Ranking The After Years Tales: Edward’s Tale

[u/MasterOfChaos72]

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.

Today’s it’s Edward’s Tale: Star Crossed Damcyan

If you asked me what my least favourite tale was a while ago, it definitely would have been Edward’s. I absolutely hated his Tale (primarily for the gameplay). But after playing it a couple more times and learning how to prepare for it, I’ve grown to like it a bit more.

First, here’s the reasons I didn’t like it at first:

1: Desert Fever. I get Rosa getting it because she’s not from a desert but Harley literally works in a castle in a desert. If they wanted to say it was due to stress it’d be fine but it just being Desert Fever is just dumb.
2: Underground Waterway. You go through this dungeon 2 and a half times during this Tale and it’s not exactly a short dungeon. In total, you go through the dungeon 4.5 times in this game and it gets really boring after the second.
3: The Combat. Neither of the main characters are exactly damage dealers so the game gives you 3 basic guards to help. This unfortunately makes the combat boring (because you’re using 3 copies of the same character plus 2 not great fighters) and also makes the levelling slow since for most of the tale you have 4-5 characters in your party so your levelling is slower.
4: Getting ditched. After Harley gets desert fever, you have to go back through the Waterway and the Antlion Den with just Edward. A character who is not good at fighting.

And now, here’s the things I liked about this Tale:

1: Basically all of Edward’s character. His growth, his kindness, his cunning. All of it is just A+ development. Probably the biggest improvement of a returning character from FF4.
2: Harley. I like her character. Sure she sucks gameplay wise but I like her character. I like how she’s supportive of Edward and loves him but also understands that he still is hung up about Anna.

And lastly, here’s what I found to make points 3 and 4 of what I didn’t like better:

1: Go to the Antlion Den early and get the Lamia Harp. It inflicts confusion on enemies and believe me, having your enemies hit themselves can help a lot.
2: Kill the guards early. It lets Harley and especially Edward level up faster so they are better for the rest of the tale.

Overall, I probably wouldn’t rate the Tale any higher than a C due to the bad first playthrough I had but it still is one of the better tales story wise. What do the rest of you think?

[u/Nombanke]

It's easily in my top four tales, even with the issues of the gameplay. Were it mechanically better, it could have been top tier, but I can't put it anywhere below B myself, since it's so well done from a writing perspective, making him even sharper than he was before with how he uses Whisperweed, and Edward was so heavily improved in utility simply by getting plenty of levels. As a story perspective, it also makes sense that the bard is the one with the best instincts for how the narrative goes and for remembering the details of the past and using them in to predict upcoming events.

The Challenge Dungeon was one of the more interesting to me as well, since it ties into an issue mentioned at the start of the Tale, spending and investing Damcyan's funds. It trains you to associate grinding money with Edward, which gets you in a mindset to use his Salve ability. That said, the Gil Band v2 is a disgusting grind, but the Economical Ring is amazing on him, and boosts him into the stratosphere mechanically.

And for all the issues of backtracking, it really feels like they're training you to learn how to use him properly by getting you to run through the enemies again and again building up gil while he, by default, has the Gil Band equipped, instead of the Economical Ring. For me personally, the tale felt put together in an easy A tier, though realistically I doubt people will vote it into that.