Welcome to our review of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins, a game where you need to defeat Chaos.
With the memory of their struggle buried deep in their hearts.
In this hard-core action RPG, Jack must face numerous challenges to bring the light of the crystals back to Cornelia, a kingdom conquered by darkness.
Features action gameplay where you use a wide variety of action moves to survive furious battles and scatter your foes before you, as well as RPG elements collecting numerous different jobs and weapons to customize and develop your characters. The game can be enjoyed at several difficulty levels.
Will restoring the crystals’ light usher in peace or a new form of darkness?…or perhaps something else entirely?
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins is possibly the strangest of games in the Final Fantasy franchise. Graphically, it looks like a previous generation game at times, and well, that is a massive disappointment. Parts look great and others look horrible. If you played the free demo, you know what I’m talking about, sadly the graphics didn’t improve in the final product. Of course, a game is more than just its graphics but this wasn’t the best way of starting a new game.
On top of that comes the issue that the voice acting is also rather cringe-worthy, I mean the number of times our main character reminds us that the mission is to destroy Chaos is extremely cringe-worthy and it doesn’t help that you never truly fully understand what this story is about. It’s all over the place and ties one strange and awkward moment directly to another one.
The entire time you are following the more than decent game itself, you are just constantly reminded of your duty to destroy Chaos and it gets incredibly annoying. But Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins is not a bad game once you look past that. It would have made a really fun game on the previous generation of consoles but compared with today’s standards it sadly falls short.
So what is the game all about? Destroying Chaos…? Yes, that too, but at its core, it’s an action RPG where you visit all sorts of places, fight tons of monsters, and advance in the story. This all sounds pretty promising and there certainly are moments that the game can be fun to play but it never really elevates itself above other games on the market. For a game like this, it certainly doesn’t help that the story is on the rather flimsy side, but hey, can’t have it all…
Since the story is rather lackluster, the main appeal of Stranger of Paradise is found in its strong fighting system, which is as close to a real-time action RPG as can be. Forget turn-based battles that dominated the Final Fantasy series for years, this is more like what would happen if Dark Souls, Dynasty Warriors, and Final Fantasy had a love baby.
That typical feeling of Final Fantasy certainly is there while you’re exploring the environment although the toughness of some enemies reminded me of the Dark Souls games (unless you chose easy which is truthfully very easy), and then more the feeling of fighting a single enemy in Dynasty Warriors. Adding the Final Fantasy style of added attacks and its naming scheme and you know what to expect, which at its core isn’t bad as a game. It certainly manages to combine interesting ideas and gameplay mechanics into a new type of Final Fantasy game but it rarely really succeeds in its goal.
I just kind of wish there was more of a story in this game, it just throws you into the game, nags your ears off about destroying Chaos and it certainly does not help that the main character appears to be either incredibly angry or constipated the entire time. The story isn’t everything in a game of course, but since this is rather story-based, it’s a real shame and it certainly takes you out of the immersion a lot of the time.
I did have fun with the battle system as those combination moves really did do massive damage and were fun to watch, but at other times, it became so clear the graphics were extremely underwhelming, which once again easily sucks out all of the fun. It’s a shame the developers didn’t spend a bit more time on the way the game looks as the combat and those combination moves really could benefit a lot from an extra layer of polish.
Take for example the finisher, it just looks like a dog that ate confetti and has to throw up. It just looks over pixelated and that is on the extremely powerful Xbox Series X, a very disappointing aspect of the game that really offers some fun combat mechanics, it just gets overshadowed completely. Especially the tutorial was visually disappointing, almost so far down the median that I wanted to quit the game at that point already, which wasn’t a good way of starting a new game. Things certainly did get better but it never got out of the mediocre.
In conclusion, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins is more a miss than a hit. The fun combat mechanics sadly get completely overshadowed by the poor graphics and laughable story, where you, just for the fun of it, must destroy chaos… This could have been a great game but sadly it rarely reaches its true potential.
