Forum - View topic

NEWS: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years Heads to Steam

This game is just so baffling to me.

My wife (the world's biggest FF4 fan) has played through the Wii, PSP, and Android versions of The After Years, and I've played a few chapters and watched significant chunks of it. There are a lot of dungeons copied wholesale from the original, almost all of the music is from the original, and even the direction of many individual scenes closely mimics FF4 (particularly when dealing with any of the original cast's children).

But at the same time there's a lot of original sprite work and animation (and 3D models in the Android/PC versions), a few new dungeons, and new enemies and new AI routines for old enemies. The tiny bit of new music is pretty good, and the plot has a couple of interesting elements inserted between the flashbacks. There's quite a bit of writing, and a few of the scenes between characters are pretty interesting. Some of the new gameplay elements, particularly band attacks, are pretty cool, but completely unnecessary. There are obviously a few people who put a lot of work into this game, and it feels like they tried to make it good, but were held back by a desire to mimic the original and also make this game as grindy as possible.

The latter at least has an explanation; this was originally released in serial installments for cell phones in Japan, and the individual chapters were made repetitive and grindy so that players would spend many hours playing each chapter until the next one came out rather than rushing through it quickly. It's a shame that the remakes of it didn't really take any steps to clean up the game and make it more enjoyable, although the Android (and presumably PC) versions at least cut out the insufferable challenge dungeons at the end of each chapter and a huge number of bosses in the final chapter. I know some people are upset that they cut out "content," but trust me, you're better off. You had to repeat the challenge dungeons dozens of times to get decent equipment and levels for the last chapter, and the last dungeon previously had the longest boss slog of any game ever made.

I guess I'm mostly just confused by how at no point did any of the developers step back, look at what they'd made, and say, "Guys, why don't we use our talents to make this game good?"

I can recommend this game to voracious FF4 fans who desire to consume everything FF4-related, but otherwise you're better off without it. And even if you are an FF4 fan, it might just leave you feeling frustrated.