Final Fantasy IV: Complete Collection contains Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy IV: Interlude, and Final Fantasy IV: The After Years in one package. This version features updated graphics compared to the original release of the game (although ironically, despite being the more powerful system, it doesn’t get the 3D remake version that the DS release had).
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy IV is the fourth game in the Final Fantasy series, and like the rest, it’s story is standalone. The original was released for the SNES, while the updated graphics allows this game to be presented in widescreen, and it looks really good, even on the Vita when you have bilinear filtering on. The widescreen presentation allows you to see more of your surroundings, although it does make the distance between your characters and opponents during battle quite wide, leaving quite a bit of empty space. Otherwise, this is a standard JRPG for its time with a turn based battle system. It uses the Active Time Battle system where it is still turn based, but there is a bar that fills showing off the speed of your characters and when they can attack next. The unique aspect (for its time) is that even when it’s your turn and going through the menu to determine your action, enemies can still attack you. There is a basic position battle where you can determine the characters in the front and back rows. The front can deal full powered attacks and accuracy with the trade-off being that they get hit harder from enemies.
Unlike Final Fantasy III, there is no job system here. The characters in your party have predetermined jobs, so you’ll get a paladin, or a white mage, a black mage, or a summoner etc. So while you lose the versatility of using your favorite characters, it gives those characters a sense of identity and uniqueness instead. During your turn, you’re able to attack with the weapon the character has, use items or run away. Every character, depending on their job, has additional abilities like magic or special unique abilities that only they have. Your party is constantly changing, which can be annoying when you like a particular character and am forced to swap to a new one to slowly build them up, time and time again. The game is 2D with a faux 3D viewpoint at times. It has random encounters, which can be annoying. The random encounter rate goes up and down, and it is actually had to predict. Sometimes in the dungeon you’ll get an encounter every few steps, but then you can traverse a whole level without encountering one. While you can dash, at least anecdotally, it feels like the random encounter rate is higher negating the faster walking speed. The other annoying aspect is that there is a high chance of having encounters where you’re at a disadvantage, with the enemy being able to attack first.
The story is of course one of the stronger elements of the game, along with the awesome soundtrack. The plot follows Cecil, a dark knight of Baron who follows orders and is at a crossroads with his conscience. On the one hand, he is loyal, but on the other, the atrocities he is forced to commit weighs heavily on his mind. Once he decides to break free, he uncovers a bigger plot. He’ll travel across the world, meet a lot of new people who’ll join his party and save the world. It’s a straightforward story where Cecil will go to each of the crystals, always one step behind the villains until the end. There are several cool locales you get to visit as well optional hidden areas. The unique part about this game is that the story is more complex and deep compared to the previous games, which were basic (but had started to improve). We get characters that are fully fleshed out and while there is still room for improvement, we do get attached to those characters. It also feels slightly darker for the fact that it’s not as idealistic, and characters come and go from the party for reasons more than just wanting to sightsee. As a result, the story does have several genuinely unexpected moments that might cause you to do a double take.
That said, the beginning can tough in terms of the available party members you get. While Cecil is great as a physical fighter and allrounder, he’s primarily the only physical damage dealer you get. A lot of the other early party members focuses on magic, so that they have weak attack and defence stats, that can make battles longer than they need to be. Dungeons can also be confusing, and while some sections will gentle nudge and railroad you to the next area, others can be a confusing mess of paths. The game’s difficulty is not too bad on the whole, but there are certain sections, specifically towards the end, where it spikes up. You’ll encounter enemies who will counter whenever you attack, or groups of enemies who have high speed so you’re being bombarded by several attacks whittling down your party’s HP before you can even make a move. Some characters have low HP due to their class and are easily damaged down to critical levels due to how hard enemies can hit.
The difficulty ends up becoming very uneven towards the end. The final dungeon itself has several difficulty spikes requiring you to grind for a few levels to comfortably beat the game. Thankfully, the game has an Auto mode to blast through some encounters but you’ll need to be careful as it is limited and risky for higher levelled enemies. Yet despite all this, the game is strangely addicting even though the story isn’t too complex. It’s good enough to keep you moving forward. Leveling up, exploring and obtaining treasures from chests is a satisfying formula. You’re given a lot of freedom once you are able to fully explore the world map, but the game’s not great with telling you where you need to go next to progress with the story. If you know exactly where to go, the game takes around 20 to 30 hours to complete. Afterwards, it unlocks a bonus dungeon that’s harder and filled with great items for your characters. Overall, Final Fantasy IV is still an enjoyable game decades later. The graphics have aged well, as did the battle system. Sure it might be simple by current standards but the variety of your party helps keep each part of the game fresh and different. The characters are likeable and the story is engrossing enough to keep you going towards the end.
Final Fantasy IV: Interlude
Final Fantasy IV: Interlude a brand new game for this collection. It takes place one year after the end of Final Fantasy IV, and it set before The After Years. The title is very fitting since this is a short interlude, that kind of sets up the next game, but doesn’t show off a whole lot. We control Cecil again, and see all the party members after the events of the previous game. It reuses the same battle system and annoyingly, everyone is now between level 30 to 40, so you don’t have access to all the abilities you had. That doesn’t matter too much since it takes less than two hours to finish but you end up retreading through various dungeons, fighting a few bosses. Everything is reused with just new story events on top. It’s okay but it isn’t something to jump at buying the game for.
