Been playing Stranger of Paradise, the new final fantasy game. It's uhhh... There seem to be two broad camps, people who think it's a cringy final fantasy melodrama with bizarre characterization, and people who think it's a hilarious intentional farce in the spirit of Metal Gear Rising. I think it's a bit of both? Some elements go so far I can't believe they didn't know what they were doing, but a lot of it isn't that crazy.
Essentially it's Nioh 3 but set in Final Fantasy universe. It's mission-based, very little in the way of travel or long in-town gameplay scenes like you get in normal JRPGs. Combat is very character action, something like FF15 but more difficult. It's real time final fantasy by the guys who made Nioh, and it feels like it.
Plot is simultaneously very paint-by-numbers and very fucking bizarre. It's a rehash of FF1, the four warriors of light have to restore the four crystals, whatever, you've seen the exact same plot a million fucking times. Every JRPG has the same plot. What makes it weird is the characters have this progressive amnesia, not just the usual JRPG amnesia but they actively continue to lose their memories over the course of the story, and there's other weird stuff, like Garland is the first boss but only the princess seems to remember Garland the knight ever existing. Somebody's fucking around with the structure of the game world and I'm not sure who or how or why. Some of the loading screen lore tidbits seem to imply there's multiple universes and some kind of unseen manipulation going on. Which is weird.
All the warriors of light feel this powerful compulsion to kill Chaos, despite not knowing who that is or if he even really exists, with the king even straight up saying Chaos is a myth. Most obsessed with Chaos is Jack, who may or may not be from Earth, you remember him from the memes. He's a douchebag, like a full on faux hawk tapout shirt douchebag. At one point early on when a character tells him Chaos isn't real, he just says "bullshit" and ends the discussion by pulling out his phone and blasting limp bizkit. He's the best and worst part of the game. In a different game he'd be annoying, but when the rest of the world is the most extreme florid final fantasy bullshit, jack's stone-faced refusal to engage with any of it is mostly hilarious. It's like if a side character from Gears of War accidentally got put in a JRPG and was pissed about it.
I'm still getting a feel for the combat system but it seems fun. Kind of awkward sometimes and a lot of enemies have pretty weak tells and attacks with low poise damage so sometimes you don't realize you're getting hit until you suddenly die.
Overall I dunno. I haven't played enough to give it a solid verdict. It seems fun, the storyline is a bizarre mix of final fantasy/kingdom hearts people spouting off the most inane flowery bullshit dialog and jack just being a huge prick and refusing to play along, which is mostly weird and awkward but sometimes really funny. The combat is alright. We'll see how it goes.
Also, it has an absolutely absurd amount of Anime Grunting. I don't get this shit. I guess it makes sense for anime since anime uses a lot of reaction shots but also limited animation, noises make sense as a workaround to get reactions without having to animate their faces, but in a high fidelity 3d game I don't see why people need to constantly fucking grunt and moan and gasp every two seconds. It gets on my nerves.
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Topic: Blurb on Games that probably don't deserve their own threads. (Read 328280 times)