I was not expecting to like this game as much as I did. Me and a friend got it because we thought it would just be funny bad it was honestly super enjoyable. Yeah the story was laughably bad until like the final chapter, but it was good bad if that made sense? Like it made no sense but it also was enjoyable and kept me entertained. The gameplay however was genuinely amazing, I could not put the game down once I understood the job system, its addicting. Music was great too, and when I actually understood the setting, the world was at the very least diverse and gorgeous. Highly recommend playing with a friend, makes the bad moments funny moments and the gameplay even better. I have got to defeat Chaos.

Good combat, good fun. Silly plot, and became very easy towards the end - I wasn't overlevelled, but it felt like it. Would have liked to see even more classic FF enemies too.

If you are a big FF fan, you'll enjoy this. If you're a Souls fan you'll probably enjoy this - not the best of the genre, not the worst.

Story is gloriously silly before becoming genuinely good in the last couple of hours.

Once this game was announced, I went day after day thinking this was a goofy, low quality Final Fantasy Dark Souls from the Nioh team. Man, I was wrong. This thing is great!

Not only do you have lovable edgelord protag Jack AKA Shadow the Hedgehog AKA Dr. House in a Final Fantasy game, and not ONLY does he play 7 seconds of nu-metal on his phone in frustration from not yet having killed Chaos before turning it off again, but this is a really good take on a more accessible/casual Dark Soulsy/Nioh thing.

It’s really easy (on default difficulty) if you’ve played one of these before, but it’s still really fun and well made. Good bosses, a dense campaign that takes maybe 15 hours to run through (20ish with some side stuff), and a strangely told story that sheds new light on the world of Final Fantasy 1. And, for as strange and budget as the storytelling feels, it…completely sold me on its vision for an expanded FF1???? I even bought the DLC to (hopefully if I get to it) see how it wraps up! Jack Garland is DMC Dante but way more lovable. Anytime a character has a monologue, he tells them to shut up before pulling out a weapon. It’s like he’s so earnestly stupid that it wins you over. A real anti-Final Fantasy protagonist.

I also appreciate that it seems to have a looty Diablo-style grind in its endgame, where you run side missions and the DLC for increasingly crazy mission difficulty levels. While I think it's a clever way to add longevity and works well for a game that isn't balanced to From Software levels of design polish, I am a bit annoyed the DLC (which features the end of the base game's story) is balanced for endgame difficulty so if you play the default "Action" difficulty you're going to get your ass beat in the DLC. There are lore friendly options, but it's still pretty annoying IMO.

Still, super cool video game. Strongly recommend checking it out and sticking with it (it gets SO MUCH BETTER after the first couple missions) if you're interested.

A game with very fun combat, a bunch of different class options and a silly storyline. If you can get it on a sale, you'll have a good and fun time which is all you can ask for. All in all, it gave me very Xbox 360 2006-7 vibes in a positive way. I played the whole thing co-op. Well, nearly the whole thing, there are several sections including the final boss which mandate you do it solo. Here's a tip though, for these sections you can usually just run through if you don't feel like fighting. There's a heap of jobs/classes to change into to vary up your playstyle and you can have two ready to go at all times, so you can be fairly versatile to handle the myriad of different enemies coming at you.

If you know anything about the first Final Fantasy, also, you'll get an extra kick from the game. The protagonist, Jack, is absolutely hilarious and even if you aren't paying too much attention to the story, you can't help but follow along with it thanks to how ridiculous and amusing he is. It's so refreshing to have a JRPG character actively resent some of the JRPG tropes and just call them out in real time. It's all explained in universe, for the most part. He's just an angry man and I appreciate him for that. I have no idea if I was meant to take the story seriously and honestly, I don't ever want to know if I was. As a final note, I enjoyed the voice acting - Mocean Melvin who plays the main protag did a genuinely good job despite the goofy lines. Thanks Jack, the best 7/10.

Had never played a Souls-like before this and depending on how you define the genre maybe I still haven't. Either way, this was enjoyable. A little too much emphasis on class variety, if you ask me. I maxed out most job trees at Level 30 without grinding, and very rarely did I need to switch up jobs to handle bosses. The story's predictably a messy disaster but it all mostly still works as either a prequel to or alternate version of the original Final Fantasy game. Ultimately this feels like a fairly minor and largely forgotten title - did it really only come out two years ago? Feels like five to ten! - but I really did enjoy it for the most part once I understood how to play it.

Played for the memes, stayed because it is legit fun AF to play.

The story is obviously so bad it almost feels like a parody, still, the gameplay is so good i couldn't stop playing.

It plays like a soulslike, but you have way more ways to interact and build your character with the job system. Overall i would say it was one of the most fun games i played in 2022.

Presentation wise nothing really stands out, outside from our protagonist listening to Limp Bizkit, making so the band is cannon on the first Final Fantasy universe.

an enigma of a game. with most video games that put me off, i'm able to, in some capacity, contort myself into going "well here was the intention and here was the demographic". i truly cannot do that with this game, because who on earth at square enix played dark souls and went "we should add a terrible loot system and necessitate grinding"? it's a damn shame too, because this game has such great catharsis when it works. jack's violent animations just feel good to get, the level design is usually pretty engaging, and boss fights have a nice spectacle to them that fit in with the final fantasy aesthetic while still creating this new, obscene and violent performance.

but i cannot stress enough how shitty the game gets by endgame when it turns out that you basically have to grind your eyeballs out just to get armor that will stop you from dying in two hits, or get equipment with job affinities you want. it's shitty! it sucks! why did they add this! it's another example of square enix getting in their own way with a genuinely great game concept. you could argue that this was always in team ninja's design doc, but i heavily doubt it and more expect the shitty aspects of this game were direct demands from square as a publisher. regardless of how it happened, it just sucks outrageously that this got bogged down with mechanics that actively made the experience worse and turned this unexpected hit into a turbo-mid product.

A prequel/reimagining of FF1 starring a grouchy guy named Jack, yelling about killing chaos could have been terrible. But, it's probably the best FF spinoff game I've ever played. The story did not need to go that hard, you WILL know why Jack is so pissed off. Combat was especially fun, smashing classic FF monsters with Jack's fists never gets old. Only downsides are that the repetitive level design made some of the areas hard to navigate, and just like Team Ninja's other ARPGs, it just dumps too much trash loot. At least the latter is solved by auto-equip.