Chaotic Journey Through Final Fantasy! CHAOS!! - Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins
24Well... Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origins has been a crazy journey of ups and downs, you could say it's been chaotic...
To be honest I went into Stranger of Paradise expecting a prologue to the original Final Fantasy 1 - which it is, but it's also a journey through all 15 main line Final Fantasy games. The game features one location or dimension for each Final Fantasy. This game is actually a celebration of all of Final Fantasy and aligns with it's 35th Anniversary
💎Twitter: https://twitter.com/Peter3pg
🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpStbJ2ZipCSWcK_JWmRMYw/?sub_confirmation=1
#FinalFantasy #StrangerofParadise #FF
00:00 - Chaos
00:17 - Nostalgia Overload
01:48 - Storytelling & Writing
02:50 - Souls Formula
04:11 - Magic / Blue Mages
04:57 - Level Design
05:27 - Recommendation
As a proper Final Fantasy fan I was getting blasted with nostalgia, through echoes of remixed music and memories of some of these old locations. There's Final Fantasy VI's Forgotten Continent or even Final Fantasy IX's Evil Forest - which I instantly recognised from the little tree trunk wells. Dimensions are filled with classical Final Fantasy monsters too, from Cactuars to Tonberrys and Behemoths.
Best of all I got to partially revisit some places special to me, like Final Fantasy XI's Chains of Promathia areas, the visuals and music brought me right back to about 2004 or 5 when I was exploring the Promyvion crags and Delkfutt's Tower. It's nice to see FF11 get some love, as an MMORPG I've poured thousands and thousands of hours into it but it's existance is barely even acknowledged from Square Enix sometimes, it often feels like a black sheep game that's usually just forgotten about, at least compared to the other Final Fantasys. They go t me good with the nostalgia because I've even started playing Final Fantasy XI again... Which is probably going to end up being a huge mistake I've sucked myself into.
Okay reeling it back to Stranger of Paradise, it's a mix of good and bad. One of the most stand out negatives would be the game's dialogue and writing. This has some of the worst character writing and dialogue I've ever heard. There's a scene where Jack (that's the main character by the way) he's told something and this is how he responds... This edgy tat just walks away blasting music from his phone. I've just got no words for it... This is Final Fantasy story writing 2022.
Stranger of Paradise starts with 3 edgy adventurers who forgotten have their past and all they know is they want to kill Chaos, and that's all they'll talk about - they want to kill Chaos. That's how the entire games' exposition is set, this is a Final Fantasy where storytelling isn't at the frontline.
The real selling point here is that this is final fantasy's take on dark souls or the souls formula. Combat is reasonably challenging and there's some pretty decent boss fights. We even get to fight the legendary four fiends from the original Final Fantasy 1 and who also appeared in number 9 too. Just replayed FF9 so that's fresh in my mind.
Combat is a bit faster paced and it's from the developers behind Nioh, so you'll pick up a few familiarities if you've played Nioh, like how the item level based loot and equipment work.
Quite a few things are borrowed from the Dark Souls formula and one of the reasons it just works is because of the pre-existing Final Fantasy Job System. So, In Elden Ring or Dark Souls I really like that we can play our own custom characters from fire mages to heavily armoured knights, it adds replayability and agency behind your character customisation. This is something that translates into Stranger of Paradise - you can swap between classic Final Fantasy jobs, Red Mage, Black Mage, Paladin, the legendary Dark Knight. You can even swap between two pre-set jobs in combat and I love this. Certain strategies, weapon types, or magic elements are going to be stronger against certain types of enemies, so swap to a more suited job on the fly.
On the topic of magic, the way you cast spells in this game is pretty awesome, you point your analogue stick in a direction to start a certain spell or element and then the longer you risk standing still and charging up a spell the more powerful it becomes, Fire becomes Fira, and then Firaga.
Pat yourself on the back if you're familar with Blue Mages, they're mages in Final Fantasy that specialise in learning monsters abilities and re-casting those monsters abilities in combat. Stranger of Paradise has Blue Mage like mechanics baked into it's core gameplay, just tap the circle button to use your "Soul Shield" and you can "catch" enemies abilities for your own use. The Soul Shield is something unique that Stranger of Paradise brings to the table and it's pretty awesome at times, like throwing fireballs back at Bombs so they'll self destruct.
Other Videos By Peter Bytes
Other Statistics
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Statistics For Peter Bytes
Peter Bytes presently has 226 views for Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin across 2 videos, and less than an hour worth of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin videos were uploaded to his channel. This makes up 1.16% of the content that Peter Bytes has uploaded to YouTube.