When first announced, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (Stranger of Paradise) seemed… bad. The reception was not good. The generic-looking protagonist proclaiming he wanted to kill Chaos every five seconds was uninspired, far too edgy, and was delivered by subpar voice-acting and visual presentation. 

You see, people were expecting a “souslike” Final Fantasy for some time, and well, that was certainly not in the spectrum of what they wanted. To make things worse, the demo that was immediately released was far too incomplete and rough around the edges. It ran poorly, it had abysmal textures, characters moved weirdly, and the visual presentation was bland. It felt like a game from past generations. 

However, as time passed, the terrible first outing of Stranger of Paradise became a joke. It was so bad people started to think: “You know, maybe they did that on purpose? Maybe the game is supposed to be that bad?”

Square Enix seemed to have embraced that view, although it’s hard to know if it was indeed what they intended from the start or if they were reacting to the trailer’s reception. From the second moment Stranger of Paradise was previewed, the game seemed to be completely inline with its super-edgy style, B-rated quality, and cheesy dialogues, something that goes completely against what mainline Final Fantasy titles are about. It even made Frank Sinatra’s music canon to the franchise.

Now here we are, finally with the complete game. Is it garbage like the trailers? Is it as funny as the trailers? Is it a decent game? Does it work as a real origin game for the very first Final Fantasy?

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Oh well, it’s bad

No surprises here. Despite being far more playable than the first demo, Stranger of Paradise is a game developed on a budget. It still runs poorly, especially on PC and last-generation consoles, and it seems to have skipped many phases of quality assurance before reaching the shelves. But hey, fret not. We all knew it was supposed to be this B-rated game mocking the Final Fantasy franchise and driving the quality bar all the way to the underworld. 

What matters here is the enjoyable factor in this game, and in that regard it does a very decent job. Stranger of Paradise is brimming with references to its franchise like remixed themes, iconic dungeons and monsters, badass boss fights, and a surprisingly wide and deep job system like any fan of a Final Fantasy would like. 

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Oh, it’s no Soulslike though

Well, bad for soulslike fans, but this is NOTHING like those games. The gameplay is fast as hell, you can dodge indefinitely, die with instant comebacks, and you will be button mashing the heck out of it. If anything, this is more similar to older God of War and Devil May Cry games than anything else, with a tint of Ninja Gaiden and Nioh because… well, this is a game developed by Team Ninja. 

In fact, the dark and saturated artistic choice may have tricked people thinking this would be like the Dark Souls of Final Fantasy, but that’s just because fans of those games immediately think anything dark and with a lot of shadows will be dreadful and hard. Stranger of Paradise is a parody, with cheesy dialogues and cutscenes, filled with edgy weapon and armor designs, and made in a way that you just rush forward and kill stuff with flashy combos and powerful spells from the Final Fantasy franchise.

The game can be hard at some points, but its systems allow you to bypass difficulty in a multitude of ways, from changing jobs on the fly, using your NPC allies to help you, or joining a multiplayer session without any form of compromise. You can also change the game’s difficulty if you like.

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It’s deeper than you think

For a game that embraces its hilariously edgy dialogues and has a protagonist that calls bullshit on every NPC’s opinions, Stranger of Paradise offers a lot more than what you’d think. 

The gameplay itself can be quite complex, with many combos, spells, active and passive abilities, and a wide array of options to choose from. Those options are given to you by an interesting job system, which draws inspiration from old-school Final Fantasy games, but also embodies plenty of new elements from Final Fantasy XIV, such as linking weapon types to certain jobs, allowing you to swap between two jobs on the fly, and the ability to level up everything the game offers. 

You may start with a few simple classes, but as the game progresses you will have a ton of them, each with some minor quirks that may influence how your weapon of choice will be used. You can be a monk and punch foes with unrelenting speed, play as a black mage and unleash magic from afar, be a white mage and heal and buff allies while keeping your distance, or play as a tanky dark knight trying to get the enemies’ attention. Yes, Stranger of Paradise is a party-based game first and foremost. 

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And that’s where it shines

Your NPC allies and the easy integration with multiplayer co-op is what makes Stranger of Paradise really work. You can play with random people throughout nearly the entire game, progressing the story and collecting items that will be useful to you without any form of compromise. There is no need to farm items for multiplayer, no punishment. You can just log in into someone else’s game and play at your own discretion. 

Even if you so choose to play alone, you have your NPC allies to help you, and they too have a multitude of jobs to choose from. Of course, they are not as good as a real human player, but they can do a decent job at helping out and giving you a sense that there’s more to combat than simply dodging around and parrying enemies’ attacks.

Much like what happened in Monster Hunter: World, the multiplayer experience also aids in making the game replayable to a larger degree. Although your NPC allies help you to rush through the standard difficulties, they start to lag behind as you face the challenges of the CHAOS mode, especially because the game is designed in a way that you will have to replay missions dozens of times, each with increasing difficulty. Having real humans play with you allows for unexpected party combinations and different experiences at each run, making the repetition a bit more enjoyable (if possible). 

