Sometime last week, I noticed a new Wiiware (a downloadable game designed for the Nintendo Wii) called Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. Final Fantasy IV, or Final Fantasy 2 in America, is one of my favorite games of the franchise. It has fantastic story, characters, music, etc., and I logged quite a few hours playing that game.

For those of you that don’t know, even there are numerous games bearing the “Final Fantasy” name, each incarnation is generally not a continuation of the next as you typically see. They generally don’t use the same characters, plots, maps, worlds, etc., and instead all tend to share a similar overall unifying theme (the world is in peril, you need to save it, you embark on an epic quest, etc.), which serves as the continuity between games.

So when I saw a “sequel” to FFIV which did include all my favorite characters on a new quest, I was excited! I downloaded it yesterday morning. The plot is essentially that it is 17 years after the end of the first game and 2 of the main characters, Cecil and Rosa, have had a child together named Ceodore. The game begins with you taking control of Ceodore on this test to become a full fledged knight of the Red Wings. The story takes off from there.

The good news is that I, who LOVED the original, was totally satisfied by returning to my old familiar maps, music, and favorite characters.

Or at least I was… until I beat the game on my second sitting. My timer read 5 hours 30 minutes. For $8, that’s a better cost/minute ratio then going to the movie theater, but not great considering I’d still be playing the original FFIV if I had downloaded that for [probably] the same $8 on the virtual console (if it were released yet, that is).

Also, did I say that I beat the game? Well… kinda. I beat what I downloaded. If I want to play the rest of the game, I have to download each additional chapter (13 of them at $3 each) and then buy the final chapters to wrap them all up ($8 extra dollars). So the total cost for the whole game is $36! That’s almost the cost of a new Wii game… and this one is in 16-bit graphics!

You know, maybe I could even justify the cost. But then again, since it’s a Wiiware game, I can’t even send it to Jeff when I’m finished so he can play it. It’s stuck to my Wii. Pretty clever, Wii, but pretty lame too!

The worst part is… I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until I start buying the additional chapters!