Final Fantasy IV: The After Years — With 64% More Party Members Than Final Fantasy VI!

When this game was announced, it took people by surprise.  Of all the Final Fantasy games, this is one of the last ones that anyone would’ve expected to receive a sequel.  Then again, who knows what Square-Enix is thinking anymore in regards to the series?

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years was originally developed for the Japanese as a cell phone game and released as a number of short chapters, then was ported to WiiWare and released in four parts, then was ported to the PSP as part of a Final Fantasy IV collection.  I am reviewing the Wii version.

An earlier attempt to review this game ended in disaster, so rather than review it in quarters like I originally intended, I played through the entire thing to review it all at once.  Anything that I don’t cover in the following review has probably already been mentioned in the first one.

First Impression

Although the game opens much like the original game did, with the Red Wings sailing over the ocean, this time around it is Ceodore and not Cecil who is on board.  Ceodore is the son of Cecil and Rosa from the original game.  His goal is to be a Red Wing just like his father was, and so he is on his way to the testing site to become one.

Meanwhile, a second moon has appeared in the sky.  This is big news, considering there hasn’t been a second moon in the sky for a good 17 years.  You can imagine it’s a cause for concern, and for good reason.  The planet probably already experienced a gravitational crisis when it lost a moon at the end of Final Fantasy IV.  Now that there’s another moon again, gravity will have been thrown out of whack for a second time.

But that’s beside the point.  There is a second moon in the sky and as soon as it appears, a mysterious woman shows up who, for no apparent reason, happens to look a lot like Rydia.  She attacks everyone and steals everyone’s crystals, and that’s how the game begins.

As far as openings go, it’s not bad.  It stirs the curiosity and makes you wonder what happens next.

Second Helping

It’s just too bad you don’t get to find out what happens next, not unless you want to screw yourself out of a large number of optional characters.  The second and third releases of The After Years to WiiWare contain chapters that take place at about the same time as the first chapter and serve only to show how each character from the first game finds their way into the action of the sequel.  New characters are introduced as well and unless you play these chapters, those extra characters will not join you in the final chapter.

If you play through these chapters to the end, you can also import your stats and continue with your characters at the level you left them off at.  There is a level cap in place that isn’t lifted until the final chapter, so you can’t max out your stats ahead of time.

Plot contrivances within each chapter force you to use only certain characters at certain times rather than a full party.  During his story, Yang decides to ditch everyone and go alone.  You’d think that he would’ve remembered how great it is to have other party members with him like in the first game, but I guess it’s been 17 years and that’s a long time to go without a white mage by your side.  He probably got used to not needing a healer.

It doesn’t help that the encounter rate is very high, so during those chapters where you have to take a team that lacks a healer through an area populated heavily by monsters, it can get pretty frustrating to rely on a small supply of items until the next time you can go shopping.  Then when you’re purposely trying to level up your characters, you can’t find a monster to save your life.

Third Base

I mentioned in my previous attempt at a review that this game looks and plays like a rom hack.  Sadly, that’s true for pretty much the entire game.  There are new characters to use and areas to explore, but this is as much a new game as Kaizo Mario World is.  It might as well have been added to the Final Fantasy IV ROM file available for the Virtual Console.

Case in point: most of the music is recycled from the first game.  There is one new piece that plays at various points in all of the tales (or at least, I don’t recognize it from the first game), and it isn’t until you reach the end of the game that you hear more new music.  If The After Years was trying to create a feeling of familiarity, it did it well.  But that’s the problem.  The game felt too familiar.  Scenes were lifted almost verbatim from the first game, the music stayed the same, even the enemy sprites were recycled.  But that’s par for the course, really.  Square did that with their other direct sequels, too.  You could probably write a sequel yourself if you had the ROM file to one of their games.

So the question becomes, why should you play this game?  The more I think about it, the more I wonder, why exactly did I play the game?

Well, because I miss the days when characters started out at level one, when you never knew what was beyond the next mountain, when you could wander around on a world map between cities rather than just select your next destination from a list.  Say what you will about The After Years, it still delivers an old school experience that is almost worth the price of admission.

Fourth and Long

At times, it felt like the game was more frustrating than not.  When you’re constantly being surprised or back attacked, it can grate on your nerves.  When you can’t walk five steps without being thrust into another battle, it can frustrate you.  Of course, the game seems to know when you’re actually trying to level up and will refuse to throw any more monsters at you until you give up and move on.

I said that the game is almost worth the price of admission, and I meant it.  The biggest problem I had with the game was the final dungeon.  It seemed to exist mainly to make you fight pretty much every major boss in Final Fantasy IV, then had you fight four iconic bosses each from the other 8 and 16-bit F
inal Fantasy games.  It was like Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls, except the bosses weren’t optional.  If this is the only way Square can think of to give someone their money’s worth, then I want my money back.  The final dungeon stretched on for far longer than necessary and I think I spent nearly twenty hours exploring and leveling up and fighting bosses before I got to the end.

I can see why Square did it, but that’s another bone of contention I have with them.  They wanted to include lots of characters in The After Years and to their credit, they made it work for most of the game.  But then all of a sudden you reach the final chapter, there’s the potential for 22 characters to be at your disposal and each of them needed to contribute to the story.  The way they achieved this was to place lots of save points in the final dungeon and then show a short scene that expands upon a character’s personal storyline at these save points.  Also, after certain boss fights, the characters who are in your party speak a token line that doesn’t really add much to any kind of conversation.  Unfortunately, that was it until the very end of the game.

One thing the final dungeon had going for it was that the enemies handed out experience points like it was candy on Halloween.  My characters were nearly level 70 by the time I reached the final boss, and I’d only been in the early to mid 20s when I’d started it.  You could easily treat the final chapter of The After Years as its own game, where the object is to travel further and further into the dungeon, going deeper and leveling up and raiding treasure chests as you go.  It’d be like Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter in the opposite direction.

This is a game that is hard for me to justify playing.  On the one hand, it’s a new story set in a familiar world and does the first game justice, even though it heavily references what came before.  On the other hand, there’s not enough new material present to make the game worth 3700 Points when the original only costs 800.  It also presumes to retcon the true purpose of the crystals in the first six games and hints that they all take place in the same universe.  Now there’s a spoiler for you.  But seriously, the game isn’t worth the points required to purchase it through WiiWare.  If you’re curious about the game, you should probably pick up the PSP version instead, since it comes with the original Final Fantasy IV and still costs less.

Images found at RPGFan.com