Review of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin – a great comedy

We haven’t had a video game in nearly a decade that was such a powerful and appreciative meme generator – perhaps the only comparable game on this site in 2013 was Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. The utterly absurd dialogue of Final Fantasy’s latest “shutdown” seems to be spit out by a random word generator after someone has fed a Final Fantasy and modern hip-hop dictionary. Here you will find situations where the main character Jack listens to pop music through bluetooth headphones between individual swords and magical battles with dragons and demons. In his group, everyone greets in the style of “punch”. In short, well, what a frame from the movie, this is a pearl (and there are really a lot of them). But what is the game itself?

• Platform: PS5 (peer review), PS4, PC, X1, XSX | S
• Publication date: 15. 3. 2022
• Producer: Ninja Team (Japan)
• Genre: Japanese Action RPG
• Czech location: Not
• Multiplayer: yes (co-op pro 3)
• Data to download: 71 GB
• Game time: 20+ hours
• Price: 1799 CZK (Xzone)

Final Fantasy Metaverse

Square Enix’s marketing team went to extreme lengths to hide the true nature of its story and overall scope before the game was released. In my opinion, this is a shame, because this aspect of the game could have attracted many fans of the series. This game is not just an alternative retelling of the very first Final Fantasy game from 1987, but thanks to dimensional travel, it includes a piece of literally every numbered Final Fantasy that has ever been published – from number one to fifteen. Thanks to this, you will visit your favorite locations from all these games, as well as hear remixes of your favorite musical tunes.

But basically this is a “traditional” story about “four warriors of light” who must save the kingdom from the attack of a dark army led by a personified demon of chaos. Moreover, the main character Jack is literally obsessed with the desire to destroy chaos and reminds you and everyone around you more or less every time he opens his mouth. Its one-sided focus is to some extent connected with the loss of memory, which for some reason has been touched by all the fighters of the light. In addition, five of these fighters will gather for the game instead of four, which was predicted by the prophecy. As with Final Fantasy VII Remake, the creators subtly turn the experienced dogma of the original game on its head to suggest an unexpected direction and end to the story.

This is not just a retelling of the very first Final Fantasy game from 1987.

But before you get there, a huge stream of absurd situations awaits – from the very introduction of the main characters (they bump into each other on the street, the crystals in their pockets vibrate, so they exchange two phrases in the style of “I came to kill Chaos” and “so that we are on the same wavelength” say a fist punch, and since then they are a team and best friends) until some situations are resolved (the princess refuses to run away from the castle is overrun by demons, so the hero stuns her with a fist and dryly comments “when she wakes up and cool, you’ll be glad for it.”) However, despite this stream of absurd scenes, the story culminates in an unexpectedly subtle, spectacular and touching finale. As I stared at the screen with my mouth open for the last hour, I felt a tingle on my face at the end sentences from a lone tear of emotion running down him.This game really deceives the body, and the meaning of its narrative is surprisingly strong.

Ugly but fun

Unfortunately, one of the things that spoils the experience is sometimes incomprehensibly ugly visual processing. It’s not only the low quality of the models or textures, but also the fact that the environment is covered with ridiculously unbalanced fog or darkness, which sometimes makes it a real problem to see what’s really going on. I tried all sorts of graphics and TV settings, turned off HDR and so on, but more or less nothing helped. It seems to me that the creators may have literally taken over some of the game cards from the older entries in the series mentioned and only somehow updated them on the machine (a process similar to Rockstar recently trying to re-release the GTA trilogy). The game’s suspicious size would also point to such a problem, as simple graphics like this really shouldn’t take up more than 70GB. By the way, on the PS5 you make sure to keep the graphics quality mode turned on, in which the game actually also runs at 60 frames per second.

The fact that the game loses on pitch replaces the gameplay itself. The structure of the missions chosen on the map, as well as the combat system to a large extent, are borrowed from the Nioh series, since the same studio (Team Ninja) was responsible for this game. Thanks to this, you can enjoy an excellent real-time combat system, reminiscent of FromSoftware games. Like Nioh, FFO also offers hundreds of weapons and armor that will drop from almost any enemy, which, together with your character’s profession switching system, results in a really diverse mix of tactics on the battlefield. If you turn on a higher difficulty, the game will be a real challenge (especially some of the bosses), but there is also a low difficulty for those who just want to enjoy the story. You can complete the entire game in co-op with one or two other teammates. If you play alone, your teammates will be taken care of by artificial intelligence (but you can influence their equipment and tactics).