🌙 Final Fantasy IV: The After Years Game Club - Home Thread

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

Welcome to the ファイナルファンタジーIV ジ・アフターイヤーズ -月の帰還- Club!

This club is an offshoot of the Beginner Final Fantasy Club, specifically Final Fantasy IV. If you haven’t played that game before, you probably should!

Start Date: TBD

FF4TA_logo
FF4TA_logo434×261 94.7 KB

Original Release: February 18, 2008 through December 24, 2008 on Japanese mobile phones

Week Description Start Date
Week 1 ??? TBD
What is Final Fantasy IV: The After Years?

Originally released as ファイナルファンタジーIV ジ・アフター -月の帰還-, FF4TAY is a sequel to the seminal JRPG classic Final Fantasy IV released roughly 17 years later. It was an early attempt at an episodic game, and although more recent releases have included the whole story together, it will still be very obvious when you move between chapters.

Is it good?

I’ve never played it, but all indications point to no. Common complaints include the heavy reuse of assets, the disjointed nature of the episodic story, and the general sense of “bad fanfiction” that you tend to get when a sequel is made by a different team a decade and a half later. But hey, if you just gotta know what happened to Cecil and Rosa…

How can I play it?

To date, FF4TAY has been released on a variety of Japanese mobile phones, Nintendo Wii, PSP (as part of Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection), Windows, iOS, and Android. Let’s take those one by one:

  • Japanese mobile phone: I have no idea how you’d begin to go about playing on a circa-2008 dumbphone, but I’d be really impressed if you figured it out!
  • Nintendo Wii: There was no physical release and the WiiWare service was discontinued on January 30, 2019. If you already bought it, you can apparently redownload it! If not, it’d probably be pretty easy to emulate for someone so inclined…
  • PSP: This is the version I’ll be playing. If you have the Complete Collection in any region, you can play it in Japanese by switching your PSP’s system language. It also includes a prequel chapter called Final Fantasy IV Interlude, which is not as exciting as it sounds.
  • Windows: AVOID. As far as I can tell, there is no way to play the Windows version in Japanese, regardless of how or where you buy it.
  • iOS and Android: Definitely the easiest version to buy. I believe these will switch to Japanese if you change your system language, but I have not tested it.
Will there be a spreadsheet?

I don’t plan to make one, but if someone takes it upon themself I’d be happy to link to it in every post!

Here are some polls!

Will you be playing with us?

  • Yeah!
  • Yeah, but I’ll start late
  • I’m not sure yet
  • I’m skipping this one
  • I’ve played this before, but will join in the discussion
0 voters

When should we start?

  • September 14, 2026
  • September 21, 2026
  • September 28, 2026
  • October 5, 2026
0 voters

The poll is anonymous and will close in a week. You can pick several options. I decided to start on a Monday because right now I get slammed with clubs every Friday and I don’t like having to pick which one I want to play or read first… If that’s a dealbreaker to you, let me know and I’ll reconsider.

2

As I was saying I think based on what I’ve heard about this one it’s probably best as a skip for me – I quite liked FF4’s pacing and am pretty happy to let it end there. But I hope you all get a group going for this because I want to see what you say and live vicariously through your posts!

3

If interest stays low it’ll just become an “informal” club (i.e. just a thread for me to post my thoughts as I go through). It’s neatly divided into 13 chapters so it’s easy to spoiler tag things even if it’s all in one thread.

4

I think that sounds fine!

5

Still working through IV so unsure if I’ll join. Maybe worst case scenario, I’ll replay it in English so I can join the conversation without dedicating too much effort. I am really interested in playing it again. I think I mentioned it in another thread, but I played it when the PSP version came out and I thought it was pretty decent. I was surprised to find out later that it was widely regarded as fairly bad but most people I heard that from just made casual comments without going in depth so I’d be curious to see if my opinion has changed at all.

