OMG Nintendo

Square-Enix usually puts a lot more effort into its WiiWare releases than a lot of other publishers… but maybe not this time. Final Fantasy: The After Years is a port of a cell phone game released in Japan early last year. Just as on WiiWare, the port was released in a series of small, price gougey DLC chapters. On WiiWare, a player is looking at 3700 points to buy all of the game’s chapters. This week’s 800 point release is really a double-sized chapter set to be followed by seven 300-point chapters that focus on various members of the FFIV cast, with another 800-point double-size chapter finishing off the story. 

If this week’s chapter is anything to judge by, the double-size chapters offer roughly 4-8 hours of gameplay (depending on how quick you are), while the 300-point chapters offer about 2-4 hours. So in all, the usual 20-40 hours of gameplay you’d expect from a Square-Enix game on DS. Every chapter even has “Challenge Dungeons” similar to the ones from the GBA FF remakes to allow for extra dungeon crawling between releases. What is so baffling about Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is that it isn’t a portabl game, really. The graphics are blurry and lose some charm on a television screen, especially when you realize the game’s localized text is running at a higher resolution than the graphics.

Likewise, the battles -- rightfully so -- feel far more tuned for the needs of portable play than a console RPG experience. Much more like the recent DS remake of Final Fantasy IV by Matrix than the SNES original, random encounters in After Years are very lethal. A player is meant to resolve them quickly, by using individual character abilities and the game’s new systems to apply overwhelming force to a monster’s weak points… or just bash it to death. The big new systems for After Years are Bands, team-ups triggered when a pair of characters input the correct commands together at the same time, and the Lunar Cycle, a system where the phase of the moon globally increases or decreases Attacks, White Magic, Black Magic, or Special Attacks. 

In theory, both are interesting. In practice, both are terribly unbalancing. Most Bands require only trivial MP to cast and do overwhelming damage either to individual enemies or entire groups. There’s little reason not to stock up on Ethers and use them constantly. Likewise, the Lunar Cycle is easily controlled by using Tents to always set the global bonuses and disadvantages to whatever suits your current party and situation. Whether or not the moon phase is favorite to you makes a huge difference in how combat goes, especially boss battles, at points seeming more influential even than your combat tactics. It removes a certain amount of satisfaction from the big difficult wins, especially since using 2 or 3 Tents at a time to manipulate the phase of the moon just feels silly. 

Now, the game’s story… well, it depends on how much you like the original FFIV. If you haven’t played that game, the plot in After Years will be utterly incomprehensible to you and you really just shouldn't bother with this. If you are a fan of FFIV, especially its SNES or GBA incarnations, then this game is a walk down memory lane that will truly delight you (even if, as in my case, it makes you feel really old). Cecil and Rosa’s son Ceodore is nominally the main character, but he’s quickly upstaged by returning cast members. After Years is essentially the sequel to the sprawling high fantasy novel that the original game was, reveling in every pulpy trope of the genre with a gleeful abandon. I can’t say I didn’t play this game through purely for plot and characters or that I didn’t love every stupid minute of it. 

So Final Fantasy IV: The After Years receives a qualified recommendation, even at its hefty price point. This game shouldn’t be WiiWare, but DSiWare or just a damned DS game. Nothing about it will entertain someone who isn’t already a fan of FFIV and its cast of characters. For those of us who are big FFIV fans, though, this game is close to being a must-buy. Seeing where the characters go after that last ending cutscene is truly rewarding, in part because it’s clear that the developers of this game had to love FFIV’s world, story, and characters as much as any other fan ever did. Where most Square-Enix sequels feel like corporate cash-ins first and attempts to entertain second, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years manages to come off as a very sincere labor of love… even if it is, at heart, a $37 cell phone port with crude sixteen-bit graphics as a selling point.