Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Final Fantasy IV: The After Years asks a question most sequels are afraid to pose: what happens seventeen years later, when the heroes have grown old and their children must face a threat their parents barely survived? The second moon has returned to the Blue Planet's orbit, and this time it is closer than before. The Crystals have begun to glow with a soft, inexplicable light. Nobody knows why. That mystery is the engine of everything that follows.

  Producer Takashi Tokita had already worked as scenario writer on the original Final Fantasy IV, so the characters were not abstractions to him. When Square Enix's mobile team approached him during the development of the Nintendo DS remake, his instinct was to make a sequel that players could step into immediately after finishing that version. The result, first released in Japan in 2008, was something the industry had not quite seen before: a sprawling, episodic role-playing game delivered to mobile phones in monthly installments. It would eventually be downloaded more than four and a half million times. What drove those numbers, and why the game still sparks argument among fans, is a story worth telling.

• 2. A Game in Episodes

  ›

  Tokita wanted the sequel to feel like a serialized manga, not a packaged video game. He described his goal as creating "not just a proper sequel with graphics like the original SNES titles, but an episodic game similar to a serialized manga." He knew that account planning, software implementation, and debugging for rapid releases would be demanding, so he settled on a new chapter every three weeks rather than weekly, prioritizing quality over pace.

  The structure built into the release itself. Players received the prologue and "Ceodore's Tale" simultaneously, then eight supplemental tales followed in roughly four-week intervals. Those tales covered characters including Rydia, Yang, Palom, Edge, Porom, and Edward, each in their own standalone installment. A penultimate chapter called "Shūketsu Hen" required the player to have finished Kain's Tale before it could be unlocked. The finale arrived in two separate parts, titled "The True Moon" and "The Planet Eater." Looking back after release, Tokita called the format "a revolutionary experiment in an era before DLC, especially on flip phones," and singled out the final chapter's freedom to choose the number of party members as a particular highlight.

• 3. Mechanics Old and New

  ›

  The Active Time Battle system at the heart of the game was not invented here; it originated with Final Fantasy IV, and The After Years carried it forward intact. The development team also preserved graphical enhancements from the WonderSwan Color and Game Boy Advance versions of Final Fantasy IV. What they added sits on top of that foundation rather than replacing it.

  The most significant new system is the "Age of the Moon." Lunar phases shift each time a character rests at an inn or after a set period of in-game time, and those phases alter the physical and magical attack powers of both player characters and enemies. Certain rare monsters appear only during specific lunar phases, tying exploration to the cycle. The second major addition is the "Band" ability: two or more characters combine separate commands into a single coordinated attack, drawing MP from everyone involved. The system draws a comparison to the Double and Triple Techs of Chrono Trigger. There are over seventy different Band combinations in total, making the system one of the deepest mechanical layers in the game.

  Sprite artist Kazuko Shibuya, who had created 2D character art for the first six Final Fantasy games, returned to craft new, higher-quality character graphics. Yoshitaka Amano came back as image illustrator, with character designs handled by Akira Oguro, a storyboard artist for Square Enix and a previous colleague of Tokita's.

• 4. New Faces, Old Shadows

  ›

  Ceodore Harvey, Prince of Baron and son of Cecil and Rosa, is the first new character the player controls. He is nervous and acutely aware that his parents are legends. His initiation into the Red Wings sends him into a cave to retrieve what turns out to be a rat's tail, the point being that the test was never about the object but about proving something to himself.

  The game's villains are introduced in similarly veiled terms. The "Mysterious Woman" can summon Eidolons and moves through the world collecting Crystals. The "Hooded Man" wears purple robes and seems to know things about Cecil's past that a stranger should not. The "Man in Black" uses powerful black magic and refuses to explain his history. These withheld identities are structural devices, feeding the foreshadowing and cliffhangers that Tokita built into the episodic format. When the Hooded Man is revealed to be the true Kain and the Kain who has been collecting Crystals is described as his "dark half," the game has already spent multiple chapters building that tension.

  The Maenads, the race of identical women revealed late in the story, reframe the entire conflict. What appeared to be a single antagonist turns out to be a category of beings engineered to retrieve Crystals from life-sustaining worlds. Their creator, an entity called The Creator, designed the system after his own race failed to evolve, and he treats any world that does not reach its fullest potential as expendable. When the party defeats him, he thanks them, suggesting some form of regret for what he set in motion.

• 5. Ports, Remakes, Collections

  ›

  A rating filed with the ESRB for a Wii game titled Final Fantasy IV: The After Years surfaced in late February 2009, before Square Enix had made any announcement. That leak triggered speculation about a North American release through WiiWare, which was confirmed at the Game Developers Conference. Square Enix also trademarked The After Years in Europe, with a PEGI rating appearing on the game's official site.

  The WiiWare port brought several changes beyond the mobile original. Screen resolution increased, menus became clearer, and character portraits were improved. The English localization followed the writing style and name translations established by the Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy IV. A handful of visual edits were made for the Western release, including adjustments to Ceodore's official character artwork and alterations to the clothing of several female characters. The episodic release structure was also modified: players purchased a main story bundle containing the prologue and the Ceodore and Kain tales, with supplemental chapters available as add-ons, and the penultimate chapter and two-part finale were combined into a single final installment titled "The Crystals: The Planet Eater."

  In 2011, the game was bundled with Final Fantasy IV and a newly written bridging chapter, Final Fantasy IV: Interlude, as the PlayStation Portable compilation Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection. A 3D remake, built in the same visual style as the Nintendo DS version of Final Fantasy IV, launched on iOS and Android on the 24th of November 2013, and arrived on Steam for Windows on the 12th of May 2015.

• 6. How Critics Responded

  ›

  In August 2008, within the first five months of the Japanese mobile release, The After Years crossed one million downloads, not counting free downloads of the prologue chapter. By December 2010, paid downloads had surpassed four and a half million.

  Critical response to the WiiWare port split along predictable lines. The game holds an overall score of 69 out of 100 at Metacritic. IGN awarded it 8 out of 10, describing the story as "engrossing but mysterious" and acknowledging that the dated graphics and gameplay were part of the charm rather than a defect. GameSpot gave it 5.5 out of 10, citing a "disjointed, poorly constructed narrative," an excessively high encounter rate, and content described as "recycled" from its predecessor, covering music, graphics, environments, and story. Jason Schreier of Kotaku offered a strongly negative assessment as well. On the other end of the spectrum, Nintendo Power nominated the game for both Game of the Year and WiiWare Game of the Year.

  Much of the division traces back to the same quality: the game's deep reliance on Final Fantasy IV's assets, locations, and music. Critics who valued nostalgia and mechanical depth found it rewarding; those who measured it against the standards of a fully original title found it wanting. Nobuo Uematsu's original score from Final Fantasy IV forms the backbone of the soundtrack, with new compositions added alongside it. Cecil and Rosa's orders at the end of the story, disarming Baron's airships so they can be used to help the other kingdoms rebuild, is the kind of detail that players who loved the original found satisfying and newcomers had no frame for.