How the hell do you start a review about Stranger of Paradise?
I'll admit that statement alone makes the game worth playing for those of you still on the fence. It's just one of those games that you need to experience to understand. But seriously, where do you begin?
How about a few launching points:
1) The incredibly busy and convoluted souls-like gameplay?
2) The shockingly dated graphics that scream Unreal 3 game circa 2007?
3) The somehow awful game performance, that can't maintain 60 FPS even on a PS5?
4) The wacked-out-of-its-mind plot graced upon us by one Kazushige Nojima?
5) The surreal characters, voice acting, and presentation?
6) Or the fact that this entire package is supposed to function as the prequel to THE Final Fantasy--a game that has hardly any real plot or world to call its own?
There's as many disparate threads here as there are gameplay systems. I had never played a Nioh game before--I always figured it was just a slight morph of Dark Souls, but I was somehow dead wrong and right on the mark at the same time. For those of you entirely out of the know like I was, let me summarize the flow chart during a typical boss fight in SoP:
1) Use both left and right on the D-Pad to activate the 'aggressive' mode on your two party members.
2) Move in towards the boss and start putting on the heat with some regular attacks.
3) When it comes time for them to attack you, figure out how we're going to not die. Which means you need to decide between:
3.1) Blocking, which will make you take some damage but is usually safe...Unless
3.1.1) The boss performs a command grab, in which case you're fucked. Or...
3.1.2) The attack is unblockable. More on that later.
3.1.3) If you are able to start a block right before the hit strikes, you actually parry the attack instead.
3.2) Dodging/Rolling, which is not nearly as viable in this game (on most jobs) because you don't get a good amount of I-Frames to actually move out of the way of most attacks safely. Avoid this move unless you're a risk taker or absolutely in a pinch with no other options.
3.3) Soul Shield, which allows you to use a special 'poise' meter to absorb a hit from the boss.
3.3.1) If it's a magical ability with a blue background you end up 'stealing' a copy of it that ability that you can then cast back upon the boss unless...
3.3.2) It's a certain type of magical ability with a red background, which is not absorbable, you're gonna get fucked.
3.3.3) Keep in mind that the meter also goes down with every single hit you absorb, and requires time to recharge. If the meter is depleted then you become stunned and are unable to take actions for several seconds. However you have some options here because...
3.3.3.1) you have two different jobs selected at any given time which means that you're able to swap between the two on the fly--each of which has their own separate soul shield meters that can recharge separate from each other.
4) Alright now that you've considered all of that in the 100 millisecond window you've had before the boss hits you, you now have a few options before you:
4.1) If you did some damage beforehand and also did some soul shielding, you probably have some special meter built up, which means that you can:
4.1.1) Perform one of several special combos that you have to pre-define in a customization menu
4.1.2) Perform one of several special job abilities like Chakra magic or Jump.
5) Oh shit I forgot to turn back on my party's 'aggressive mode' once their meters depleted, shit I need to reach over to the D-Pad to do that again...
6) Wait what HP am I at? Did my special meter get depleted or do I have some left I can use? Oh shit I forgot I still had some stolen magic that I can cast back at the bo...
6) Oh fuck they're about to slap me in the face which way should I....
7) And....I'm dead.
Got all that? In reality there's some hyperbole going on here, but the rough feeling is true: There's a lot of random bullshit that you need to juggle while you're in the heat of battle. Between all the different jobs, party members, combos, special abilities, and block/dodge/parry/soul-shield/magic-reflect/stagger/heal options that you have before you, the game very quickly walks a dangerous path towards being too busy for its own good. Sure there were classes, stats, and weapons to juggle in a game like Dark Souls, but the core gameplay loop always felt very clean and compact.
Speaking of classes, lets talk about jobs for a moment, shall we? Certainly a souls-like hack-n-slash following the pedigree of the original class-based Final Fantasy would be remiss if it didn't have jobs, right? Right. Well, if you didn't already think there were enough cooks in the kitchen, we've now got enough to feed a whole army. There's 27 jobs, each with unique gimmicks, abilities, and entire skill trees that need to be leveled through. Some might view this as a great way to encourage replayability, but it often leads to a confused mess of unbalanced and unfun game design.
