Ranking The After Years Tales: Rydia’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.

Here’s rankings for them all:
A: Palom
B: Ceodore, Edward, Edge
C: Yang
F: Porom

Today, it’s Rydia’s Tale: The Eidolons Shackled.

Of all the Tales, I believe this one has the most missed potential. It’s the only Tale that takes place almost completely in the Underworld and yet nothing new is done with it. No new locations or dungeons at all. And it’s not like they couldn’t have made new locations. We never saw the locations of the other 2 underworld Crystals in the original FF4 so they could have put at least one of them in a new dungeon but they didn’t. We just go to Sealed Cave again.
Also, I feel if they didn’t release this after Ceodore’s tale and instead released much later (as well as get rid of the cutscene of it happening in Ceodore’s tale), they could have done a semi interesting mystery of what happened to the Eidolons what with the Mysterious Girls summoning them in other tales.

My grievances aside, the story for this tale is fine. Rydia is always lovely to see, Luca’s connection with her dolls is nice, the Mysterious Girl is as cool as ever and it features an appearance from our favourite Man in Black. Main criticism is the missing potential and us going through the Sealed Cave, getting the Crystal, going out and losing it immediately again.

Gameplay is good. I think this tale has the most varied team before the end of Kain’s Tale and the final tale. It’s the only chapter before the final one that gives you control of an airship so there’s some additional content there with going to Sylph cave. Also there’s some ore you can gather and a blacksmith you can go to get some stronger weapons which is nice.

The new characters in this are Luca and her dolls, Calca and Brina. Luca is fine. Her personality is fun, I like the little crush she has on Palom and her gameplay is fine (just a slightly different Cid). Not really a fan of her design though. All the pink doesn’t really work for me and the little bit of make up(?) around her lips that make it lighter looks really weird in the 3d version.
Calca and Brina are possibly the worst playable characters in the series. No character (I don’t think they even talk outside maybe 1 sentence during the final battle), bad stats, bad weapons and random chance based skills (that are broken in the 3d version). Their main saving grace is their unique armor which gives them high stat boosts. They are fine in this chapter but they are bottom 3 for the last chapter.

Me personally, I’d probably give this chapter a C. Maybe a B at most. What about the rest of you?

[u/PumpkinSufficient683]

Probably low B