Impromptu RPG Review: Final Fantasy 4: The After Years
I’m surprised it took this long. While sequels are insanely popular for current generation video games, most of the early Squaresoft games have been exempted from anything other than re-written scripts on the DS and Game Boy Advance. Final Fantasy 4 was one of the first video games I ever played and grew up with, and having completed it around 20-30 times, I feel qualified in calling myself a devotee to it.
This Wiiware sequel straddles the lines perfectly for already adoring fans, but as a stand-alone game, it’s flawed and frustrating. I think you need to have a very healthy appreciation to the original game to truly love this one.
The After Years starts out with interesting terms. As a game ported over from Japanese cell phones, it is intended to be played as a series of several smaller stories, with one character serving as the main focal point of each of them. You can ignore whichever stories you want, asides from the last two, but you lose a lot of the backstory and many of the best items in the game (and a few of the characters) are only obtainable if you complete the tales. Asides from the main game, there aren’t really a lot of new areas. Trekking your way through the Watery Pass for the fourth time when it was an annoying training ground to begin with isn’t a lot of fun. Nostalgia dulls the pain, but there definitely could’ve been more thought put into a few of the tales.
I really don’t think this gamble pays off. For a sequel that kept so much of the original game in mind, the cyclical nature of all the individual tales coming together gets annoying. You fill in lots of details in the tales, but there’s so much repetition that by about the fourth separate offspring of the main arc, you already know where everything is going and just want the story to climax. Another problem that these terms create is that you never get a full chance to explore anything. It’s sort of a JRPG standard that at some point you’re able to travel anywhere in the world easily and easter eggs can be found. In this case, you end up seeing the whole world by virtue of each different tale, but you never get the feeling of complete freedom. Even in The Gathering, where the focal point is the exploration and accumulation of Summons and you can dig into various small spots for treasure, so many areas are blocked off that instead of freedom you feel like you’re running down a checklist.
The story itself gets about a C-. The main story, which could be summarized as “Cecil’s son grows up and Kain gets redemption,” is pretty solid. Out of the seven tales, Palom’s, Rydia’s, and the Lunarians are all credits to backstory and do a great job of keeping things interesting. Three of the other tales revolve around the exact same premise, which is: “wow something fishy is up, the king better go check it out.” Finally, there is Porom’s tale, or as it should’ve been called, Palom’s second tale. Those last four could’ve been whittled down into one story or added onto the existing stories pretty easily without losing too much. That said, through The Gathering, the story is pretty well executed and enjoyable, if predictable. The last chapter is completely convoluted, and as fun as it is to play through, I’d like to pretend that the last six or seven floors of the last dungeon never happened.
The gameplay is what gives the game most of it’s appeal. It’s a very dedicated recreation of the original, and I’m extremely happy that it was created as a 2D game with enhanced sprites. Many reviews that I’ve read have complained about this; I have my share of games that I dig with greater graphics, but I think it’s terrific that they stayed true to the original schemes and didn’t take the DS route where everything was turned to 3D for no real reason. If there is one nitpick to be found, it’s probably that there seems to be an extraordinary amount of back attacks. Normally, that’s not such a bad flaw, but given the extreme nature of some of the parties in the scenarios, it can be downright frustrating. There’s nothing like having to go back to the start of an area because your two mage party got back attacked and took 5 swings from guys hitting for 1/3rd of their HP.
They also stole Chrono Trigger’s idea and had characters learn team-up attacks. While these are fun to watch, their main purpose is to further widen the gap between the playable characters and the non-playable characters. Some better game design would have helped make the weaker characters an interesting choice based on their teamup attacks. Instead, the powerful characters get powerful teamups and the weak characters get brooms. Cid and Harley are left to sweep the Lunar Whale during the last chapter, because they have no business being on the field at any point.
The tales also each have an added bonus dungeon, where playthroughs can result in additional excellent equipment or treasure for a successful completion of it. They’re interesting at the beginning, but too much of the best treasure is stuck at the very end in a cycle so that you must complete the dungeons multiple times to get all the best stuff. By about try 5 or 6, it stops being fun and starts being busy work. Necessary busy work due to the staggered release of the tales, so that players had something to do while waiting for the next chapters to be released, but busy work nonetheless.
One real letdown about the ending chapter is that they didn’t make better use of all the characters. The developers created a couple of grand dungeons with an enormous amount of boss battles, but it’s also extremely linear and other than a few separate examples I won’t spoil, you don’t gain any advantage based on who is in the party. While they were stealing things from other successful Super Nintendo RPG’s, they could’ve looked at the multi-party dungeons that Final Fantasy 6 used so well and found a way to incorporate those so that more strategy was involved in the ending chapter.
It was a pleasure for me to play though this game personally, as someone who worshiped the original Final Fantasy 4. But in a vacuum, this game is probably going to be a letdown to anyone who doesn’t share the same feelings. There just isn’t enough depth in either the story or the strategy to make it a complete joy. If you don’t have any nostalgia for the original, you can probably find a better use of 30 hours.
I remember playing this game back when I was a kid too. But I played the japanese version. I understood what was going on but a lot of things were unclear to me. After reading this, it all makes sense now.
“They also stole Chrono Trigger’s idea and had characters learn team-up attacks.”
They sure did. But they weren’t as creative with it as Suikoden was.
Dang. Thanks for the nostalgic trip Rivers! All I wanna do now is go home and play Chrono Trigger and Suikoden.
I have actually never set foot in Suikoden. I wish I could but PS emulators are rocket science to setup.