All of that is to say, the job system makes it incredibly easy to crack this game wide open. By the 30% mark, I had already discovered a combination of mechanical interactions that broke the game in two. Lets see what my actual SoP flowchart looked like as a Lancer/Dragoon:
1) Use both left and right on the D-Pad to activate the 'aggressive' mode on your two party members. They'll tank the boss aggro.
2) Stand at a safe distance and throw spears at the boss using the lancer ability.
3) If I'm somehow out of special meter before the boss is at 50% HP, I'll wait until my teammates are back in 'aggressive' mode and get a few safe hits in while they tank aggro
4) Back off and start throwing spears again
5) If the boss aggro is ever drawn to me, wait until he gets close and use the Dragoon's Jump ability to hop the fuck across the battlefield to safety. Begin throwing spears again.
6) The boss dies before they've even laid a finger on me.
I've only done one playthrough of the game, but I'm certain that there's dozens of simple one-track strategies that players can use to breeze through the game. Obviously it's unfair to judge a title simply on the broken strats you can create, but the path of least resistance in a game can't be as plain and boring as it is here. I had a feeling from the start that the inclusion of party members as well as 27 different jobs was a recipe for broken mechanics. After all, you can only stack so many gimmicks onto a soulslike before the whole system topples under its own weight.
But enough about the gameplay. Everyone was driven here by the hilarious E3 trailer that focused on the story, so what about that? Well, I'm not going to mediate long on it here...but it is just as laugh-out-loud funny and absurd as you'd imagine. Frankly it's a reminder that Nojima really should have thrown in the towel on RPG writing after VII and became a writer for wacked-out-of-its-mind games like this instead. He would have been an incredible Platinum Games writer in another life.
But despite all of the bad things I've said...goddamn it I still like this game a hell of a lot. It's busted and dumb, but it still manages to be a fun experience beyond all of that. Everything is faulted so clearly that even a Kingdom Hearts player could see the cruft, but let's be honest--nobody's here for the emotional, epic, and lifechanging game of the year. They're here to see one man punch the everliving fuck out of CHAOS. And in that regard, the game delivers in spades.
There are many theories that posit camp is a combination of bad qualities and time. The Phantom Menace might have pissed off Lightsaber clutching Star Wars fans back in '99, but now we can all just sit back and laugh at the whole affair. It's so far removed from our current life that we can admire its goofy qualities from the cheap seats. In that same sense, Stranger of Paradise performed an incredible magic trick. The game managed to package up of that same powerful sense of camp even before it released. It was as if the game just warped to us from the year 2007--in every sense of the concept. But that's not where the real magic was. SoP packaged up all that absurd camp without the smallest shred of irony behind it. Everyone involved with the project believed in it. Nojima and Nomura genuinely considered it a great way to pay homage to the game that eventually gave them careers. That nightmare "fantasy" JRPG that barely functioned and featured UFOs, giant mechs, time-travel schemes, and T-Rexes abound.
And you know what? In that sense, this game is a really great homage to the original Final Fantasy. Not in the actual content of the game, but the absurdity of it all. It's dumb, simple, busted, and hardly capable of keeping consistent with anything it sets out to do. Of course FF-creator Hironobu Sakaguchi would refine the series and eventually strike gold with Hiroyuki Ito and Yoshinori Kitase on FFV, VI, and (with a young Nomura and Nojima) on FFVII. Perhaps the passing of the torch between these two generations isn't as crazy as I initially thought.
I suppose the difference is Sakaguchi quit designing/writing FF after IX in 2000--13 years following his creation of the franchise. Ito and Kitase wouldn't be too far behind him. By contrast, Nojima and Nomura have been chief creative forces behind the FF series since 1997 with FFVII, a career now spanning 25 years. Maybe they also mentally checked out after around the 13 year mark, eternally stuck in the 2007-2010 era. I think Stranger of Paradise is living proof of that fact. But hey, now that new faces like Yoshi P. dominate the industry with FFXIV, and now that Nojima/Nomura are nostalgia-tripping on their FFVII remake, perhaps Stranger of Paradise represents that last waltz for the late 2000s era--a fascinating time capsule filled with a lot of stupid shit that many of us yearn for because it reminds us of the final epoch before the modern internet turned our world (gaming and otherwise) into a nightmarish hyper-aware, hyper-social, live-service, microtransaction filled hellscape. So, despite all the clear flaws, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is still a unique and charming trip that harkens back to simpler times--a game worth playing in 2022.
