This is my journey through FFIV: The After Years. I will give you updates as I make my way through this game. I will try to keep my posts spoiler light, but It won't be spoiler free. Don't read if spoilers about locations and people bother you.
To start out let me tell you that I love FFIV. I first played part of it with a friend when it first came out on his SNES. We played through Mt. Ordeals and that is where my love began. About six months later when I had saved up enough money to buy a SNES from doing yard work around the neigborhood, FFIV was the first game I bought with the system. I played through the game at least three times my firt year owning the game and have played through it every few years after that.
There was one point before FFVI was anounced that GamePro had a small article about a sequal to FFIV coming out soon, which included a picture of Cecil and a few of the main characters battling some cool looking sprite monsters. Even today, I'm not sure if they had made up the article or if it was something that Square scrapped. Well the one thing they weren't wrong about was that there was going to be a sequal to FFIV, it just happened many years later than expected.
When I first heard about FFIV: TAY it was planned as a Japan only mobile phone exclusive. I thought the idea was cool, but was disapointed I would miss out on the game. But then I heard it was coming to Wii Ware. I became excited, but then forgot about it. After chatting with HappyDolphin and BasilZero and they asked me about FFIV:TAY all I could say was I don't know.
Last night I hooked up my Wii at my girlfriends place so I could take the plunge. I finally downloaded the game for 800 Points.... Or so I thought.....
When I got to the main menu I say there was a downloadable content menu item. So I went down and clicked on it. And then I saw:
Rydia's Tale - 300 Points
Yang's Tale - 300 Points
Palom's Tale - 300 Points
Edge's Tale - 300 Points
Porom's Tale - 300 Points
Edward's Tale - 300 Points
Lunarian's Tale - 300 Points
The Crystals - 800 Points
That's 2,900 in addition to the 800 Points I had already spent. I am willing to spend $38.00 For a Final Fantasy follow up to IV. I was just surprised that it was done this way and I felt a little deceived.
So I started the game. It started a lot like FF IV, but this time with Cecil's son Ceodore on an airship preparing for his right of passage to become a Red WIng. The music, enimies, land, etc is all taken straight from FFIV, however there are some things added that are much higher resolution than the 16bit sprites. The clouds in the sky behind the airship are whispy and the backgrounds during random encounters look like matt drawings. This looks good behind the airship, but looks strange behind the sprite characters and enimies.
The battle system is pretty much the same as FFIV, though there is a new Moon Phase system. With different phases of the moon your Attack and magic abilities become either more or less powerful...
More to come.
