So I played through
Final Fantasy IV ~Interlude~ for the first time
This is a game I've put off for quite literally a decade because when it was new, I wanted to play through all of Final Fantasy IV again, so I did most of that and then dropped it and just recently picked it back up and finished it off, so now I can FINALLY start Interlude, and, well...
Interlude feels like it was written to originally be an OVA, like a little single-episode anime designed to promote the collection, but was later just remade in the game's engine. Throughout the game, it has jump cuts to other characters after scenes like you'd see in a television show, and other things that feel tailor made to the format, like how it's all strictly linear and all the airship travel is exclusively used in cutscenes.
The writing was alright, it fit the characters' personalities and since it's an early 2011 game, it's free of Clown World meddling; but considering there's not much actually going on, there's not a lot to say. The game was extremely short, yet I still had to look up the plot synopsis to remember what even happened.
Other than that, the vast majority of the game is hiking through Mt. Hobs (again), the Sealed Cave (again) and the Tower of Babil (again) because the game needed to be padded out. This would have been fine in the base game, since it's a JRPG, and battles are never truly wasted, since you're continually building your levels and earning money to eventually face the final boss. But Interlude is its own thing: you can't import a completed save from FF4, and you can't import an Interlude save into After Years. You start at level 32 and you still have to grind a little bit throughout the game, and it was kind of annoying because I'd rather have preferred to import my complete FF4 save and just have Interlude scale up the enemies so I could put the experience and treasure towards the Lunar Ruins. Plus, why is everyone back down to level 32, when your average level upon completing FF4 will be around 70? Did everyone's muscles just atrophy at a breakneck pace over the past year?
When it was new I heard someone say Interlude was only about an hour long, and I wish it were only an hour long because my game clear time clocked in at exactly three hours, and it just kinda felt like three hours of nothing. Every plot point could have easily been covered in a 20-minute long anime OVA, and it still wouldn't be very compelling, but I'd have enjoyed it more for both the novelty of seeing a Final Fantasy IV anime and also for not sucking up an extra 2h40m of my life.
I guess I'm ready to move onto After Years now, but even FF fans always seem to say that the game is just mediocre at best, trash garbage at worst, and it really doesn't help that it came out during a time when Square-Enix games were abysmal across the board. Not to mention, it was designed as a featurephone game, being released initially for specifically this one:
so I doubt I'll ever get very far
So that's my review for FF4 Interlude, don't play it, just read a plot synopsis instead, and I'm giving this one a
3/10 
