Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (Wii)
[spoiler]The last tale came out today, and I nearly forgot about it.
Anyway, I played up to the moon. The beginning was kind of interesting: You get free reign of the world for the first time, and need to visit every place on the map. The goal of this is never really stated, but it turns out you need to get Rydia's Eidolons back...or kill them, it actually doesn't seem to make any difference. (I killed Ramuh and Shiva before I realized you didn't actually need to kill them, just weaken them. It's kind of like the Rubicante fight in the original; if you want to see his final words, you need to fight very carefully so you don't over damage him. Same thing here, but with a much more reasonable amount of remaining HP.) After this, you get access to Baron castle, and then fly to the moon on the Lunar Whale.
Once on the moon, you have access to everyone except for the useless nameless characters (surprise, surprise! all of that wasted EXP...), and can form your own party. Amusingly, Cecil is basically wheelchair Cloud at this point, yet you can still drag him into battle and have full control over him. The moon's surface is completely different than before, and is actually a dungeon; you can't save anywhere, and can dash with the B button. Very strange. You have access to the subterrane through a crater rather than the crystal palace. The subterrane itself is actually mirrored for some reason, with some minor edits that weren't there when Golbez and FuSoYa last ran through. You fight bosses from the original game, released from crystals. I killed Baigan, but then got killed by the magus sisters, who are much more brutal than originally. It probably doesn't help that I chose to take my weaker characters, rather than tearing through with my best.
I hope I'm not too close to the end, but I have a feeling this will be the last dungeon...[/spoiler]
[spoiler]This moon never ends. I gave up on using my weaker characters, and just took my best in with me. Killed all of the revived bosses (magus sisters, Lugae + Barnabas, CPU + Nodes, Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo, Barbariccia, Rubicante), then reached a new area with a new tileset. Much like some of the new monsters, this tileset doesn't match the rest of the graphics at all, and I swear I've seen it before somewhere. Anyway, in here you fight a lot of enemies that were previously in the Lunar Ruins, which was a bit of a surprise, and you also get a lot of the GBA version exclusive equipment. Te bosses here, so far, have been from FF1, FF2, FF3, and FF5, so I'm guessing FF6 is up next. The translation has kind of fallen apart here, though, with well-established enemies/bosses being named differently than normal (Beelzebul, Lord Dragon (Shinryu), Coeurl Legina), and I now have the Excalipar (they seem to have settle on "poor" lately, "pur" was used frequently, but never "par"). The dialogue itself has held up well, thankfully.
For the bosses, there's not much to say. They replicated some of their behavior, while FF4-izing it. Ahriman (the FF3 one, not the common enemy) was particularly fun. It's a ripoff of Plague; it casts Doom on the party, then starts Hasting everyone (which actually speeds up the timer in this version). The thing is, you don't have nearly enough time to kill it in one go, you need to actually kill off two or more of your characters, so you can revive your others for the next "round." Every time Doom status expires it casts it again, but it doesn't use any other attacks - once you get this down it's really simple, but still, a fun battle due to the unconventional strategy.
I got killed by Lord Dragon; one tidal wave and I was gone. I didn't try fighting Omega, but Gilgamesh was pretty pathetic. One thing I wish they did was import the boss music from these games for these battles, that would've been awesome. I think I need to do some leveling/ I haven't had any real trouble with the other bosses, but the random encounters are really wearing me down. My party averages about level 60 now.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Lord Dragon and Omega are optional, thankfully. I had a feeling that they would be, since they aren't found in crystals, but I wasn't sure. Only Gilgamesh and Atmos (yes, Atmos) had to be killed. Atmos was pretty pathetic, all he did was cast Meteor every turn, which wasn't enough to cause any real concern. I went down to the FF6 bosses and killed Ghost Train. They imported its Wheel attack (which makes the character it hit spin backwards, hilariously), and it can use Shiva's Diamond Dust for some reason. Not a difficult fight, but not as easy as FF6, since you can't kill it in one hit with a Phoenix Down.
Now Ultros, Ultros is a bastard. He starts out really weak, he has his tentacle attack, but that's of no real concern. He retains his fire weakness, so getting 9999 against him is easy enough. The problem is, after you get him weaken enough, he'll absorb all elements, start healing himself, and using Tidal Wave. Tidal Wave is non-elemental, and gets stronger the more HP he has. He can deal about 4000 damage with it if he's healed up, which he almost always is. There's no way I can survive that at this point.
I got bored with dying, and decided to use the interdimensional elevator to teleport out and bring my weaker characters through. I have a feeling Calca and Brina will be my strongest characters, they're out-performing level 50 characters at level 30. Their HP growth sucks though, so they die really easily. Their special skills aren't that great either, but stat-wise, they're pretty good.[/spoiler]
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