“Bulls**t,” proclaims Jack, as he pops in his AirPods, blasts some nu-metal, and walks away. Most of us have seen this clip by now, and it is hilarious. It feels out of place, unnatural, and so incredibly goofy – especially for a Final Fantasy game – despite being played entirely straight. There’s no laugh track, this is not some work of high satire, and big guffaws certainly don’t seem to be the aim. Instead, this is camp made manifest – pure absurdity that will make you roll your eyes and hang your head whenever there are more than three lines of dialogue. And it is art.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin feels so silly any time the characters start talking, but Final Fantasy games always do, right? Ramblings about Heroes of Light, Gilgamesh, crystals, the lifestream – it has always been nonsense, and finally, a character is here to say it like it is. Jack is our protagonist. He doesn’t want to listen to lengthy monologues, and he doesn’t seem to have any interests outside of awful music and killing Chaos – yes, the big bad is called Chaos. He’s the ideal foil to those flamboyant RPG characters that would like you to sit back and enjoy a thirty-minute long history lesson. He tells people to shut up, give him the important information, and walks away after.
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You start to look forward to those cutscenes, just to enjoy Jack’s hostility towards anything that isn’t battering a boss with a six-foot sword. You need that abrupt, absurd comic relief because there aren’t many other reasons to keep playing. The storyline sees mysterious crystals enabling time travel, allowing Jack and his pals to experience other worlds and times, essentially traversing an abbreviated version of the mainline Final Fantasy universe in a polo shirt. Each level is based on an area that will be familiar to die-hard fans, complete with a soundtrack to invoke some nostalgia, but how recognizable these areas actually are is pretty hit and miss. They share the aesthetics of memorable classic environments, but the layout is some of the most standard and boring you can ask for in an action game like this.
There’s no getting around it, Stranger of Paradise is heavily influenced by Dark Souls and Team Ninja’s own Nioh. “Cubes” (the cast literally call them that) look like RPG save points and act just like a bonfire or checkpoint. Die, and you can retry from there, or you can rest at them to respawn enemies and earn back Potions to heal with. The levels each attempt a sense of looping progress and shortcuts to make traversal easier, and you’ll see where these shortcuts should be as you progress – a ladder to drop or door to unlock – but you’ll usually locate the boss or next set of Cubes before finding the shortcut helpful.
Levels are pretty linear, much closer to a traditional action game than the labyrinthine legacy dungeons you explore in Elden Ring. Enemies can almost all be run past with little issue, and only tougher sub-bosses that hold keys really need to be battled properly. Demonic mouths that block passageways and spawn monsters are another roadblock, but these won’t come back after a single defeat. The game tries its best to force you to play, but in some situations you will, inevitably, end up just running straight past a gang of frustrating foes.
Running through feels like a more valid tactic here than in most games thanks to the fact that there are no real experience points to speak of. Your characters don’t level up. Instead they have Job Levels and multiple Jobs, which change how characters behave on the battlefield. Jack can swap between two Jobs mid-battle, while other team members will need their loadouts set, with fewer Job options. It’s nice to have a variety of Jobs at your disposal, with most of them offering the use of new weapons and new combo patterns to learn in battle. Unfortunately, a few of them are less useful, like the magic Mage class, which requires time to charge magical spells, and then asks you to jump back into battle to actually earn the action points to use those spells. When an enemy calls for elemental attacks, using the Mage class feels like a punishment.
Luckily, each and every class has access to the Soul Shield. Tap Circle and the Soul Shield acts as a parry, able to negate damage in return for a bit of your Break Gauge. If your Break Gauge depletes you’ll be a sitting duck, but if you successfully time Soul Shields repeatedly, your Break Gauge won’t actually break, essentially sitting on 1HP indefinitely. In these moments it feels like you’re dancing on a knife-edge, a single wrong move away from failure – and that’s when victory is the sweetest. Soul Shield acts as the perfect counter to any enemy attack that isn’t a grab, and using it against bosses makes feel invincible.
It’s a good thing the combat manages to hold together so incredibly well in those tense moments because it’s very tedious otherwise. Fighting against most bosses feels fraught and dangerous, but exciting. Fighting against weaker foes just feels boring, which is exactly when you’ll realize you can run through stages so effortlessly and quickly. The only thing you miss by not taking down foes is gear – something you will acquire so much of you’ll become sick of editing your loadout. Gear is important and decides how well you’ll fare in any given level, so much so that you can return to older levels to complete side quests. In practice though, these feel like excuses to go back and grind so you don’t fall behind.
This game has launched right alongside Elden Ring, and therefore comparisons are inevitably going to be made – not very flattering ones, especially with the incredibly rough visual quality of this game in Performance mode, which manages to stutter often and still look worse than a PlayStation 3 game in places. That’s not hyperbole either, Final Fantasy XIII absolutely looks more polished and impressive on PS3 than this game does playing natively on a PS5. But instead of comparing it to Elden Ring and Final Fantasy games of the past, it’s better off compared to a solid hack-and-slash action game.
Bear with me for a moment, but consider this: flick on “Story” difficulty. On Normal mode you can expect a challenging Nioh-like experience, and on Hard things get intense for those true masocore fans. But Story mode makes everything feel like a more common hack-and-slasher, Ninja Gaiden meets Devil May Cry, with sweet combos and flashy attacks everywhere. You won’t be uploading videos of your boss defeats onto YouTube, but it’s actually a great romp.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin shouldn’t be taken seriously, even if it plays everything with a completely straight face. Anyone expecting an in-depth Final Fantasy tale and memorable characters are going to be sorely disappointed, as are some of those thinking this is essentially Nioh 3. This is a dumb action game about dumb boys swinging big, dumb swords, and that’s all it needs to be. Put on some nu-metal and enjoy.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
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