6

I’m not too worried about the bad comments either, I usually enjoy the games just fine, doesn’t have to be perfect. And even better here because either way I’m going to get some Japanese practice out of it, so it’s a win no matter what! (if it was a bad game and I was already fluent then maybe I would pass, but luckily I am still far from that :smiley: )

7

I really enjoyed this old review from Jason Schreier, who nowadays is probably the single most respected name in games journalism. He was not particularly kind, calling it “the dubstep of RPGs.” It only made me want to play it more, haha.

8

samuel-johnson-blinking-sam
samuel-johnson-blinking-sam997×1200 58 KB

9

He’s also a fellow wanikani user! Or at least he was for a while.

10

And he slanders Mystic Quest too?

11

Start a club and show us how great it is!

12

Maybe I will. Maybe I will.

13

I played FF4: Interlude (the PSP-exclusive chapter) this weekend because I wanted to decide if it should be a part of the club or not. After playing it, I can confirm it’s completely pointless. I’ll make a separate post later about the story content (or lack thereof), but for now here are some differences I noticed coming from the PR.

Playing on PSP vs Pixel Remaster (no spoilers)

The monster sprites on PSP are gorgeous. The party member in combat sprites are a bit odd, but nothing I can’t get used to. The music arrangements are different, but not really better or worse, in my opinion. I wouldn’t normally mention or even notice it, but the menuing sound effects are really annoying on PSP. Changing your equipment or healing your party out of combat means hearing the same piercing chirp dozens of times in a row.

One big positive is that the party members’ portraits are visible in both the combat UI and dialogue. This was a pretty common feature in FF ports before the Pixel Remasters, and I wish it had stuck around. The sometimes-colored name tags on the PRs’ dialogue boxes are much easier to miss.

Combat mostly plays the same, though even in wait mode, targeting does not pause the ATB. My habit of starting an attack every turn to get some time to think has already screwed me a bit. I noticed that Palom and Porom’s Twin-cast has a sort of secondary ATB bar over the top of the main one while it charges, which is kind of neat, but doesn’t seem to apply on all spells. I already posted in another thread that the trap doors in 封印の洞窟 work differently, getting their kill spell out much faster and often multiple times per battle. I’m sure there will be some other enemy behavior differences, but that was the most obvious.

screenshot (28)
screenshot (28)1280×800 238 KB

Auto-battle also works completely differently - instead of repeating the last turn for each character, it just always uses Attack. It also stays on between battles, which you have to be quick to catch when you start a boss fight so you don’t waste any turns. A semi-related complaint is that unlike the PR, arrows are a limited resource. The dungeons at least made sure you had plenty of them, but I didn’t like the feeling that I was wasting finite resources just by being lazy and auto-battling.

Surprisingly, exploration has been my biggest pain point so far. Most of all I just really miss the PR’s dungeon maps. I tried to use an online walkthrough for the first dungeon, but eventually just decided I didn’t care that much if I missed some optional items in a 4 hour game and forged blindly ahead. Not sure if I’ll go through the effort of finding online maps in After Years.

One last weird quirk is that there doesn’t seem to be any normalization of encounter rates. By which I mean, there’s nothing ensuring you get a random encounter approximately every x steps, with some variance. Sometimes you’ll go a really long time without seeing any, while other times you’ll literally get an encounter one step after the last one. Super annoying.

14

That was also the case for the original on SFC. Strangely I don’t recall this happening in the Famicom entries.

15

I thought I remembered you mentioning it at some point, but I wasn’t sure. Is FF5 back to normal?

16

I’m preplaying the PR version so I don’t know. I’ll play the SFC version during the club so we’ll see…

17

Yeah, it is a bit of an interesting curio. If I remember right, TAY takes place like 15 years after IV so I appreciate that they made an effort to fill the gap a little bit but it really is just “Hmm, these mysterious things happening sure are mysterious. I hope nothing comes of this like a decade later.”