I'll admit that statement alone makes the game worth playing for those of you still on the fence. It's just one of those games that you need to experience to understand. But seriously, where do you begin?
How about a few launching points:
1) The incredibly busy and convoluted souls-like gameplay?
2) The shockingly dated graphics that scream Unreal 3 game circa 2007?
3) The somehow awful game performance, that can't maintain 60 FPS even on a PS5?
4) The wacked-out-of-its-mind plot graced upon us by one Kazushige Nojima?
5) The surreal characters, voice acting, and presentation?
6) Or the fact that this entire package is supposed to function as the prequel to THE Final Fantasy--a game that has hardly any real plot or world to call its own?
There's as many disparate threads here as there are gameplay systems. I had never played a Nioh game before--I always figured it was just a slight morph of Dark Souls, but I was somehow dead wrong and right on the mark at the same time. For those of you entirely out of the know like I was, let me summarize the flow chart during a typical boss fight in SoP:
1) Use both left and right on the D-Pad to activate the 'aggressive' mode on your two party members.
2) Move in towards the boss and start putting on the heat with some regular attacks.
3) When it comes time for them to attack you, figure out how we're going to not die. Which means you need to decide between:
3.1) Blocking, which will make you take some damage but is usually safe...Unless
3.1.1) The boss performs a command grab, in which case you're fucked. Or...
3.1.2) The attack is unblockable. More on that later.
3.1.3) If you are able to start a block right before the hit strikes, you actually parry the attack instead.
3.2) Dodging/Rolling, which is not nearly as viable in this game (on most jobs) because you don't get a good amount of I-Frames to actually move out of the way of most attacks safely. Avoid this move unless you're a risk taker or absolutely in a pinch with no other options.
3.3) Soul Shield, which allows you to use a special 'poise' meter to absorb a hit from the boss.
3.3.1) If it's a magical ability with a blue background you end up 'stealing' a copy of it that ability that you can then cast back upon the boss unless...
3.3.2) It's a certain type of magical ability with a red background, which is not absorbable, you're gonna get fucked.
3.3.3) Keep in mind that the meter also goes down with every single hit you absorb, and requires time to recharge. If the meter is depleted then you become stunned and are unable to take actions for several seconds. However you have some options here because...
3.3.3.1) you have two different jobs selected at any given time which means that you're able to swap between the two on the fly--each of which has their own separate soul shield meters that can recharge separate from each other.
4) Alright now that you've considered all of that in the 100 millisecond window you've had before the boss hits you, you now have a few options before you:
4.1) If you did some damage beforehand and also did some soul shielding, you probably have some special meter built up, which means that you can:
4.1.1) Perform one of several special combos that you have to pre-define in a customization menu
4.1.2) Perform one of several special job abilities like Chakra magic or Jump.
5) Oh shit I forgot to turn back on my party's 'aggressive mode' once their meters depleted, shit I need to reach over to the D-Pad to do that again...
6) Wait what HP am I at? Did my special meter get depleted or do I have some left I can use? Oh shit I forgot I still had some stolen magic that I can cast back at the bo...
6) Oh fuck they're about to slap me in the face which way should I....
7) And....I'm dead.
Got all that? In reality there's some hyperbole going on here, but the rough feeling is true: There's a lot of random bullshit that you need to juggle while you're in the heat of battle. Between all the different jobs, party members, combos, special abilities, and block/dodge/parry/soul-shield/magic-reflect/stagger/heal options that you have before you, the game very quickly walks a dangerous path towards being too busy for its own good. Sure there were classes, stats, and weapons to juggle in a game like Dark Souls, but the core gameplay loop always felt very clean and compact.
Speaking of classes, lets talk about jobs for a moment, shall we? Certainly a souls-like hack-n-slash following the pedigree of the original class-based Final Fantasy would be remiss if it didn't have jobs, right? Right. Well, if you didn't already think there were enough cooks in the kitchen, we've now got enough to feed a whole army. There's 27 jobs, each with unique gimmicks, abilities, and entire skill trees that need to be leveled through. Some might view this as a great way to encourage replayability, but it often leads to a confused mess of unbalanced and unfun game design.
