FF5 is definitely the longest out of all of them. I passed my FF3 time a bit ago and I still have the final area and a bunch of trophies to finish. No way I'll be getting level 99 in this one either 'cause I'm like level 43 and getting ready for the endgame.
I seemed to get the "all items" trophy early, cause I definitely didn't get all the items. Like I can see missing items on the map. So I think the item trophy pops a couple items early, maybe to give people a little bit of a break given how much is missable.
The thing that's annoying about FF5 is probably that the enemies use a LOT of status effects compared to earlier games. Been constantly curing something or other all game.
The blue magics are sometimes pretty annoying yeah. The worst so far was Mighty Guard. Have to find a Stingray that spawns in one specific area (the lake, just south of the Phoenix Tower in world 3). It's a rare spawn, and when you finally do get it to spawn you have to Control it and get it to cast MG on the party. Then you realize you forgot to equip anyone with Learn and have to do it again (this didn't happen to me but I could easily see it happening). There are a few things like that.
At least Mighty Guard is super-OP. Actually Blue Mages in general are super-OP. Still in the endgame I end up going with Freelancers/Mimes and using Rapid Fire / Dualcast respectively. Freelancer functions as FF5's Ninja and Mime functions as FF5's Sage, if we're comparing this to FF3 which also had two super-classes at the end. So typically I'll have 3x Freelancers using Rapid Fire + Two-Handed, and 1x Mime using Dualcast + Time Magic + White Magic. Dualcast on its own will give you a bunch of white and black spells, like a Red Mage would have, but equipping the actual spell types will let you use everything from those fields in conjunction with Dualcast. So double Meteor, double Holy. I kinda let Black Magic fall off in this one.
Maxing out all the classes in FF5 was way easier than I expected with 4x ABP. Had like 90% of them done by world 3, then the Phoenix Tower finished it off. That place gives like 2000 ABP from the five Magic Pots you can fight throw elixirs at. I recommend not wasting them (aka if you have a class that's at like 410/500 on its last level, don't waste a 400 ABP fight on it).
Left EXP on 1x all game so it wouldn't be easy and that worked out. Cranking ABP early means no need to grind Movers in the endgame, which can be tedious.
It might as well be "master all jobs on all characters" because they're all gonna hit max at around the same time anyway. Except Lenna, since she's out of the group for a while. In my case she had 3 classes to finish at the end when everyone else was going into their last one, so basically two classes behind.
Might be my favorite thing about FF5, that if you buy a spell or learn it once, everyone gets it. Makes everything so much simpler than FF3.
Yeah hopefully there's no burnout. Probably not as far from the end as you think, endgame enemies give a lot of ABP. The bestiary is what's taking me a lot longer. For me the burnout hit, weirdly enough, on FF3. I bounced between that and FF4 and that helped, and the burnout seemed to be gone by the time I got to FF5.
You could jump ahead to FF6 and go back and finish FF5 in a bit or something, though that carries the risk of just not wanting to be bothered to pick it back up.
I still think FF5 is probably the best gameplay-wise out of the six...though I'm this huge FF Tactics mark and FF5 is basically proto-FFT so I may be biased.
Time to wrap this up so I can get to FF6.
