I happened to come across this after joining the discord, and it looked interesting enough to give a try! I do not regret the fact that I did, because it was an enjoyable, if brief experience!

ATFW takes the familiar FF2/4 gameplay and adds a few new features to keep it fresh on top of of a brand-new story. You play as Furio, the son of FF2’s Edge, who takes on various missions around the world. Familiar locations are nice to see again and NPC dialogue within them is humorous, so talking to everyone at least once is totally worth it. Some locations have been revamped and the maps are slightly different in some places. Some new locations have been added.

There are several features not present in vanilla FF2, the one you encounter first and most notably the mercenary system. Mercenaries are story-less party members that you can swap in and out of your party, which gives you some variety. If you feel you want some stronger healing, you can hire a white mage. If you want TWICE the stealing and some physical damage, a ninja is great. The way this was implemented makes this mechanic fun to use, as you can only have one mercenary at a time but if a high leveled mercenary leaves, you don’t lose that progress when you hire them again. This encourages experimentation with the system.

Another feature is the limit break system, where you gain the option sometimes to pull off a powerful attack when at critical HP. Generally these are very useful and a few times really turned the tide of an otherwise loss for me. Some are more useful than others, and the gamble of having a low HP character use their limit vs potentially dying before they can use it is worth it in my opinion.

At times, the game will allow you to make choices and these WILL affect important things. Some of them won’t be fleshed out until later entries. This adds some replay value, as you might want to create an additional save to see what some choices might have affected.

The main character is a ninja and I think the gameplay supports this rather well, especially early on. An aspect of being a ninja is preparedness, and generally throughout the first part of this hack the player is rewarded if they take the time to, for example, steal from a boss. The item stolen might be useful for the next boss. Having a stock of certain items on hand might make a fight vastly easier. Granted, this stuff helps in a any RPG but it feels more ninja-esque here given the main character’s profession. Choosing the right mercenary for a given area or boss really matters. I was very surprised at what my black mage mercenary could do even in fights where magic wasn’t the best answer. Status effect use can be very strong against some creatures.

Without spoiling, the story is a definite divergence from the “canon” timeline of The After Years, but it’s an interesting one with enough going on and enough intrigue that I would happily take the time to play through another installment. Great work! Definitely the start of something good.