I genuinely have no words to describe the absolute peak that this game is. Probably my favorite version of the FF job system, a story that, while short and simple, really lends itself to its gameplay and characters, and most importantly, is an amazing love story to the entire mainline FF franchise (up until this point at least).

The game's world is based off the world of Final Fantasy 1, but with two major deviations. The biggest deviation is that our main cast members are not the Warriors of light from FF1, and our protagonist, jack Garland, was the easiest one to notice out of the bunch. Its not really a spoiler, the game never hides his name and pretty much every trailer and developer interview after the first one pretty explicitly said "yeah this is an alternate universe telling an origin story of this world's version of Garland". And it does a great job. For as much as some people found Jack's attitude and nature worthy of joking with, the game directly acknowledges why he is the way he is, explains it, and runs with it. They not only explain who he is, why he and his friends all dress so modern compared to the otherwise fantasy characters in the game, but also his memory problems, thirst for violence against Chaos and most importantly, how he becomes the Big Bad of FF1 when he's the protagonist of this title. And its all done very well despite this not being your traditional FF game. The other major change from FF1 is that every stage in this game is based off a previous Final Fantasy title, called "dimensions" in this game. The Sunken Shrine holding the water crystal is a mako reactor from FF7. The pirates in Pravaoka, instead of being in the town like in FF1, are instead in a nearby cave modelled after Sastasha from FF14, etc.

The gameplay is what you would expect from Team Ninja's action rpgs like Nioh, fast paced and stylish combat with a high skill ceiling, grindy postgame and a lot of build variety, combined with the traditional FF job system. Every job has a unique action that can only be used while playing as that job, like the Thief having the "steal" command that lets you steal an enemy's ability (this is in addition to already being able to steal certain abilities by soul guarding, meaning Thief can be used to create a character built around using enemy skills), or the mage classes being able to use magic. There are also, in addition to the starting jobs, more advanced jobs that you unlock by levelling up the existing jobs, like levelling Lancer to unlock Dragoon, but these advanced jobs aren't just "better" versions of the basic jobs either, as using the previous example, the Dragoon job can use the jump ability, but not the spear throw ability that the lancer has. Dragoon can also use axes, in addition to spears, giving you variety in how to play. You might like to fight with a sword and shield, but as several jobs can use swords and shields, you'll need to pick which job compliments your playstyle the best. This is of course, not even getting into the postgame gear and level grind, or the extra changes made to the combat system with each dlc, (which I will review separately) all of which add to the already expansive buildcrafting that the game has.

There are a few downsides here, some of the sidequests (that can either unlock more sidequests, or crafting options) are hidden within the levels of the game, and while some of them are easy to find, there were two or three that were hidden fairly well, and when the postgame is basically nothing but grinding for better equipment and levelling your jobs to create builds, not having the full crafting system available can seriously affect you. If you don't have the dlc, there's no extra story after you beat the game, you can replay previously completed stages at increasingly difficult difficulties, but that's it. Having some secret bosses or mission modifiers would have made this grind significantly go down better (which the dlc does fix btw, although you'll probably want level 200 gear and nearly maxed out job levels before starting). There's no hub area in the base game, which isn't usually an issue with a game like this, but since the game has optional dialogue with npcs after major story beats, needing to go into a menu to hear it instead of just walking through town is a minor downside. Especially if it would have allowed you to actually see the changes to the world being spoken of.

Without the dlc, this is an AMAZING love letter and tribute to the entire FF series, ending where it all began, with four Warriors of Light setting off to the Chaos Shrine to rescue Princess Sarah from the clutches of the villainous Garland. Closing off the game's story with an amazing conclusion that wraps up jack's storyline and ties it all back in a way that, if they ended it right there, i'm sure nobody would complain.

but WITH the dlc... This might become one of my favorite action games of all time.

I love the magic system and how monster hunter kind of this is.
And the lore expansion, my god, this is so cool overall and reveals so much of the entire final fantasy universe without sounding too off the tracks.
Before we only had things like Gilgamesh as a unifying point (in fact, I think he is the only one, as in the Dissidia games he's the only one who retains memories and it's due to his capabilities of swapping between realities and universes, while other recurring characters or names like Cid are different on each universe) BUT NOW we have all this shit that explains a bunch of stuff, and on a kind of good game, with coop even. Nice.

Applies half-learned lessons about level design and class-based customization from the Soulslike genre with junky looting and spammy battle systems from the MMO genre and creates a pretty hysterical mutation out of the two of them. Likely more fun to get a group to laugh at/with but also just on the side of being too easy and silly to feel embarrassed to be playing this in this day and age (even if just because you have a PS+ Extra account for now) to try even random rooms. The type of game where you can discover a wind spell will blow away poison gas, but the arbitrary lava you have to get across isn't affected by spells but instead stopped by destroying the statue it's pouring out of.

Chaos game is good game.

Combat system is fleshed out with the job system and there is a ton to do with it. My favorite was monk, I used it the whole game and there is even more too. On top of the special moves you get, and the ability to steal spells, I struggle to understand how people can call this repetitive. How fun the game is depends on how much you choose to interact with it. I think people on this site just don't like action games that much. They'll complain that this 10-hour game is too repetitive and then talk about a 50-hour jrpg being the best game ever made. I also see a lot of complaints against the Team Ninja games that they have bad level design, and I personally don't see that. All of them kinda hit the same notes that souls games do, with the exception of Nioh 1 that is a game where the developers intentionally try to make to hate it.

This game is also a love letter to the FF franchise. So many levels are modeled off of areas in mainline games. There's an area that's based off the first big FF12 dungeon with walls that push you into pits. Sunleth waterscape, a song from FF13 gets repurposed. There's a FF15 level, and so much more.

The story is fine, I like seeing jack do the chaos things and talk about chaos and being chaos and destroying chaos. It's kind of a big task to make a prequel to a 40-year old game. If you hate it, you probably take stories too seriously. Team Ninja has never done stories well, and I still don't know why people expect some masterpiece from them. A small complaint from me is that I don't like having to choose difficulties. I like having just one and you have to deal with it. But I also understand that this is a Nioh game for babies so it is what it is.

Chaos good, Game good, and now I am CHAOS.