Final Fantasy IV: The After Years Review

---SPOILER WARNING--- 

So I'm going to take a break from the weekly comic review, and instead take a look at a video game I just "finished." If you remember back in my Advent Children review I said Final Fantasy IV was my favorite Final Fantasy game. As such you'd think I would of played this sooner, but there where other games I wanted to get on WiiWare and the Virtual Console first. Like Final Fantasy 6. Anyway let's check it out.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is a sequel to Final Fantasy IV that takes place 17 years after the end of the original game. You control Ceodore, the son of Cecil and Rosa from the first game. The game begins with Ceodore away from the castle in order to take the test to become a Knight. However after passing the test the Red Wings' Airship is attacked, and it crashes. Ceodore is the only survivor, and he sets out in order to find his way home. Meanwhile Baron is also attacked, and Cecil try's to hold them off but a Mysterious Woman appears. She summons Bahamut, and defeats Cecil. We then cut back to Ceodore who is being attacked by monsters, he is almost defeated when a mysterious Hooded Man appears, and saves him. The Hooded Man agrees to help Ceodore since he was going to find a certain Dragoon, and so they head off to Baron.

The Gameplay is pretty straight forward. It's your standard Post-Final Fantasy 3 style Gameplay. However what make's this unique is the Moon System. You see in this game the way you and the monsters attack is changed by what the phase of the moon is. For example if it's a Full Moon Physical Attack's will be weakened but Black Magic will be stronger. This adds a bit of planning to your battle's, and I actually really liked it.

The Environment isn't anything too great. It mostly reuses towns and dungeons from Final Fantasy 4 with some new stuff here and there. However since this is a game that is mostly for Nostalgia, I'll let it slide. Especially since I liked revisiting towns, and people from the last game. It brought back a lot of memorys. The music is the same way. Most of it is from the last game, however I like certain places they used it. My favorite is the song that is playing while Cecil fights Bahamut.

This game is 800 Wii Point on WiiWare, which is essentially $8.00. That is really cheap for a WiiWare game, and there's a reason for that. You see this is half the game. You can download other story's which explain what the characters are doing during this as well as the ending. Yeah this game technically ends on a cliffhanger. So if your just playing it on it's  own it's really not worth it. Some of you may cry foul but the truth is Square-enix sold half a game. I'm not sure why they decided to do this instead of having the rest of the game, and have it be 1500 Wii Point like a lot of the other games on WiiWare. I mean they could of still had the DLC with the other characters in it but they decided to split the game in half instead.

Other then that I don't really have a big problem with the game. It's fun, and nostalgic. It is a bit easy from what I played, especially after you get the Sleep Blade. I recommend it but only if you by all the DLC or just get the PSP version since I'm pretty sure it comes with all the DLC. Otherwise you get only half the game. The game itself is 800 Wii Points, the extra story's (six in total) are 300 points each, and the other half of the game is another 800 points. You could just get the Second Half but you might not know what's going on so you pretty much have to buy all of it which will cost you 3500 Wii points or $35.00 which means you'll have to buy Two WII Points cards.

Rating:
2/5(The Game Alone)
4/5(With All DLC)

Note: Has anyone else noticed that I've been reviewing a lot of Video Game stuff lately.