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It’s system can be a mess too

I’ve said the job system is quite interesting and varied, but it also feels like a missed opportunity. This happens because everything you kill drops like four or more items, making you hoard hundreds of pieces of equipment in a few minutes. It’s one of the worst equipment treadmills I’ve seen, basically offering 300 tiers of equipment for a game that runs its course in about 20 hours.  

What this means is that you will kill a monster, pick a new cool weapon, and the very next monster will drop something better already. After you finish a dungeon, your entire set of equipment becomes obsolete, as the most basic piece dropped by monsters of the next dungeon will be better than what you already have. Considering every piece of equipment offers very minuscule bonuses overall, you will only really need to think about what you equip after reaching the endgame and unlocking CHAOS difficulty. Everything before that is complete garbage and you can easily bypass the entire game using its “auto-equip” button. 

This problem is worsened by the fact that you cannot plan actual functioning builds during normal gameplay. You cannot achieve the really useful bonuses with gear obtained before endgame and if you happen to find a combination of equipment that gets you something interesting for your tank or healer build, you will only have that working for you until the very next dungeon, which usually means about 20 minutes. The sheer amount of possible drops make it impossible to seek for specific sets of armor before reaching the final CHAOS difficulty, which gives you the highest level possible of equipment. Before that, anything that you manage to get working will fade to oblivion and become useless when you bump the difficulty or progress to the next mission. 

Another big problem for the endgame content is the way it is divided as well. As I’ve mentioned, the game wants you to run through a mission about a dozen times each. That’s boring, obviously, even more so when you know that you will have to refarm equipment after a bump in difficulty. What this leads to is for players to seek less boring grinds that completely circumvent the intended way of play. It’s far easier and less boring to kill 100 random enemies and skip all those 10 runs and go straight to the highest difficulty. 

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It’s widely inconsistent overall

This inconsistent game design, trying to make you replay stuff but never letting you settle for a build for more than 10 minutes, is spread to every department of this game. 

The graphic department shows this well. You have, on one hand, some detailed and absurdly beautiful pieces of equipment and accessories. It’s top-tier graphical fidelity, especially with metal and trinkets. However, on the other hand, you have pathetic geometry and texture in environment scenes, with places looking straight up drawn from Playstation 2 or Playstation 3 games. The last-gen consoles, in particular, have some of the most horrendous graphics I’ve seen for them. 

In fact, the overall game design feels absurdly dated. I‘d feel like playing Dark Cloud or Ephemeral Phantasia for the Playstation 2, when every single shift in the scene had a fade to black and every cut was followed by a loading screen. It brings the narrative to a turtle pace and is something that could’ve been skipped even with all the idea of making the game look and play like a B-rated action flick. 

Sound is yet another inconsistent department. The remixed themes from older Final Fantasy may sometimes sound really good, while at others feel like they are not even playing. At some points the background music is damn loud, and at others almost silent. Voice-acting too, with the likes of Neon and Astos having superb performances while Jack and Jed feel pathetically generic and weird. 

Even the online component suffers a lot as well with inconsistent design. Although it is easy to join and open your games to random players around the world, the matchmaking here is complete garbage. The game lacks simple lists of currently open sessions. If you want to join a game, you can only filter which mission you want and hope the matchmaking feature gets you an actual party. Most of the time you will be receiving a “party full” message. This is particularly annoying because it would take only a minor change to make things work perfectly.

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Fun, but bad

In a way, Stranger of Paradise was everything that I was hoping it to be and, surprisingly, even a bit more. I was expecting a trainwreck in terms of production values, but the game does play much better than I ever hoped it would. Its fluid action is engaging, its menu systems are complex and rewarding, and even its cheesy story manages to reach a finale that was really damn good. 

Sadly though, it seems all those good surprises are misused most of the time, offering a game that feels like a wasted opportunity. It could allow us to create mid-game builds with more impact, it could reduce the 300-level treadmill of equipment to say… 10. It could have less grindy-ways to complete its postgame content. It could have a multiplayer lobby. Hell, it could’ve done a lot of minor adjustments to be a much more complete and incredible experience. 

There are a lot of interesting story aspects that really make this uncompromised game feel deeper than you’d expect. Jack’s attitude is hilarious, Astos is quite interesting, Neon’s voice acting is loveable (heck, I really liked her english voice-acting), there are secrets and mysteries worth an entire game to explore, and much more. 

All its possibilities however, are just that: possibilities. The real game is an engaging action button-masher with accessible multiplayer and a plotline that grows on you, but the production is just bad. The inconsistency is everywhere, the systems are never fully explored, and it plays and feels like a game released fifteen to twenty years ago. The meme will make you laugh, you will stay for its fun gameplay, but the final sentence is just that this could’ve been something much much better if it was given proper care and money. 

Anyway, this may have worked to pump me into wanting a complete remake of the original Final Fantasy, so that’s something.