Our FF4 sequel was better. (part one)

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is pure, uncut fanwankery. This is the kind of game you chop up on a mirror and snort through a rolled-up $20. If you’re a fan of FF4 it is impossible to play this sequel and not enjoy it at least from a “squee! all my favorite characters on parade!” standpoint.

The dopey story, however, plus the slightly mismatched sprites and re-used music and rehashing of just about every adventure Cecil and his gang had in the original… it all strikes me very much like someone’s RPG Maker fan game. Which is precisely what some friends and I decided to make a few years back. But get this: ours would have been better.

From the outset we had two very broad goals in mind: one, we wanted to avoid fanwankery as much as possible. None of this “go through all the old dungeons again” nonsense, no “every fanfic where Kain becomes a Paladin and Rydia falls in love with Edge comes to life” malarky. And two, we wanted the story to be comprehensible by people who hadn’t played the original game. The After Years fails spectacularly on both these points.

It’s only natural, then, that our sequel took place some sixty years after the original, and most of the main cast was dead.

So for the next three days I’ll be spilling my guts about Final Fantasy IV: Crystal Sonata, the fan game that never was. A lot of it will be off memory, but I’ll also be compiling whatever old notes I can scrape up and comparing them where applicable to the real, official sequel Square pooped out onto some cell phones.

Part One: The Backstory

The world of FF4 is an interesting place. During the game you have all these spread-out, somewhat isolationist kingdoms that didn’t interact with each other. Cecil needed the aid of each of them at different points in the game to complete his goals, however, and in one particularly powerful scene at the end they all band together to do battle with the alien robot tower tearing the world apart. So when we started piecing together what had happened in the past sixty years, we knew two things: 1) the world was going to be much smaller, metaphorically speaking and 2) nobody was going to let Baron be a military superpower ever again.

About a year after Cecil and co. returned from the moon a summit of world leaders was hosted and a nonaggression treaty was drafted to usher in an era of peace and mutual benefit for all nations involved. The only nation that had to make concessions during this summit was Baron, who kind of started the whole mess to begin with. Before anyone else would sign Baron had to agree to dismantle the Red Wings and share their airship technology with the rest of the world. Since most of the room was filled with people Cecil trusted with his life (Edge, Edward, Yang, Giott, etc.) he had no problem agreeing to these terms.

Over the next few years every nation prospered. Everyone had their own fleet of airships used primarily for trade. Only Eblan had military airships, a peacekeeping force called the Falcons. Damcyan was rebuilt, but Edward stepped down as monarch, establishing a republic similar to the one used in Troia. The bond between Baron and Mysidia became very strong after the Devil’s Road was widened and made safe for travelers.

Cid was the first of the FF4 cast to die, of natural causes. Palom was the second; he voyaged out to sea in search of an ultimate black magic spell he found referenced in some of Tellah’s most ancient texts, and his boat was lost in a storm. (It wasn’t Leviathan’s fault this time, honest!)

During this time some of the cast was reproducing. A year or two after the summit Yang and his wife had a son named Tai. Many years later, when Rosa was in her early forties, she gave birth to her daughter Crystal. Cecil chose the name to honor the Lunarian’s crystals he had become so familiar with, but around the world it was viewed as ambitious, especially by Troia.

During the Lunar War, Troia was the country that had lost and contributed the least. Since they were never sacked by Baron they didn’t have to devote any resources to restoration. They therefore had a jump start on airship production and development of trade on their continent. Also, and more importantly, nobody in Troian power had personally served in the war alongside Cecil and his comrades, so they understood the least that Baron’s ambition wasn’t the result of human conceit. The combination of increased political clout backed by a lessened amount of responsibility led them to fire the first shot in the second war: they cut off trade with Baron and threatened to do the same with Damcyan and Fabul unless they followed suit.

Damcyan, being a fledgling republic and having been devastated by war, agreed. When Edward publically spoke out against the decision he was exiled from his own country. Fabul, being led by one of Cecil’s strongest allies, disagreed and that winter, cut off from the Troian and Damcian goods they had become so reliant on, was very harsh to its people. Yang died of illness and his son Tai took the throne. Tai was more practical than his father and joined the Troian alliance, leaving Baron alone on the continent.

Somewhere in here Porom succeeded the old-ass Elder of Mysidia as well, having mastered the arts of white and black magic. She continued to aid Baron by keeping trade lines open with Agart and the Dwarfs, and by fortifying both Mysidia and Baron with magical runes that could repel aerial attacks in case of war.

The first military strike was also made by Troia, but was repelled by the Falcons. The hero of the battle was a man named Cedric who was promoted to commodore of Eblan’s fleet for his courage.

That’s the world Cecil’s daughter grew up in: the nations of the world had factioned off with Troia/Damcyan/Fabul on one side and Baron/Mysidia/Eblan on the other. Hostilities continued to rise until, in time, Troia’s own fleet matched that of Eblan. Cecil (who was very much an idealist and not very effective as a king, as it turns out) eventually caved to public pressure and agreed to re-instate the Red Wings as a countermeasure. He traveled to Eblan to negotiate his new fleet’s construction with Edge and the Falcon engineers.

During that visit Cedric suddenly staged a very violent, very bloody coup against the monarchy of Eblan. Cecil and Edge were both killed in the battle, and overnight Eblan became a purely military dictatorship. Shortly after that the Falcons attacked and destroyed the island of Agart with some advanced form of magical weaponry, cutting off the link between the Overworld and Underworld.

So that’s where our sequel would have picked up: Troia is an ambitious nation which has Damcyan and Fabul firmly under its thumb, Baron and Mysidia are left in a position of weakness, and nobody knows what the hell is going on in Eblan. Over the next few years Eblan and Troia have a few spectacular airship battles, but nothing world-altering. Half the cast of FF4 is dead and the other half are too old to do much of anything about it; the only ones still around are Rosa (who very stubbornly refuses to let her daughter raise an army, as it goes against Cecil’s vision of peace), Edward (who lacks any strength to do anything) and Porom (who is now about as old as the previous elder was when Cecil met him).

That just leaves Rydia and Kain, who had disappeared years and years prior. We decided to just write Kain out completely. “Cecil’s traitorous friend vanished mysteriously and without a trace” was good enough for us, and besides, purposely excluding the #1 source of FF4 fanwank served our goals just fine. Rydia, on the other hand… well, we’ll save that for tomorrow’s post.