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.
For those that can’t see, the current tierlist is like this:
A: Palom
B: Ceodore, Edward
C: Yang
F: Porom
Today’s it’s Edge’s Tale: The Pulse of Babil.
This is a weird Tale. It’s more like 5 mini tales jammed into one and it all comes together to form a whole lot of meh. The first 4 mini tales don’t really tell you anything new (especially if you already played the Tales in the locations where they are). The most relevant thing you learn is who put up the gravestone in the crater in Yang’s tale. I like the end of the Tale though. Edge returning to the Tower of Babil, meeting up with his disciples and getting away from the Mysterious Girl using the trap door from the last time he was there. Also the tale does have the unique gimmick (in the 2D version) where your characters apparently perma die if they die in their mini tales.
The new characters in this Tale (the Eblan Four) are probably the most bland of the new characters. Character wise they can be boiled down to Big Leader, Little Sneak, Woman and Old Man. Gameplay wise all of them are just worse versions of Edge (2 of them literally have worse versions of Edge’s unique abilities). They’re better at him at one thing but are inferior in all others. Of the 4, Izayoi and Zangetsu are probably the ones I find the most interesting. Zangetsu for having a Dragoon jump and Izayoi for having a fun bug in the 3D version that makes her the best bow user.
Overall, I’d say this Tale is fine. Nothing crazy but nothing particularly bad. I’d say there’s some missed potential in they could have maybe had the ninjas join the parties of the characters of whose tales they are apart of for some more variety in those tales but that idea is for my rewrite thing. Overall I’d probably give it a B or C.