(This post will be based on the first two chapters that were available at launch and may be updated as new chapters are released)
I remember hearing about this sometime ago... and I imagine it must have been on 1up when Shane Bettenhausen was still on the show or during an episode of Retronauts.
Originally released as an episodic cellphone game, Square ported the code to WiiWare and gave us shameful Westerners with our antique and quaint "iPhones" a chance to play the game for ourselves.
First of all, what is it? Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (henceforth shortened as TAY in this post) is the second "mainline" Final Fantasy game to receive a true honest to god sequel (I'm looking at you, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII) that brings back most of the original cast for an all new story. And as a sequel, it does not shy away from its original roots. I really don't know much about making a 16bit game, but I wouldn't be surprised if Square went back into the archives and dug up the original artwork from the FF4 for use in TAY. They've also reused most, if not all, the music cues from the original game, meaning that you probably shouldn't be coming into this game thinking that you'll get a completely new experience.
In fact, I would argue that most of the charm of the game comes from the fact that we're playing a brand new sprite-based RPG in 2009. It's a game that exudes nostalgia, in a way that the fourth Act of Metal Gear Solid 4 did with its flashback, taking the player back to the early 90s and reminding them of the fun (or frustration) of playing the original back on the SNES with an oldschool gamepad.
And I think it succeeds completely at that invoking my wistful longings for a simpler time. I found myself enjoying the grind because the battle animations were short (unlike the longwinded animations of modern 3D RPGs) and even though the music is just a series of endless loops, I found myself humming along to them out of habit. In many ways, I think I prefer TAY to the DS remake of FF4 simply because I much prefer the sprite-based art to the Playstation era polygon-based art that the DS version produces.
But is there more to the game than just its art assets? Certainly.
I appreciated the way that it invoked nostalgia with flashback scenes. When you travel to a location that was important in the original game, you will often flashback to the original scene. The game suddenly applies a sepia filter, plays the "sad" version of the main theme (I'm not really good with names of songs from FF games unfortunately), uses the original character sprites from FF4 and replays the original cutscene. In a game whose art design already invokves nostalgia, they managed to find a way to make the game even more nostalgic. And for me, it excused the recycling of old locations, simply because it meant that I could go back to many of these old towns and dungeons and remember the original game.
Story-wise, the game relies on that old trope of aging the original characters and introducing their children. Personally, I've only experienced this a couple of times - The Anne of Green Gables novels and the Allison to Lillia anime - so I don't have a lot to compare this to, but I think it works relatively well. It gives you a chance to relive the consequences of the original game (what happens in the first chapter of the game is almost ripped out of Persona 4 where Kain must fight his true emotions - being on the losing end of the Cecil-Rosa-Kain love triangle - made manifest in a "shadow"/evil Kain that you must battle) while also giving you a chance to explore the world from a completely new perspective (through Cecil and Rosa's child, Ceodore).
Rydia's chapter plays out the same way, as you can play Rydia and Luca - you explore Rydia's issues with her lineage from the first game while seeing the Underworld from Luca's relatively unexplored perspective. I have to imagine that all the chapters will be designed in this manner - an old character to tie the game to the old story and a new character to provide a fresh perspective.
It's a nice way to keep the game from devolving into complete fanservice by having the old characters simply relive their old issues without introducing anything new and I think it works relatively well.
Pacing wise, it appears that the game will take a page from Rashomon and have all the chapters happen concurrently, telling the story from several perspectives. This keeps in line with the fact that the game has to be sold episodically (which was probably how it was originally sold in Japan). By introducing the characters in their own episodes rather than have a single chronologically continuous story that you have to play in sequence, you don't really have the problems of serialized fiction (what happened last week?) and you might even sell the subsequent chapters to people who aren't interested in the entire story but like a particular character. I might have preferred that the game was released in one complete package, but this is a fair compromise.
There really isn't much to say until the final chapter comes out and I finish off the game. As it stands, it's all very familiar in terms of gameplay and storytelling. I still think it's clever that the game manipulates the battle system in order to impart narrative (in the form of battles that you will inevitable lose), but that's so old hat now that it's not as special as it was back in the 90s. But, you're not playing this to be blown away... you're playing this to be taken back to the past (very much like the Angry Video Game Nerd!).
One final note though. I honestly don't think any other game franchise could have pulled this off. Most companies simply remake games (like Bionic Commando: Re-armed) or just re-emulate games (pretty much everything Backbone makes) and even those just sell for 5 or 10 dollars. But TAY will cost nearly 40 dollars when the game is fully released and I don't doubt that the many older fans will be perfectly willing to part with that obscene amount of money just to play through the entire game (myself included). I look at it this way. The Penny Arcade Adventures games are brand new experiences for 20/15 dollars each and I just couldn't bring myself to buy them. With TAY, there was absolutely no hesitation. I guess it just goes to show that for a certain generation of people, the Final Fantasy name is still extremely important to them.
