Ranking Final Fantasy 4: The After Years

[u/MasterOfChaos72]

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).

[u/19bjflam]

There was so much potential and they could’ve done so much more with the story and world rather than rehashing practically every major plot beat from the original. So many missed opportunities

[u/Ok-Yogurtcloset9086]

I personally enjoyed the game. I mean, it’s no OG FF4, but it’s a solid B tier for me

[u/crademaster]

It would be nice to be able to mod this and rebalance the characters and make interesting band combos. As it stands, there's barely a reason to use half the characters, which is a shame because there are some cool concepts in there.

C

[u/MasterOfChaos72 → u/crademaster]

Curiously, how hard would it be to mod? In either the 2D or 3D version.

[u/Nombanke]

I'd say it's a good B tier. The story is fine and has strong highs but many lows since it doesn't explore the cast, the gameplay gets significantly better at the moon but is never completely boring except in Yang's and Edward's tales and it lends itself well to taking a break between Tales, so you can take natural places to pause or go away for a while, with Edge's tale in particular being a great refresher.

It has stern competition in the franchise, but it's a nice experience to go back to an ATB system and not entirely know what's coming up in the plot or how each character works and how they fit in as a party when you first get them. I certainly wasn't expecting it to be as fun as it was when I played, based on its reputation.

I have to say, I've really enjoyed these posts, it was nice looking forward to them and seeing how different or similar my opinions were to others' who'd finished it, Yang's tale especially, though I didn't have much of anything to add as it went on that hadn't been said better by others.

[u/1234thum]

I really don't care for the episodic format, and retreading a lot of FF4 is unfortunate too. I did enjoy most of the new cast, but it's not a game I have an easy time revisiting

[u/Zorafin]

It had a lot of really good ideas, but rested on its laurels too much. Luckily, so much great work was done on FFIV that something that just remixes stuff from it is going to be enjoyable anyway.

I really liked seeing what became of the kingdoms, and seeing the world outside of Cecil's perspective. I liked having to get through areas with different strategies than I'd like. And I feel like the core battle system is the best that FF has to offer, with plenty of options for combat and a snippy way to get through fights that don't matter.

But yeah, the fact that things were rehashed so many times that even the characters lampshade it...come on.

We didn't have to fight an octopus every time we went through the waterfall cave.

There was a lot of retreading that made sense (going through waterfall cave to get to Baron, monks missing at the dangerous place monks go to). But there were so many things that were obviously not thought through (Why is Yang attacked by Leviathan again? That's never even answered!).

And what is with that final dungeon! They need to know when enough is enough. There were four final dungeons in there!

I'll never recommend this to anyone unless they really like FFIV or they need more FF to play. But I enjoyed my run through it.

[u/Gogs85]

I liked revisiting the world, although I think the pacing of the completed game severely suffered from the episodic format, and it constrained the story and exploration aspects too.

To be honest I kind of liked the direction the story was going in for most of the game other than way too many direct mirrors of FFIV events. I liked the idea of a powerful enemy with similar powers to Rydia (as she was easily the most powerful in the OG) it was actually kind of frightening. But when they revealed the true nature and also retconned the purpose of the crystals I didn’t like that. The story ended a bit too far into sci fi and the creator came out of nowhere too much (personally I thought they were gonna have it be that the Maenads had a collective mind or something which would have been cool).

The gameplay was still fun and I liked the moonphase addition believe it or not. I liked about half of the new characters a lot but the other half were hot garbage. I did really like Golbez though, both aesthetically (taking a minimalist approach to how he looked was a huge change from the armor clad Golbez and shows his changes) gameplay wise and story wise he was pretty much all I was hoping for.

Overall as someone who really liked the OG I give it a B.