18
Recap & review of FF4 Interlude - full spoilers

So the premise of this one is that some time after FF4, Cecil and Rosa are now King and Queen of Baron. They have to attend a ceremony to commemorate the reconstruction of Damushian, the castle that we originally met Gilbert in. This of course brings together most of the player characters from FF4, with the exception of Edge and Rydia. The ceremony goes without incident, and we actually get to go into the crystal room and admire the crystal. Gilbert brags about the countermeasures that keep it safe, which seems super foreshadow-y, but nothing ever happens to the crystal for the whole game.

The actual inciting incident comes when a guard tells us that 2 monks have been attacked on Mt. Hobbs, where we originally met Yan. Cecil, Rosa, and Yan run off to help them. The dungeon is almost completely unchanged from FF4, but we’re introduced to two exciting new party members: Monk A and Monk B. The five of them eventually face a Father Bomb, a recolor of the Mother Bomb we faced in the main game in the same location. They didn’t think too hard on that one.

The monks tell us that they were on their way to inform Yan that his wife, now named シーラ, is in labor. Why Yan chose to come to this stupid celebration instead of staying with his very pregnant wife is never addressed. The party all continue on foot to Fabul to watch her give birth. The baby is named アーシュラ, which was apparently localized in English to Ursula in a kind of inverse of the Lydia->Rydia situation. Maybe because it was too similar to the summon アスラ?

Cid, Palom, and Porom arrive to tell us that we have to go to the Sealed Cave (the one with all those killer doors). There are monsters pouring out of it, or whatever. Rosa stays behind for vaguely defined reasons that will be explained later. Cecil, Cid, Palom, and Porom fly off to the Sealed Cave. All airship travel in this episode is NPC-controlled, by the way, so you get a direct shuttle between locations with almost no overworld exploration.

The Sealed Cave is also a complete copy-paste from the main game, and you even fight an unchanged Demon Wall. In the Crystal Chamber at the bottom, you meet a collapsed Rydia. There have been occasional sequences where you play as Rydia and Edge peppered throughout, but Rydia seemed to be on her way to Damushian to meet everyone else, not doing anything in the underworld. She also speaks in fragmented sentences and can’t use any of her summons. We trust her completely.

Rydia tells us to go to the underworld entrance of the Tower of Babel, which is glowing. We again fly there on rails and retread the entire dungeon. One change is that there are occasional minibosses that each give Rydia the power to use one of her summons from that point on. Would you be surprised to learn that these minibosses are also reused base game enemies?

At some point along the way, Rydia runs off and Edge joins the party, which is now Cecil, Palom, Porom, and Edge. When we get to the end, Rydia turns out to be an imposter! We fight 4 summons back-to-back before getting a mandatory loss to Bahamut. The real Rydia turns up and heals us, then takes her summons back from the imposter and joins the party for the final boss: Fake Rydia, who just casts some spells and is kind of a pushover. She still looks exactly like Rydia because sprites cost money.

Finally, we all meet up again to find out that Rosa is pregnant! They talk vaguely about what to name the baby, but don’t come to a decision. This is presented as if it’s going to be a big twist, but obviously it’s going to be revealed in After Years, probably without much fanfare.

Overall it’s pretty transparently an asset flip made with almost no budget. They probably used it as a training exercise to get some new designers familiar with their tools and engine. As far as I could tell there wasn’t a single new sprite or piece of music, but I think the map of Damushian’s repaired throne room was new? I guess that’s something.

The plot is also just kind of aimlessly shuffling you between reused dungeons from the main game with thin justifications for why. Rosa and Sheila’s babies are new information if you’re playing the games chronologically like I did, but wouldn’t be a twist if you played them in release order. It was kind of cool that they mixed up the party a bit and gave you more time to play with Palom and Porom, but your end party is otherwise the same as what you had at the end of FF4.

It is mercifully short, taking me a total of 4:09 while trying to talk to everyone, and I’ve heard of people online getting through it in as little as 90 minutes. I don’t regret the time I spent playing it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but a super fan of the series who already owns the PSP collection.