Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

(Disclaimer: If you haven't played Final Fantasy IV and RPGs just aren't your thing, you're going to want to skip out on reading this lengthy, rambling, barely coherent recap. Trust me.) Alright. Let me start out by saying how much I loved Final Fantasy IV. I first played the game on a Super Nintendo system when I was just five years old. I didn't even have any idea what a "role-playing game" was. I just knew Final Fantasy IV was totally unlike the simple platformers I'd played up to that point in my life. I never actually beat the game until something like eighth grade, but that's hardly relevant. It was never my favorite Final Fantasy, but it was such a monumental game in my childhood and adolescence nonetheless. So important was it, that its re-release on the DS with updated graphics a year and a half ago was the biggest reason I even purchased a DS at all. So when I heard, around the same time, that Square was making an episode-based sequel series, called The After Years, all I wanted was for it to come out in America. (It had been exclusive to Japanese cell phones for a while.) It was a foregone conclusion, then, that I would purchase the WiiWare title and every last kilobyte of downloadable content. And I did. And what follows is a lengthy, rambling, barely coherent recap of the game and its many chapters. The game is set 17 years later than its predecessor. The main story and conflict are complex and confusing right off the bat. Rydia's summons have all gone missing. Meanwhile, a second moon has appeared in the sky. Monsters have increased in number and aggressiveness. And a mysterious girl is wandering around the world taking crystals by force. Cecil starts going bonkers, much like the old King of Baron in the first game, and to an extent the game borrows plot elements heavily from FFIV. An unnamed cloaked figure plays a key role early on in stopping the alliance between Cecil and the mysterious girl, and even though the revealing of this man's identity is pretty cool, it's extremely (even embarrassingly) obvious who he is pretty much immediately. I won't spoil anything, but, I mean, come on. In fact, there's a second unnamed man who comes to the aid of the party. His identity, too, is obvious, but at least this time around the game doesn't pretend it isn't; he's revealed to be Golbez very quickly. At any rate, this "main story" comprises a prologue and two chapters: "Ceodore's Tale" and "Kain's Tale." It was a blast. Quick, nostalgic, and entertaining. Next came the downloadable content chapters; these were very much optional, and for a while last summer I almost considered thinking of them as separate games in my backlog. But after each one turned out to be brief (and for the most part boring) I figured I'd refrain from slapping you readers in the face with constant mundane After Years updates. Of course, that just means that now I need to go over each tale briefly. First up was "Rydia's Tale," in which your party consisted of Rydia, Luca (extant but unplayable in IV), and Luca's animate dolls Calca and Brina (bosses from IV, and particularly annoying ones at that). Rydia's Tale essentially covers the entirety of the underground from the Dwarven Castle to the Sealed Cave. It was entertaining and enjoyable. Next up was "Yang's Tale." If Final Fantasy IV had a "sixth man" (the party size is capped at five at all times), it was certainly Yang the martial arts master. In Yang's Tale, you mostly play as his daughter, Ursula (a newcomer) and explore a meteorite crash site. It's shorter and less exciting than Rydia's Tale, but was still a decent experience. Next came "Palom's Tale," and let me be honest with you - this one flat out sucked. Palom and Porom, of course, were the annoying twin kids that joined up with Cecil in the first game. They were always a package deal - why did After Years have to split them up this time around and give each their own chapter? Anyway, in this one Palom begrudgingly trains a girl named Leonora. You climb up a tower and then climb back down it. Boring! Awful! And what doesn't help is that your only characters are mages. No one can damage enemies without using magic, which drains MP and takes time to use. Tedious as fuck, this one was. It ends in the Dark Elf's Cave. We next check in with "Edge's Tale," in which four new characters with long Japanese names are introduced. This one was kind of cool. Edge sends each ninja out on a rogue assignment, and you get to play as each one individually for a period of time before all five ninjas meet up again in the Tower of Babil. This was one of the better chapters, but honestly, that's not saying much. Next came "Porom's Tale," and this was the one that really irritated me and put me over the line between "this game hasn't been everything I wanted it to be, but it is still fun" and "this game hasn't been everything I wanted it to be, and now it's just annoying." I don't even remember what Porom's tale consisted of, but Rydia and Palom were heavily involved even though each had their own tale earlier. Oh yeah, and Kain was in there too briefly. What the fuck? Another tale of mages meant another tale with long battles and an inability to do much damage. Also, part of it was told as a flashback. Don't ask me why. The penultimate optional chapter was "Edward's Tale" and it was the worst one of them all. Anyone who played even just the beginning parts of Final Fantasy IV knows what an annoying, awful character Edward was. Remember how I played the game when I was five years old? I didn't even know what a "fag" was, but I knew Edward was one. He fights with a harp and incessantly laments everything. Just awful. His tale introduced Harley, his secretary, as a playable character. Both were terrible. Nothing about this tale was fun or interesting at all. In fact, I fled from most battles just to get it over with as soon as possible. It should come as no surprise that Harley and Edward ended up as my two least-leveled-up characters, by a long shot, at game's end. Finally, we come to "The Lunarians' Tale," which thankfully didn't suck ass like the last pair of tales. In this one, you're Golbez (and briefly FuSoYa), and you're on the fucking moon. (Well, one of two moons... but more on that later.) Golbez starts out way stronger than any other titular character, but the trade-off is that he faces tougher opponents. He's also only capable of using black magic and physical attacks, so his only source of healing are items like potions which can only be found in treasure chests since there are no item shops on the moon. Naturally. Golbez ends up fleeing the moon as it begins to crumble, heading for the planet, on a spaceship shaped like a flying whale. (This wouldn't even sound remotely absurd if you played the original