered why the game would seem to freeze occasionally during battle. I really noticed the lag during the final battle which seems to be where it's the most prominent.

The multi-version support is also a really nice touch. It really opens up and allows compatibility with other hacks of the game so we don't have to choose between this and other potentially good hacks.

There are a few sounds that still sound strange (for example the knife attack sound), but they sounded like that in the original SNES version so that's not the fault of the patch creator.

Overall, I would say this is a must-have patch for the game. It truly makes the GBA port the definitive version of Final Fantasy V.

Majority of the music matches the original SNES sound as advertized. A few instruments in certain songs are slightly off, and the orchestrated intro starts too early. Perhaps having the original SNES intro music as an option or retiming would fix it.

Overall great but needs a few fixes to perfect it like the hackers' FF VI Advance sound fix.