r/FinalFantasyIV

So, we ranked all the Tales of The After Years. Here’s what they looked like:

S: Lunarians/Golbez , True Moon
A: Palom, Kain, The Gathering, The Planet Eater
B: Ceodore, Edge, Edward, Rydia
C: Yang
F: Porom

So now, after all these posts, I’m curious. As a whole, how do you feel about Final Fantasy 4: The After Years?

Me personally, I do really like the game. I like the world of FF4, I really like the bands, getting to play as Golbez is great, a chunk of the new characters were interesting, I like the Mysterious Girls, I like that certain returning characters got more development like Edward and Kain and I like how the tale system means I can play it more in chunks then most RPGs.

That’s not to say I’m blind to its issues. The story repeating what happened in FF4 is very annoying at times. Edward going to the Antlion Den for a pearl again, the main villain being after the Crystals again, climbing the mountain with Yang and fighting the big bomb again, going to the sealed cave again (these last two also happened in the Interlude too), etc.
A number of the new characters are somewhat half baked in terms of story (Ursula), personality (Ceodore), gameplay (Harley) or all 3 (the Eblan Ninjas and the Dolls).
And as a sequel to FF4, it doesn’t really push it that much forward as either a game or a story outside of a couple things like Kain and Golbez.

It’s not a bad game by any means but it could have been a lot better. I’d probably still give it a B (which would be great for most series but for a series with as many S and A rank games, it does look worse by comparison).

Have the After Years on my mind recently due to replaying it for a dumb rewrite thing I’m doing for it. I know the game in general isn’t liked but I’m curious about how people feel about the individual Tales so I’m doing a little tierlist thing for fun.

Current rankings are like this:
S: Lunarians/Golbez , True Moon
A: Palom, Kain, The Gathering
B: Ceodore, Edge, Edward, Rydia
C: Yang
F: Porom

And now we come to the final end to this Tale: The Planet Eater.

This is very different between versions. In the 3D version, it’s a straight forward dungeon with you going down a 13 floor dungeon with you facing the Mysterious Girl early on before going deep and facing the final boss and maybe some superbosses in the Lunar Eidolons. In the 2D version, the dungeon is 29 floors long. Where does the extra length come from? In the 2D version, there are 20 additional optional bosses coming from all the other 2D final fantasy games:
FF1: Lich, Marilith, Kraken, Tiamet.
FF2: Asteroth, Beelzebub, King Behemoth, Iron Giant.
FF3: Cerberus, Ahriman, Echidna, Twinhead Dragon.
FF5: Gilgamesh, Atomos, Omega, Shinryu/Nova Dragon.
FF6: Ghost Train, Orthros, Deathgaze, Ultima Weapon.
Theres also an additional super boss in the Lost Babil (which is the only part of this Tale where you split your whole party).

And now for my controversial option: I kind of prefer the 3D version of this area. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool to see all these previous bosses and everything as well as seeing the characters reactions to them but I feel like it makes the dungeon too long, I’m not the hugest fan of the selection for some of them and I don’t like that all the superbosses are just from 5 and 6.

Story and character wise, this last part is very simple since most of that was done in the previous part. There are still some save point conversations primarily involving Cecil like him and Golbez, him and Kain, him and the other kings, etc. And all the bosses still have dialogue either before, after or both as well as getting the crystals back and meeting the baby Cuore.

Next let’s discuss the meat and potatoes of this final part: the Maenads and The Creator. The Mysterious Girls/Maenads have overall been a cool set of villains throughout the game. While they don’t really have much in terms of personality (and Golbez is obviously better), they were effective villains in the story that only really lost because Golbez got involved. The final boss with her and Bahamut is really hard but it’s a good boss. I don’t really get why they helped us at the end because they didn’t really seem to care about each other earlier but it’s still nice.

As for the Creator, he’s unfortunately one of those villains that only really shows up at the last minute without a lot of buildup like Necron and Cloud of Darknes. But I do prefer him over them since he does make somewhat sense as the Skynet to the Maenad’s Terminators. I even prefer him over Zemus from the original 4 since he was just kind of a big thing of nothing while the Creator at least has a decent backstory and goal. His fight is ok. Nothing special but he does tie with Kefka and Ultimecia with having the most phases of a final boss at 4 and I like the design of them all (except the final form in the 3D version where it looks like a weird fish). I like the chase thing you have with him at the end.

The ending isn’t anything special with it mainly just being a zoom in on how everyone is doing now. The only part I particularly liked was with Rydia and her new child meeting the Eidolon King and Queen.

And that’s it. Overall, I’d give this Tale an A or B.