game.) And thus conclude the downloadable content chapters. Were they fun? Some were. Were they tedious? Some were. Were they a waste of money? For a huge fan such as myself, no, not at all - but I'd never recommend them to anyone for any reason other than a feeling of obligation to do so. We're left now heading into the final two chapters. At this point, I expected I was mostly done with the game; nine chapters had been played and beaten, and only two remained. I couldn't have been more wrong. The second-to-last chapter revolved around Rydia going around the world with Edge, Golbez, and Luca trying to regain her summons. I'm pretty sure it was strictly optional, for the most part, to regain any summons at all. But a Rydia with no summons is a piece of shit, so I made sure to regain each and every summon. It was a bit ime-consuming, but certainly worth it. Finally, it was time to play the final chapter. At this point, believe it or not, you're only about halfway through the game. Yeah, it's that ridiculous. It's "back to the moon" time to confront the mysterious girl, save Cecil, and see if you can stop a second, new moon from hurtling into the planet. Typical. Suffice it to say, the first moon dungeon is thirteen floors deep, and each floor took me roughly forty-five minutes to venture through. My characters were a tad inexperienced and many fights took a lot out of me. Also, there were eight boss fights in the moon dungeon, each of which was a previous memorable boss from Final Fantasy IV. I mean, these were boss fights for the sake of boss fights. Hadn't I already killed all of these people and creatures? And what were they all doing together on the moon? Never mind their resurrections - what the hell was going on? Still, I managed to slash and burn my way through these bosses with little difficulty (I had all the strategies down pat, having played through FFIV like half a dozen times.) Awaiting me on the final floor of the dungeon was Dark Cecil (yawn). Of course, only by killing him could I save real Cecil's soul. Apparently, depending on your party when you initiate this battle, you usually lose Golbez forever afterward as he dies to save Cecil. This would have been a just and poetic end to his redemption song, and the story would have been a lot better had I let him die. But fuck that - he was my sixth best guy at the time! I sacrificed a good story for a strong party, and I don't regret that choice. Now, after this very climactic (but scripted and straightforward) battle, the mysterious girl appears and invites you down into the depths of another dungeon. And that dungeon was like the first lunar dungeon on steroids and crack. Thirty floors! Sixteen mandatory boss fights! And the worst part of it was that these sixteen bosses were all taken from other Final Fantasy games. Come on. There's no reason to suddenly mix up the Final Fantasy multiverse. Sure, it was "fun" to see FFVI's Ultros the comedic squidlike thing once again, but utterly random and ridiculous. How did he get to this second moon? And some of the bosses chosen were real head-scratchers. The Phantom Train? Really? They could not have chosen a boss more out of context than that one. But I digress. After going balls to the wall on these floors and bosses for like a week (not the best way to start a new semester), I finally made it to the twenty-fifth floor where I had to fight the mysterious girl alongside Rydia's final (and best) summon: Bahamut. This thing kicked my ass. Several times. Only two days ago, I was almost totally disheartened and considered putting the game down for a while. But no. I was so close to finishing it! If I had to grind, so be it. So, grind I did. It actually wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be. I put in about three hours or so last night while listening to songs and podcasts, and that was all it took; today I beat the girl and the dragon on my first attempt and moved on to challenge the final boss. I'll give credit where credit is due - even though this game was for the most part absurd, things were actually tied together somewhat well in the brief dialogue that preceded the fight. The final boss was known as the "Creator" and he traveled around on his moon to various planets as he tried to document various evolutions of life. By connecting the scattered dots with leaps of faith, I suppose one could fathom that all of the Final Fantasy I, II, III, V, and VI bosses on this final moon dungeon were actually just science experiments made by the Creator after he had traveled to the different worlds of the Final Fantasy series. In a strange way, things were tied together unlike ever before, and a very lose continuity between the various games in the franchise was established at long last. The mysterious girl was his creation as well, but I won't spoil the somewhat shocking twist to her story's conclusion. At any rate, the final boss was four stages long and though I felt a bit unprepared I managed to beat it on my first attempt. Finally, I was done. So what did I take away from The After Years? Did it live up to the precedent set by the original? It's tough to give a straight answer. If you look at After Years as three separate entities - the main story in the beginning, the various character-based chapters, and the pair of lunar dungeons at the end - you can see that it was really all over the place. "Wow, this is exactly what I expected and wanted" gave way to "This is tedious and boring" which ultimately became "This is super-tedious, but I'm secretly having more fun with it than I'll admit to." It was certainly a bizarre sequel but in a number of ways it went above and beyond the original. Bigger, longer, more epic. Fundamental to the game were its SNES graphics charm and its loyalty to the characters and settings of FFIV. It sure was a beast of a game, but it isn't one I regret playing. I can't dissuade anyone else enough from doing so, though. I suppose what it all boils down to is your connection to the first game. If you never played it, or did but can't remember much of it, then this is not a game for you at all. At the very least, don't purchase all the bonus chapters. They were mostly pretty shitty. But if you're like me - a staunch fan of Final Fantasy IV - or, if you're just a glutton for punishment, then you should absolutely play this game for all it's worth. As for me, I may take some time off from logging for a little while. I'll still be going at it, but only in my spare time. At least for now. I need to catch up on some schoolwork (already) and some sleep (yeah, already), and I just can't dedicate the same amount of time as I'd like to be able to. Expect more sporadic updates from me, at least until I get a feel for this semester and my workload. Anyway, fellow Back-Blogged contributors - keep on loggin'.