I'm. Finally. Done. I finished Final Fantasy IV: The After Years yesterday, and my two plus month odyssey through the world of Cecil and company is finally done. The game has a convoluted history to it. It originally came out in Japan as a mobile game, and was later ported and localized to America as episodic content for the Wii as part of its digital only WiiWare line. I played this one on the Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection compilation released on PSP a few years after that. The game follows the adventures of Cecil and his friends, along with a few new characters, in the years following Final Fantasy IV.
The game uses the basic structure of Final Fantasy IV's mechanics, and reuses a lot of the assets from the game. The two new additions are the moon system, which alters the relative strengths of four classes of abilities (attack, white magic, black magic, and skills-think jump, pray, etc.) depending on the cycle of the moon. As you complete battles, or whenever you rest, the moon will advance a cycle, altering the strength of your party. So if you have a predominantly physical party, battling will be extremely difficult during the phase in which physical attacks are weakest. Conversely, the moon cycles will also affect the strength of your opponents, meaning that picking the appropriate time for fighting a given boss is important. The other big change is the inclusion of band attacks, which are more or less like double techs in Chrono Trigger, only there are way more of them due to the increased number of playable characters. The big difference is that rather than learning them organically once you have the requisite abilities for both characters, you now have to experiment by testing out combinations of abilities, and seeing if they result in a band. From that point on, the band will be accessible, and costs MP to perform.
The moon cycles idea was a really cool one, but was ultimately botched. Basically it ended up being a mechanic which you mostly built a balanced party, ignored, and dealt with along the way, altering the cycle of the moon only when faced with a really tough boss. There were just so many directions they could have gone with this idea that I really regret. They could have made it a system a bit like Final Fantasy X, in which party members could freely pop into and out of battle to take advantage of a particular strength or weakness of enemies as well as the phase of the moon. Or they could have made it so that the phase of the moon alters the tides, changing the landscape of the world and unlocking new areas to explore depending on the level of the water. Or they could have included a new ability that allowed you to skip a turn, but manipulate the cycle of the moon to turn a battle. Take, for example, a boss structure like in Final Fantasy XIII, when bosses are changing up their weaknesses and strengths to fit a more physical or magical style. You could have used this mechanic to allow you to attack strategically, weaving the moon's phases to take advantage of your foe's current status. But it ends up just languishing and being an irritant when your physical attacks do 1/2 as much damage, making random encounters take forever, or when you fight off against that super powerful magical boss and he one shots you to start the level. I liked the idea, but, like most of this game, the execution was very lazy and adhered too closely to the structure of Final Fantasy IV.
The bands didn't really strike me as very fun, because it basically required you just experimenting constantly to find new ones. I frankly didn't do this at all, and never used bands. If you're into mining games for lots of possibilities, I guess this could be fun, as there are hundreds of bands to discover.
Speaking of lazy, holy heck this story. Stop me if you've heard this one before. There's a moon that's ominous. Kain isn't acting like himself. The king of Baron isn't acting like himself. Baron's being overly aggressive towards its enemies. Someone gets desert fever and needs a sand pearl. A character must shed his dark past to tap into his holy powers. We need to travel to the moon to save the day. We have to get through the magnetic cavern without our metallic gear. And this is just a small taste of the amount of narrative that's rehashed from the previous game.
This would all be okish fan service if everything else about the game wasn't exactly the same. There are very few new enemy sprites. The world map is basically identical. There are only a handful of new locations to explore. Basically every boss you fight throughout the game is just another boss, recolored, from Final Fantasy IV.
The basic structure of the game, as adapted from the episodic WiiWare, is that you have to go through each character's story first, and then you enjoy (maybe) a longer story with all of the characters together. The first part is definitely the best part of the game, as at least you have some dungeons to explore, can get some new (sort of) narrative, and enjoy seeing what your favorite characters are up to. But they make you sit through adventures with even the most marginal and useless characters from Final Fantasy IV. There are a ton of dull tales with everyone's favorite spoony bard, Edward, traversing a mountain alone with a white mage, and a whole lot of other hair pulling experiences. The new characters are all completely dull, do nothing superior to the original cast, and are a complete waste of time, except for Cecil's son Ceodore, who I actually liked quite a bit.
Somehow, the second half of the game is even worse. At least there is some original content in the first half, but the second half is literally just a single 20 floor dungeon that forces you to fight nearly every boss from Final Fantasy IV, along with an elite selection of bosses from Final Fantasy I, Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy V, and Final Fantasy VI. Always wanted to face your team of heroes from Final Fantasy IV against Ultros? No? TOO BAD. This game should have been renamed Final Fantasy IV: Boss Rush Mode. It would have been significantly more accurate.
The music is fantastic, although there are no new tunes that aren't in the original game that I can detect. Uematsu can do no wrong, so move along.
The graphics are the same redone style as in the rest of the collection, although the WiiWare and mobile game versions had graphics closer to the original. I think I prefer the original, but it's not a huge deal.
This is a cash in, plain and simple. It's just narrow minded greed, and no one should make the mistake I did and buy it. At least I didn't go for the WiiWare version, which would have cost an astounding $34. It makes me shake to think that buying it on the Wii was once a goal. I got it the PSP version for a much more reasonable price, and at least got a copy of the tremendous Final Fantasy IV as part of the bargain. Please don't play this game. I'll give it a 3/10, even worse than the previous worst game of the reTROview universe, Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light. For one of my favorite game series ever, Final Fantasy is really littering the bottom of my review distribution at the moment.
Anyway, I had to pick up a game that was going to make me happy for my next handheld experience, as this one annoyed me even more than the bomb I mention in the last paragraph and the dreadful Project X Zone. So I went with a beloved genre that I haven't visited in a while, and early returns are a tremendous amount of joy. Here's a teaser.
-TRO
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