Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (2008)

Finally finished this game. I played the PSP version, and this game is brutally long. I didn't spend a lot of time straying from the story, but I wasted hours leveling in the final dungeon to fight the optional bosses.

The optional boss fight with Nova took a solid 40 minutes. I used Meteor x2 every round for 9999 damage each hit, and the fight still took that long. My only guess is that this boss has an insane amount of health, and the 9999 hard cap on damage just drags out the fight. The reward of Ragnarok ended up not being worth the effort.

In addition, the final dungeon forces you through a gauntlet of previous FF title bosses. A neat concept, seeing bosses from other games, suggesting all the FFs live within the same universe. However, there are around 30 bosses total, and you're forced to fight some of them multiple times. I had massive boss fatigue by the end of the game.

The only positive was seeing an extended story involving some beloved characters from my childhood.
All in all, glad to have another FF in the books, but definitely not a title I ever want to revisit.

Do folks here feel that this game is worth playing? I'm still working my way through IV itself but have been really enjoying the characters so far. I see a lot of negativity surrounding the sequel games for IV and also that there are a couple versions of this one.

Any recommendations for or against particular versions or to play it at all?

I finished all the individuals stories and am now going, pretty thoroughly, through the challenge dungeons. I have Ceodore/Kain party levels in the upper 40s, Rydia and Luca maxed out, and am working through Yang's now, which will also require extensive leveling. I'm not even sure I've gotten everything out of the first two. The internet tells me you can get multiple sets of Diamond equipment through Kain's. I thought I had finished with Rydia's since all I was getting was consumables, but on another run I got a gold hairpin.

For any who have played this, should I care about these this much?

I recently found out this game has three different versions, if you will - the original, which was combined and sold in the Wii Shop; a shiny upgrade, still with 2D graphics, with the original FF4 for PSP; and the 3D remakes.

I say this because I wish I knew there were two 2D versions out there, one would think once the PSP version was released, it would become the definitive one, and therefore sold on the Wii Store. I guess that's not how the world works. :) I didn't want to play the 3D remake because I'm not a huge fan of the style and the pacing on the 3D FF games seems way slowed down.

This is an odd one. I don't mind the episodic format at all, it adds variety to the storytelling and fleshing out character development. I'm about halfway through the characters' stories. I like the focus on plot. I do not like, despite the fact that there are new aspects, it feels like nothing new is added at all. I'm fighting the same battles I fought for 30 hours in the original FF4. I'm not sure I've ever used a band once.

I'm also frustrated by the grindiness of the game. The encounter rate is very high. I refuse to grind levels for characters I'm only going to spend a short amount of time with. For each story, there's an easy peasy training dungeon of sorts, and then it gets VERY HARD afterwards. I spend most of my time running away from fights. It's not surprising that Yang's chapter has been the easiest so far, because you get a full roster on your team. Characters can focus on healing and others solely on DPS, compared to say, Rydia, where my two team members have the best gear, 600 or so HP, and enemies are all of a sudden doing 300+ damage per hit and I'm scrambling like mad just to stay alive. I like fighting in RPGs, that's why I play them, but for a "story-focused" game, there is just SO MUCH of it, and it's all SO BORING. How many more times can I cast Fira against a group of skeletons?

I'm going to stick it out because that's the point of this project, but I am a bit turned off by the whole thing.

I almost forgot - let's talk about the music. The music in TAY is somehow worse than the original. It's all the same music, but instead of using the perfectly great sounding SNES synth, it sounds like they ran all the tracks through some cheap, early 90s MIDI program and wound up with what sounds like amateur remakes on VGMA. I still feel cheated that I'm not getting the graphic upgrade version (but that's on me), but I'm actually insulted by the music. I don't understand at all why they did this.

That's it for now. We'll see if I have anything to add once I beat it.