If you only play Jack's game once, you know that it's a 7/10. If you play it twice, you know that it's one of the greatest character action games ever made.

I mostly play games to the credits, and then I stop. My reasoning for this is that if I see the credits of any given work, then the creator is signaling to me that the work is now over. It's a pretty good system, largely because creators seem to be on the same page as me; the most they'll usually include is something like a post-credits scene, or maybe a New Game Plus option if they're feeling especially daring. Stranger of Paradise offers a post-game with a decent wealth of side missions to take on, but I never felt any real need to dig into them. I saw credits, after all. The game was over, and everything after this was just a bonus for those who desperately needed more and didn't feel like starting a new run from scratch. I imagine that this is how most people experienced Stranger of Paradise, and I similarly imagine that this is why most people seem to agree that Stranger of Paradise is good. Not great, not awful, just good.

Stranger of Paradise doesn't do a good enough job at incentivizing you to use even a quarter of the tools you have available until the DLCs, which I think is a shame. You can easily cruise through the entire base game with any job on Hard by hitting the Optimize Equipment button every now and then. There's really very little that you need to do to roll credits. I suppose it's good for encouraging the player to learn their fundamentals — blocking, dodging, parrying, learning when it's safe to hit and when you need to back off — but I don't see much of a reason why they're given the entire length of the base game to do it. Stranger of Paradise certainly doesn't start when you get into the DLC, but it opens up so much when you do that you may as well be playing a completely different game.

Suddenly everything matters. Everything. Gear now requires you to balance affinities and blessings and attached skills rather than just picking whatever has the highest level appended to hit. The smithy becomes something that you actually use, forcing you to swap affinities and skills around while upgrading the gear that you've got to be better at everything it does. Figuring out a command ability rotation you can bust out during fights to keep your buffs going is critical. You get three Lightbringer forms instead of just one, and you need to be making regular use of them to beat the highest-tier enemies. Job levels get capped at 300 up from 30, and each level beyond 30 gives you a master point that you can allocate into extra stats to create a myriad of different builds even within the same job. The game stops playing fair, and it similarly demands that you stop playing fair. You will struggle, wonder how the fuck anyone is ever supposed to do whatever is walling you, figure out that the trick is based on some mechanic that you haven't been making use of until this point, develop an understanding of that mechanic, and then use it to win. You repeat this until Jack becomes an unstoppable beast and you break the balance in half over your knee, and the game immediately ends with a message of congratulations.

Stranger of Paradise might be the mechanically deepest character action game I've ever played, but it rolls out all of its mechanics masterfully over the course of the base game and its three DLCs. You never really stop learning until the end of the third expansion, but it never feels overwhelming. Struggling with the Dragon Trials? Learn how to balance affinities and allocate your job's side-upgrades. Struggling in the rift? Learn how to play around with the smithy's tools and identify relic gear. Struggling against the final boss of the rift? Learn how to use Dimension Bringer. Struggling in the final zone? Learn how to work blessings into your build. I didn't even know that you could parry until about fifteen hours in, but it eventually became the cornerstone of my entire final setup.

I said it earlier in my review for Sekiro, but you can boil most action games down to one of either slow or fast, and one of either simple or complex. Fast and simple is my least favorite combination. Fast and complex is my most. Stranger of Paradise is kind of fast and ridiculously complex, and is accordingly one of the best action games I've ever experienced. Rare is it to find a game that's as fun to play as it is to break. Your reward for struggling through the past thirty hours of the game is to attain borderline godhood just in time for it to end (provided that you didn't use Extra Mode to cheat your way through most of it), and it's a wonderful capstone to a delightful playthrough.

Of course, the gameplay is far from the only thing that managed to slip its hooks into me. The fact that I can describe the narrative as "a post-modern take on how nostalgia shapes our memories as viewed through the lens of Final Fantasy setpieces" and not be incorrect is ridiculous. This is the killing Chaos game! This is the bullshit game! This is the game where Jack turns on his iPod and plays nu-metal and then walks away! How the fuck is this serious? How can you describe it as anything other than blunted edge, more resembling Shadow the Hedgehog than Paradise Lost?

The key here is intention. Jack is a completely one-dimensional edgelord. However, he wasn't always that way; it's only by seeing everything through to the end that you get to see the full picture of who Jack really is — who he used to be, at least — before he gave himself completely over to his quest for revenge. There's something about your first playthrough that'll make you feel like the writing is bad, because it plays into a lot of very basic, newbie pitfalls; everyone always talks as if they know exactly what's going on, leaving the player feeling mostly bewildered at every development. Everyone seems to know something that you don't, which makes all of the characters have this sort-of alien quality to them that you often see in stories that are poorly-written. However, that's exactly the point. Everyone else in your party knows exactly what's going on, and, as the player avatar, he's about as confused about all of this shit as you are. It's only by the time the game ends that you're filled in on all of the details, and it largely feels like an asspull the first time you play it through. Go through the game a second time with the knowledge that you now have, and a lot of what seemed like bad writing from the outset reveals itself to be secretly masterful all along. You and Jack just didn't know it yet.

It's remarkable that Stranger of Paradise has as much to say as it does, while never managing to get in its own way. Many players will breeze through it, never engage with the deeper narrative hooks — why would they, right? — and walk away feeling as though they got a pretty decent experience. In a way, that's admirable. Stranger of Paradise doesn't grab you by the shoulders and scream in your face that you need to equip this job with this gearset for this boss to understand this plot thread to appreciate this bit of story. It gives you a lot of leniency to overlook all of that in a way that makes me feel bad for not playing closer attention to it on my first time through. I feel like I've failed Stranger of Paradise, in a way, and this is the best way for me to make things up to it.

If you've only played it once, I don't have strong enough words to beg you to play it a second time. Take what you know, everything you've learned your first time through, and bring it with you again. Re-enter the cycle, just as Jack has done hundreds of times over, and realize why the Lufenians felt it so important to make sure you don't get to keep your memories when you start over. It's because your knowledge will make you more powerful that anyone could have expected.

I don't give a fuck who you are.