I Came, I Saw, I killed Chaos.
-Julias "Jack" Ceasar
This is a resoundingly fun Team Ninja Souls-ish like experience best enjoyed with a group of buddies who you can laugh and banter with about the game's S Tier dialogue and humour. I don't know even if Stranger of Paradise is even "good" per se, but it was damn fun. The levels are beautiful, but unfortunately limited to being corridors littered with similar groupings of enemies. The caveat though, unlike with many games that have the folly of repeated environment tropes, is that the combat in SoP: FFO felt pretty fresh because of the plethora of customization you could do with classes. Each of the members in my trio covered their niche: I preferred tanky support classes, one of us went the mage route, and the other went pure dps. I've written about player agency quite a bit in my reviews, but SoP plays into it in a big way and it payed dividends toward my enjoyment of actually playing the game. You level pretty fast which makes it easy to try each and every class that the game offers, while also being slammed with literally thousands of items to help fit your classes.
Music was great, borrowing themes and motifs from the series past while also ushering in new sounds... and some licensed tunes. Speaking of the licensing, I can't put into words how much I laughed when Jack gets tired of Neon's rant in the first mission or so, exclaims Bull*** and opens his phone to bump some Limp Bizkit. I'd seen this in teasers and gameplay when the game came out, but I'll tell you now absolutely nothing can prepare you for how funny that moment and this game can be. Jack is so hilariously blunt and stand-offish as a protagonist... almost like a cross between Dante and early Part 3 Jotaro Kujo. We were bursting with tears from laughter with how well this title is written and crafted from a humor/dialogue standpoint. The cast is so unassumingly funny.
Where the game loses credentials for me is in the aforementioned lack of fluff in dungeon/mission design, character art being... questionable, and the story being a weird hodge podge of fetch quests and "why are we doing this" for the majority of the game. I am often a stick in the mud about the way characters look, but having Jack in a T-Shirt and pants while his constituents are: a tech influencer, a guy in Jordans and a flannel around his waist, and a woman with bandages wrapped around her legs for no? reason, it's hard to take them seriously in comparison with the story.
It's a fun title, especially if you're a geek about Final Fantasy and want to get granular on the lore that builds up to the first title from however many moons ago, but it's got its issues that get in the way of being a "good" game and not just a "fun" one. I'd recommend Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin if you've got a good group to tackle it with or are looking to delve even further into the lore of Final Fantasy.
-Julias "Jack" Ceasar
This is a resoundingly fun Team Ninja Souls-ish like experience best enjoyed with a group of buddies who you can laugh and banter with about the game's S Tier dialogue and humour. I don't know even if Stranger of Paradise is even "good" per se, but it was damn fun. The levels are beautiful, but unfortunately limited to being corridors littered with similar groupings of enemies. The caveat though, unlike with many games that have the folly of repeated environment tropes, is that the combat in SoP: FFO felt pretty fresh because of the plethora of customization you could do with classes. Each of the members in my trio covered their niche: I preferred tanky support classes, one of us went the mage route, and the other went pure dps. I've written about player agency quite a bit in my reviews, but SoP plays into it in a big way and it payed dividends toward my enjoyment of actually playing the game. You level pretty fast which makes it easy to try each and every class that the game offers, while also being slammed with literally thousands of items to help fit your classes.
Music was great, borrowing themes and motifs from the series past while also ushering in new sounds... and some licensed tunes. Speaking of the licensing, I can't put into words how much I laughed when Jack gets tired of Neon's rant in the first mission or so, exclaims Bull*** and opens his phone to bump some Limp Bizkit. I'd seen this in teasers and gameplay when the game came out, but I'll tell you now absolutely nothing can prepare you for how funny that moment and this game can be. Jack is so hilariously blunt and stand-offish as a protagonist... almost like a cross between Dante and early Part 3 Jotaro Kujo. We were bursting with tears from laughter with how well this title is written and crafted from a humor/dialogue standpoint. The cast is so unassumingly funny.
Where the game loses credentials for me is in the aforementioned lack of fluff in dungeon/mission design, character art being... questionable, and the story being a weird hodge podge of fetch quests and "why are we doing this" for the majority of the game. I am often a stick in the mud about the way characters look, but having Jack in a T-Shirt and pants while his constituents are: a tech influencer, a guy in Jordans and a flannel around his waist, and a woman with bandages wrapped around her legs for no? reason, it's hard to take them seriously in comparison with the story.
It's a fun title, especially if you're a geek about Final Fantasy and want to get granular on the lore that builds up to the first title from however many moons ago, but it's got its issues that get in the way of being a "good" game and not just a "fun" one. I'd recommend Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin if you've got a good group to tackle it with or are looking to delve even further into the lore of Final Fantasy.