The After

After I finished Final Fantasy IV for Android, I decided it was high time I finally played through Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. I think it was a game worth playing as a longtime fan of FFIV and its characters, but it's definitely an immensely flawed experience that smacks of some combination of laziness and/or a low budget. I hesitate to call The After Years a cash-in but I may grudgingly have to admit its true, especially as it pertains to the game's original episodic release. It is a game in which the player is tasked with taking control of many of Final Fantasy IV's various heroes, as well as a number of new characters. In these characters' individual chapters, they traverse two or three repetitive dungeons, backtrack, and get perspective on an unfolding threat.

In some cases, this sort of gameplay is not too bad. Palom's chapter, in which he takes on an apprentice from Troia named Leonora, is sweet and interesting. The prologue chapter featuring Cecil's son Ceodore is cool because it introduces the concept of Bands (the game's combination attacks system) and a mysterious hooded man who is clearly Kain. Edward's chapter is unforgivably bad as it tasks the player with traveling through the waterway north of Kaipo probably three times with a party consisting of Edward only. If that wasn't frustrating enough, the chapter introduces only one other character (by the name of Harley) who is quite possibly even more useless than Edward himself.

An uncomfortably high percentage of these early chapters are an absolute slog to play through, but I felt the game redeemed itself somewhat by the time you reach the game's final chapter--The Crystals. It is at this point that all of the game's characters come together to combat the ultimate threat. After an introductory period in which the party is static, the player is finally given free reign over which characters can be placed into the active party. With a roster of characters pushing 30, this really opens up the player's options for party compositions. There are fewer things I enjoy more than composing parties of characters, be they predefined or not. Bands add a huge amount of variety to these team compositions, as all of the game's characters can perform unique combination attacks with 2-4 of the game's other characters.

The final dungeon consists of parts of the original game's Lunar Subterrane spliced with sections of other FFIV dungeons. Bosses like Baigan, Lugae, and the Magus Sisters return once more and must be fought to advance further into the dungeon. I would say the dungeon took me anywhere from ten to fifteen hours to get through, but I really enjoyed doing so. There weren't puzzles or much in the way of interesting design, admittedly, but fighting my way through all those classic bosses was a real treat in a way I will freely identify as fanservice. I've heard that 2D versions of the game also include bosses from other games in the Final Fantasy series--but the 3D version instead includes the horrifyingly difficult Lunar Dragon, Leviathan, and Bahamut.

I think The After Years had a lot of potential as a game. I love almost any game that features characters that adventure separately until reuniting much later in the game. I like many of the updated character designs, particularly Yang and Golbez. New characters like Leonora and Ursula are really interesting, whereas others (Calca and Brina) are pretty terrible. The gameplay is virtually identical to FFIV, apart from the excellent Band system--which may have been the primary thing keeping me playing. I'm glad that I played (and finished!) the game, but it has a lot of problems and I doubt I'd recommend it to most.