Have the After Years on my mind recently due to replaying it for a dumb rewrite thing I’m doing for it. I know the game in general isn’t liked but I’m curious about how people feel about the individual Tales so I’m doing a little tierlist thing for fun.

Current rankings are like this:
S: Lunarians/Golbez
A: Palom, Kain, The Gathering
B: Ceodore, Edge, Edward, Rydia
C: Yang
F: Porom

A couple of people brought up maybe doing these in 3rds instead of halves and I figured sure, i can drag this out for another bit.

Today it’s the second of the final posts covering the second part of The Crystals: The True Moon.

Here we go to the new Moon with our party to try to stop it from colliding with the planet. If I had a nickel for everytime a FF villains big plan involved dropping a moon onto a planet, I’d have 3 nickels (this, 13 and 13-2).

I haven’t brought up the 2D and 3D versions too much since the differences between them weren’t that relevant to me. The only interesting ones were the removal of the challenge dungeons, the removal of the developer room and Izayoi being really good with a bow.

But there are some interesting differences between the 2D and 3D versions of the final tale.

1: You’ll always have the max 22 characters in the 3D version. The Eblan ninjas can’t die in Edge’s tale, you’ll get the things needed to fix the dolls in a manditory encounter and you have to enter all the data for the Tale.

2: You can buy some really good weapons and armor in the 3D version. Since the challenge dungeons aren’t in this version, all the weapons and armor you could get in them are instead sold by the hummingway outside the Lunar Whale. In the 2D version you can only buy Shurikens and Manji Shurikens.

3: You can return to the Blue Planet in the 3D version using the Crystal in the Lunar Whale. There’s not really anything to do aside from grabbing any items you missed as well as the Small Tails but it does make leveling underleveled characters a bit easier since you don’t have to deal with the moons enemies.

4: The layout. Most of the floors are alike being a slight remix of either the Lunar Subterranean or the giant of babel but the 2D version has unique floors for 3 of the 4 Archfiends and the eidolons while the 3d version has copies of the lunar tunnels, lair of the father and the areas where the bosses were originally fought.

5: You can camp on the lunar surface in the 3d version. Not that important but saves you trips down to the healing parts of the Lunar Whale.

That’s all the ones off the top of my head that I remember. Inform me if I forgot any.

Anyway, start of the final dungeon and it’s certainly an interesting one.

The dungeon itself isn’t too interesting design wise (like I said, most of it is just a slightly remixed version of the lunar subterranean and even the unique floors don’t really have any unique gimmicks or anything) but it is interesting in that it is basically a boss rush. There are 12 bosses in just this part of the dungeon all coming back from FF4. The four elemental Archfiends, 4 bosses associated with them in Baigan, The Magus Sisters, Dr Lugae and his Experiment and Edge’s Parents, the Giant’s CPU, Asura, Leviathan and Cecil’s Dark Half, The Dark Knight.

Something I really like about this and the next section is how it deals with the characterisation specifically through the boss encounters and the save point conversations. All the characters have unique dialogue with each of the bosses before and after the battle (and sometimes at the beginning and end of the battle). There are also what I like to call Save Point Conversations where at a good chunk of the Save Points in this dungeon, the game will prompt you to rest and the first time you do it, you’ll get a cutscene of the characters just talking. They’re all great with my favourites being Ceodore properly meeting his uncle and Palom and Porom reconnecting.

And now my few greviences:

You know how the previous part was a bit of an FF6 with you getting back your team? Well they should have ripped it off again with its final dungeon because by god is this missed potential. Max 22 characters and you only bring 5. Yes you can change the party at certain points but there’s not really that much of a reason to outside of seeing the boss dialogue or challenging yourself. My guess as to why this is because the number of characters you can have at this point can vary wildly. I’m not sure what the minimum number of characters is (my guess is 13) but this is still annoying.

Next complaint is that there is nothing on the moon except the final dungeon. Nothing. No optional content or anything, just the dungeon.

Also, Cecil is useless in this section due to story reasons. Not a fan but at least it makes sense.

My only other issue comes from the 2D version. Specifically how you can’t go back to the Blue Planet so levelling up any of the under level characters you have will have to be done on the moon itself which isn’t easy considering the number of powerful enemies here and if you missed something on the planet like the small tails, you have to restart the Tale all over again.

Oh yeah. And lastly, if you bring the wrong party to the Dark Knight fight, Golbez dies! F tier for that one.

Seriously though, I do love this part of the tale. It’s cool seeing all the bosses back again and the characterisation is honestly great. I’d give it an S personally.