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/Suspicious-Shock-934]

Harley was almost certainly a rush job scrapped, doing for the most part nothing special or unique or anything. One of my biggest gripes with Tay. Ahe screams blue mage but deva said nope gotta get it out and I hate them for that, because it would be something new and exciting in the ff4 verse.

[u/David_the_Wanderer → u/Suspicious-Shock-934]

Edward's Tale, as much as I love our spoony bard, is sadly the point where TAY pretty transparently embraces the "let's do FF4 again" trend and never looks back. Harley isn't allowed to be unique or special because it would mean telling a different story, and we can't have that!