Stranger Of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin review – the meaning of chaos
GameCentral reviews the new action role-player from the creators of Nioh, that tries to recreate Final Fantasy 1 for the modern age.
When we first heard that Square Enix had commissioned Team Ninja, creators of the grossly underrated Nioh, to make a Dark Souls style game in the Final Fantasy universe we thought it was a great idea. Not only would it be an opportunity for Team Ninja’s games to reach a wider audience, but the melancholic grandeur of Dark Souls and its sister titles seemed a perfect match for the classier end of the Final Fantasy spectrum of games. So imagine our surprise when this turned out to be the trashiest thing Square Enix has published in a long time.
Unlike the irredeemable awfulness of Babylon’s Fall, Stranger Of Paradise does have many positive elements but there’s no getting around the fact that it is presented in the most bizarrely obnoxious way possible, as its edeglord characters blunder about like drunken Neanderthals. Sometimes it seems like it’s trying to be funny on purpose but you can never be sure, and most of the time we really don’t think it is.
The storytelling is so frequently absurd that it manages to come across as weirdly endearing anyway, if only for the fact that most of the cut scenes are actually quite short. Of course, your mileage may vary, in either direction, but if you consider Stranger In Paradise purely on its gameplay merits it is a pretty decent Soulsborne game – even if it never reaches the heights of any of the games it’s trying to copy, including Nioh.
The set-up of Stranger Of Paradise is also something that sounds better on paper than in reality. It’s an alternate take on the very first Final Fantasy game, which had no officially named characters for its
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