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is a direct sequel to Final Fantasy IV. It was originally released only in Japan for mobile phones, in episodic format no less. Due to its episodic nature, it’s structure that each main playable character from Final Fantasy IV has their own tale, where you start from a low level with no items and little money. The story itself takes place years after the ending of Final Fantasy IV and the Interlude chapter. It is separated into multiple scenarios called “tales”. Each tale follows a different character, so those that like to have a consistent growing party will be disappointed. There is a slight change to the battle system in this game. It’s still turn-based but the major new feature is the moon where it waxes and wanes. Each phase will affect the power of magic and physical attacks. For example, at full moon, physical attacks does half damage while black magic is doubled. This affects enemies as well as your own party members. The phase changes over time while on the field or manually changes when your party sleeps and recovers. Another addition are combination attacks between the characters, which are quite flashy.
The first thing you’ll realize when you start the game is how it reuses basically everything from the original. You’ll be going through the same dungeons and towns, some of them multiple times. It’s nostalgic if you played Final Fantasy IV on its release years ago, not so much when you’ve just completed it like you likely would have when playing this collection. The random encounter rate is also as high and random as it was in the original. You can traverse a whole floor of a dungeon without an encounter while at other times, you’ll have an encounter after one step. Each tales takes under two hours to complete, depending on how much you grind and how quickly you rush through the dungeons. Unfortunately, playing with a new party in each tale is a flaw as you need to re-level each time as well as stocking up on healing items. Your parties are unbalanced and you’re trapped within a really small area of the world. This is always a problem with games that takes this split viewpoint approach (like Dragon Quest IV). The first tale follows Ceodore, the son of Cecil and Rosa. He is a far cry from his parents who is insecure. This tale sets up the story of the game which focuses on the strange happenings on the moon that coincides with monsters invading Baron.
The second tale follows Rydia and supporting characters from the original become playable characters here. The story starts to become more intriguing, particular since Rydia is a stronger character overall. Although her character is nerfed so it makes battles more annoying. Yang’s tale follows a similar structure and at this point, it starts to become a chore. The enjoyment from new dungeons in addition to trekking through old ones is mitigated through the amount of backtracking required. Once you’ve reached the end of a dungeon and beaten the boss, what does the game need you to do next? Walk all the way back and this is just pure filler. Palom’s tale truly shows how annoying Palom can be. In the original game, he doesn’t get much screentime before he exits your party so his antics aren’t as grating. Here, they’re in full force and it can get to the point where you can’t stand the guy. He becomes better towards the end but it is yet another tale with similar plot points, dealing with the loss of a crystal.
Edge’s tale takes what was already one of the worst elements of this game and makes it even worse. His tale is further splits into five sections, each with a different main playable character. While this split into different viewpoints may be interesting at first, they all result in the same thing and structured in a similar way which eliminates the intrigue. Porom’s tale is as obnoxious as Palom’s… because Palom is in it and this game plays up his angsty attitude way too much. To make matters worse, you’re stuck with an all-mages party for most of the tale so that you’re too heavily reliant on magic, which makes grinding up levels suck. The only saving grace to this tale is how it is a different perspective to the events that happened in other tales so you can see other characters doing their thing.
Edward’s tale isn’t that much better and wow, this one takes the cake for backtracking. In addition to trekking through the same dungeons for the third time in this game alone, the tale includes scenario where you trek through multiple long dungeons, make it through to the end, only to be told to go back, grab an item and then come back again. Throughout all this are seemingly super high encounter rates, and it makes this a really unpleasant experience given that the story in this tale was so shallow and so similar to the others. Kain’s tale is probably the most interesting story-wise compared to the others, but the big reveal on appears at the end. Before that, you’re going to traverse the same dungeons, and swap viewpoints, so more of the same really, and that is such a shame that the pacing is so out of wack in this game. At least this if you’ve been playing the tales in the order that the game presents them in, this is the last one before the final tale where everyone joins up together.
The Lunarian’s tale is long, and if you thought up until this point the game was bloated with filler, you haven’t seen anything yet. The pacing was already bad but it makes it worse here with the constant backtracking of the same extremely long dungeons for only a piece or two of the story. It’s so bad that you can’t wait for the end but despair as there so much of the game that is left. The final tale is split into various sections where you spend the first part collecting the various playable characters together. Then you’re able to finally choose your own party from the many available. Unfortunately, even if you import the save data from the other tales, you will end up with uneven levels within your party. This results in a terrible difficulty coupled with a high encounter rate making the overall experience even worse than it already is. Then there’s the actual difficulty spike in the final dungeon where every enemy hits like they’re a boss, on average twice as fast as your characters, and gives pitiful experience. It is frankly just terrible design that’s disgusting and outdated even when the game was released. It’s as if your time wasn’t wasted enough already with all the filler, recycling and grinding already, you’ll have to do even more if you hope to traverse through the final dungeon.
The final tale is also horrendous in that you’re going through almost every single dungeon in the game yet again, as if the first, second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth time wasn’t enough. Seriously, at this point, you suspect the game’s sole aim is to see how far it can push a player to play through the same area again. The final dungeon itself is too long as well, making it seem that the game never seems to end. All this combines into an artificially padded out game that’s about eight times longer than it should be, where it outstayed its welcome 20 hours ago. Overall, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is a bad game, it is one of the worst Final Fantasy games available. It’s got a bad story, a bad structure and a bad difficulty. Even being originally for mobile phones isn’t enough to explain some of the baffling design choices. Having you traverse the same dungeon six times? Making the final dungeon over forty floors long with the same design we’ve already seen? Making the difficulty insanely spike up and jacking up the encounter rate? These were all completely unnecessary but no, and for that, it is completely disrespectful to the player for wasting their time. This game sours the memory of the original Final Fantasy IV and should not have existed.
Overall
Overall, Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection is great value, having packaged both the original and the sequel. It’s just a shame that The After Years is a terrible sequel and a horrendous game. Buy the game to play Final Fantasy IV, and ignore Interlude and The After Years as both are trash that’s not even worth booting up.
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