The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 12
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
I am not sure how to classify the ending sequence of The After Years, I’m really not. Because on the one hand, the game basically decided to just throw everything to the wind and fling the entire group into nothing more than a huge, lingering dungeon crawl to cap off the game. That’s sort of the height of laziness. On the other hand, it’s the first time in all of this installment that we actually get some choice and control over the characters, even if it’s just insofar as setting up the party.
Final Fantasy IV is the only game in the franchise that really took that option out of player hands in the first place, I’ll note, but that’s a different discussion.
Regardless of that, it is what it is, and we have all of the team members assembled in the Lunar Whale as we speed off to the final confrontation. Which seems like a long time for us, the players, because getting to this point has easily taken 40 hours. For the characters this is happening over the span of a couple days. Bit of a difference in scale.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 11
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
My impression of The After Years has been kind of mixed, but I don’t think you can really talk about the game thus far without pointing out that it is, in fact, nine smaller games. At this point, the actual events have all taken place over a very short span of time, and the characters in these stories haven’t done a whole hell of a lot, especially due to the fact that there’s no space for upward motion. Ursula and Yang get two hours of development, awesome, but they don’t show up in any significant fashion in the prior or later tales.
In short, the whole thing doesn’t feel like a cohesive whole at this point, just a series of vignettes that are trying to link together in a vague fashion. But this is the point when everything does link up and all of the characters come together. After lots of hints and little pieces of the whole picture, the last chapters start up, and they reveal what’s going on, why we’ve had all these thin rehashes of old bosses and encounters, and what it’s all supposed to mean.
So it’s time for the whole thing to start feeling like a Final Fantasy title.
Sequel ties
The fact that she could theoretically be dead is apparently something people have a great deal of investment in.
In the earliest days of video games, it was very easy to understand how sequels to a game would work. You had a title, then you had a number after that title. Maybe a subtitle if you were feeling fancy. Once you loaded up that sequel, you were starting back from the same position as someone who had never played the predecessor, because of course you were. That was just how it worked. There’s a reason why early series either had stories that were only loosely connected by theme (Final Fantasy or Ultima, for example), protagonists who had reason not to carry things over from prior titles (Metal Gear), or were produced by companies that don’t care about your stupid continuity (Every Capcom Game Ever).
We are no longer in those earliest days now, though. In order to properly play Dragon Age: Inquisition, I had to log into an external website and recount all of the things I had done during my playthroughs of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II to ensure that the world was still one I recognized. And that’s worth discussing, because if you think about it that’s both kind of strange and kind of brilliant.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 10
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
All right, people, let’s talk about villains.
Redeeming a villain is at once the best and worst thing you can do to them. It’s super tempting, obviously, because when written well a villain is easily one of the most fascinating characters in a story. So now you get one of the most interesting characters in the story as someone the audience can actually cheer for, which is why the temptation arises. Yet a redeemed villain has to be different than their original villainous incarnation, often meaning that they set aside the cool stuff that made them likable in the first place.
Yes, it can be done; Emma Frost was a prime example of taking a villainous character and making her a protagonist with good aims rather than necessarily a hero in her early days (that’s kind of been undone with years of character decay). It just doesn’t happen frequently. I bring all of that up because The After Years is wandering into that territory now, and given the game’s narrative chops and track record up to this point, you will hopefully forgive me if I don’t have the utmost confidence in the game’s ability to do a complex concept justice.
Hard Project: Guitar Hero
I have no regrets about five-starring Through the Fire and the Flames, but I think I was pretty much done afterward.
In 2004, nobody would have predicted that one of the most popular video games would involve standing in front of your television with a fake plastic guitar and pretending to play music. In 2011, the idea seems pretty ridiculous. And yet the Guitar Hero franchise exploded in 2005, enjoyed huge popularity, then violently collapsed and can now be found littering bargain trade-in bins sans guitar. Not that it’s alone in this; the Rock Band franchise dropped in the same timeframe, which for those who don’t remember was the spiritual successor by the same team as the original Guitar Hero.
Fads in gaming are nothing new, but the sheer popularity and the sudden drop-off is worth exploring. It’s an astonishingly quick rise and fall, and it’s not as if the core idea – “pretend to play music” – suddenly became forbidden like whatever the plot was in that Aerosmith video game. But when you think about it, it’s less a matter of surprise that the games didn’t last forever and more a surprise that they were ever a thing at all, because they’re the definition of a hard project.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 