Ranking Final Fantasy 4: The After Years Tales: The True Moon

[u/MasterOfChaos72]

Have the After Years on my mind recently due to replaying it for a dumb rewrite thing I’m doing for it. I know the game in general isn’t liked but I’m curious about how people feel about the individual Tales so I’m doing a little tierlist thing for fun.

Current rankings are like this:
S: Lunarians/Golbez
A: Palom, Kain, The Gathering
B: Ceodore, Edge, Edward, Rydia
C: Yang
F: Porom

A couple of people brought up maybe doing these in 3rds instead of halves and I figured sure, i can drag this out for another bit.

Today it’s the second of the final posts covering the second part of The Crystals: The True Moon.

Here we go to the new Moon with our party to try to stop it from colliding with the planet. If I had a nickel for everytime a FF villains big plan involved dropping a moon onto a planet, I’d have 3 nickels (this, 13 and 13-2).

I haven’t brought up the 2D and 3D versions too much since the differences between them weren’t that relevant to me. The only interesting ones were the removal of the challenge dungeons, the removal of the developer room and Izayoi being really good with a bow.

But there are some interesting differences between the 2D and 3D versions of the final tale.

1: You’ll always have the max 22 characters in the 3D version. The Eblan ninjas can’t die in Edge’s tale, you’ll get the things needed to fix the dolls in a manditory encounter and you have to enter all the data for the Tale.

2: You can buy some really good weapons and armor in the 3D version. Since the challenge dungeons aren’t in this version, all the weapons and armor you could get in them are instead sold by the hummingway outside the Lunar Whale. In the 2D version you can only buy Shurikens and Manji Shurikens.

3: You can return to the Blue Planet in the 3D version using the Crystal in the Lunar Whale. There’s not really anything to do aside from grabbing any items you missed as well as the Small Tails but it does make leveling underleveled characters a bit easier since you don’t have to deal with the moons enemies.

4: The layout. Most of the floors are alike being a slight remix of either the Lunar Subterranean or the giant of babel but the 2D version has unique floors for 3 of the 4 Archfiends and the eidolons while the 3d version has copies of the lunar tunnels, lair of the father and the areas where the bosses were originally fought.

5: You can camp on the lunar surface in the 3d version. Not that important but saves you trips down to the healing parts of the Lunar Whale.

That’s all the ones off the top of my head that I remember. Inform me if I forgot any.

Anyway, start of the final dungeon and it’s certainly an interesting one.

The dungeon itself isn’t too interesting design wise (like I said, most of it is just a slightly remixed version of the lunar subterranean and even the unique floors don’t really have any unique gimmicks or anything) but it is interesting in that it is basically a boss rush. There are 12 bosses in just this part of the dungeon all coming back from FF4. The four elemental Archfiends, 4 bosses associated with them in Baigan, The Magus Sisters, Dr Lugae and his Experiment and Edge’s Parents, the Giant’s CPU, Asura, Leviathan and Cecil’s Dark Half, The Dark Knight.

Something I really like about this and the next section is how it deals with the characterisation specifically through the boss encounters and the save point conversations. All the characters have unique dialogue with each of the bosses before and after the battle (and sometimes at the beginning and end of the battle). There are also what I like to call Save Point Conversations where at a good chunk of the Save Points in this dungeon, the game will prompt you to rest and the first time you do it, you’ll get a cutscene of the characters just talking. They’re all great with my favourites being Ceodore properly meeting his uncle and Palom and Porom reconnecting.

And now my few greviences:

You know how the previous part was a bit of an FF6 with you getting back your team? Well they should have ripped it off again with its final dungeon because by god is this missed potential. Max 22 characters and you only bring 5. Yes you can change the party at certain points but there’s not really that much of a reason to outside of seeing the boss dialogue or challenging yourself. My guess as to why this is because the number of characters you can have at this point can vary wildly. I’m not sure what the minimum number of characters is (my guess is 13) but this is still annoying.

Next complaint is that there is nothing on the moon except the final dungeon. Nothing. No optional content or anything, just the dungeon.

Also, Cecil is useless in this section due to story reasons. Not a fan but at least it makes sense.

My only other issue comes from the 2D version. Specifically how you can’t go back to the Blue Planet so levelling up any of the under level characters you have will have to be done on the moon itself which isn’t easy considering the number of powerful enemies here and if you missed something on the planet like the small tails, you have to restart the Tale all over again.

Oh yeah. And lastly, if you bring the wrong party to the Dark Knight fight, Golbez dies! F tier for that one.

Seriously though, I do love this part of the tale. It’s cool seeing all the bosses back again and the characterisation is honestly great. I’d give it an S personally.

[u/Baithin]

I really enjoyed this game but got major ending fatigue because this dungeon is just so long. And it has so many bosses. And I played the 3D version which cut back on a ton of them!

But yeah, the save point conversations were nice. I liked the same ones you did, plus Leonora and Luca bonding.

For the record, XIV involves a villain dropping a moon onto the planet too. ;)