Impressions of the game (Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin)
...Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin on PS4. 100% on Action -- all missions, all records, maximum level of all professions of all characters.
It looks like the souls-like genre is becoming the new musou. I can't imagine how someone could come up with the idea to make a tough souls-like out of some tactical jRPG. Missing the audience was immediately visible. Plus, instead of the original plot, they decided to shit on something old again and chose the holy Final Fantasy 1. However, the status of the game is hardly more canonical than that of any other spin-off, and Square Enix probably didn’t hear about such things at all. So let's go.
For some reason, there are two trainings in the game, one follows immediately after the other. Again they gave different people to do different segments of the game. Missions take place in locations, each of which is built on the basis of some location from licensed parts. It would be nice to choose something interesting, iconic, no - everything always comes down to caves, forests with narrow paths and cramped castles. Why these restrictions are unclear, this is not a PSP. Armor is seen on the characters for the first time, which is very cool. That's just in armor and in general in the inventory there is no point at all, because there is a lot of loot, legendary excaliburs fall from dozens of monsters. But there is a button "optimize equipment", they themselves created the problem, they themselves solved it. The gameplay is tolerable, there are idiotic moments, but in general you can play, souls-like as sparing as possible, based on the FF VIIR combat. Yes, they can kill with three blows, but death is punished only by reference to the last "bonfire". Two partners often interfere, but you can’t remove them. I often watched on bosses how they run towards me instead of attacking, it’s almost impossible to control them, plus they knock down aggro and attract when it’s not necessary.
Ten hours later, it becomes clear that this game is closer not to licensed parts, but to skits like Dissidia (which is not surprising, because the same development team) and Explorers. There is little original here, all the content is references, remixes of original compositions, familiar locations, etc. However, all this is rather base, the developers did not really study the sources.
The plot is a reconstruction of the plot of Final Fantasy 1. A terrible reconstruction, exhausted by the most debility methods. The opening again contains the most severe spoiler after which the whole circus of idiocy looks even more boring than it could. But in some way they answered the question "Why did Garland kidnap the princess?" (because this classic twist isn't shit enough by today's standards). And yes, this whole "like a prequel" nullifies the efforts of the warriors of light simply to zero. And the characters were also squeezed (both monsters and locations - there is less content than in the original FF I on the NES), from the acquaintances only Astos and know Cornelia. What dwarves, what elves, what dragons and mermaids, they had a budget of $300. For some reason, the final boss is still Kaos, only called differently (which, of course,
The game is assembled well. The graphics are great in some places, super slick in others. Flies on the base PS4 without any complaints.
As a post-game, here is the Chaos difficulty level. You can knock out higher level equipment on it, but for this you need to unlock high-level missions (the same regular missions, just with a different equipment level coefficient) by grinding. And this grind, judging by the tables, is simply bottomless. Like the game wasn't dull enough.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin leaves a very mixed impression. On the one hand, this is a spin-off of a very rich series, it's nice to plunge into it all again, on the other hand, there are a lot of misses and an extremely low budget. Previously, such parodies under the cover of Final Fantasy came out on portable consoles and no one expected much from them.
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