All of that is to say, the job system makes it incredibly easy to crack this game wide open. By the 30% mark, I had already discovered a combination of mechanical interactions that broke the game in two. Lets see what my actual SoP flowchart looked like as a Lancer/Dragoon:
1) Use both left and right on the D-Pad to activate the 'aggressive' mode on your two party members. They'll tank the boss aggro.
2) Stand at a safe distance and throw spears at the boss using the lancer ability.
3) If I'm somehow out of special meter before the boss is at 50% HP, I'll wait until my teammates are back in 'aggressive' mode and get a few safe hits in while they tank aggro
4) Back off and start throwing spears again
5) If the boss aggro is ever drawn to me, wait until he gets close and use the Dragoon's Jump ability to hop the fuck across the battlefield to safety. Begin throwing spears again.
6) The boss dies before they've even laid a finger on me.
I've only done one playthrough of the game, but I'm certain that there's dozens of simple one-track strategies that players can use to breeze through the game. Obviously it's unfair to judge a title simply on the broken strats you can create, but the path of least resistance in a game can't be as plain and boring as it is here. I had a feeling from the start that the inclusion of party members as well as 27 different jobs was a recipe for broken mechanics. After all, you can only stack so many gimmicks onto a soulslike before the whole system topples under its own weight.
But enough about the gameplay. Everyone was driven here by the hilarious E3 trailer that focused on the story, so what about that? Well, I'm not going to mediate long on it here...but it is just as laugh-out-loud funny and absurd as you'd imagine. Frankly it's a reminder that Nojima really should have thrown in the towel on RPG writing after VII and became a writer for wacked-out-of-its-mind games like this instead. He would have been an incredible Platinum Games writer in another life.
But despite all of the bad things I've said...goddamn it I still like this game a hell of a lot. It's busted and dumb, but it still manages to be a fun experience beyond all of that. Everything is faulted so clearly that even a Kingdom Hearts player could see the cruft, but let's be honest--nobody's here for the emotional, epic, and lifechanging game of the year. They're here to see one man punch the everliving fuck out of CHAOS. And in that regard, the game delivers in spades.
There are many theories that posit camp is a combination of bad qualities and time. The Phantom Menace might have pissed off Lightsaber clutching Star Wars fans back in '99, but now we can all just sit back and laugh at the whole affair. It's so far removed from our current life that we can admire its goofy qualities from the cheap seats. In that same sense, Stranger of Paradise performed an incredible magic trick. The game managed to package up of that same powerful sense of camp even before it released. It was as if the game just warped to us from the year 2007--in every sense of the concept. But that's not where the real magic was. SoP packaged up all that absurd camp without the smallest shred of irony behind it. Everyone involved with the project believed in it. Nojima and Nomura genuinely considered it a great way to pay homage to the game that eventually gave them careers. That nightmare "fantasy" JRPG that barely functioned and featured UFOs, giant mechs, time-travel schemes, and T-Rexes abound.
And you know what? In that sense, this game is a really great homage to the original Final Fantasy. Not in the actual content of the game, but the absurdity of it all. It's dumb, simple, busted, and hardly capable of keeping consistent with anything it sets out to do. Of course FF-creator Hironobu Sakaguchi would refine the series and eventually strike gold with Hiroyuki Ito and Yoshinori Kitase on FFV, VI, and (with a young Nomura and Nojima) on FFVII. Perhaps the passing of the torch between these two generations isn't as crazy as I initially thought.
I suppose the difference is Sakaguchi quit designing/writing FF after IX in 2000--13 years following his creation of the franchise. Ito and Kitase wouldn't be too far behind him. By contrast, Nojima and Nomura have been chief creative forces behind the FF series since 1997 with FFVII, a career now spanning 25 years. Maybe they also mentally checked out after around the 13 year mark, eternally stuck in the 2007-2010 era. I think Stranger of Paradise is living proof of that fact. But hey, now that new faces like Yoshi P. dominate the industry with FFXIV, and now that Nojima/Nomura are nostalgia-tripping on their FFVII remake, perhaps Stranger of Paradise represents that last waltz for the late 2000s era--a fascinating time capsule filled with a lot of stupid shit that many of us yearn for because it reminds us of the final epoch before the modern internet turned our world (gaming and otherwise) into a nightmarish hyper-aware, hyper-social, live-service, microtransaction filled hellscape. So, despite all the clear flaws, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is still a unique and charming trip that harkens back to simpler times--a game worth playing in 2022.