I wasn’t interested in Stranger of Paradise until I read that it had a fantastically weird plot. Then I saw a cutscene in which the grumpy protagonist reacted to a typical Final Fantasy waifu’s monologue about crystally chaos stuff with a curt “bullshit”, before pressing play on his iPod and marching away to metal.
Okay fine, I’ll play this game.
I wish I could see the pitch for Stranger of Paradise. Theoretically this is a celebration of Final Fantasy‘s 35th anniversary, though Team Ninja doing that by having a very angry man stomping a Tonberry’s head in with a giant boot is certainly a choice.
The game itself essentially adapts and tweaks Team Ninja’s Nioh games (which were themselves heavily informed by Dark Souls) and squeezes them into a Final Fantasy-shaped container. You play Jack, who is on a single-minded mission to kill Chaos (and the trailers were right, he really doesn’t shut up about it) and team up with two buddies Jed and Ash to get the job done.
By the time the credits roll you’ll have been so doused in particle effects that your eyes will be glassy, you’ll have heard a gravelly-voiced man say “chaos” about a thousand times, and will have beaten the absolute shit out of most of the iconic Final Fantasy monsters.
Along the way, you play through stages inspired by various Final Fantasy games. Despite having played most of them I didn’t recognize anything apart from the Final Fantasy VII mako reactor stage, as an ice cave or volcano dungeon is generic enough to be from any number of games.
As for the plot? It’s quite a ride, though after a dream logic opening in which three strangers compare their throbbing black balls (bear with me here) and decide they’re now besties it settles into a familiar groove. You head to a mission, work through the area, beat a boss, and repeat. At around a third of the way in you’re told that there are four monsters representing the elements and guess what? Yup, time to wipe them out.
Disappointingly Stranger of Paradise loads its weirdness at the beginning and end, leaving the middle feeling much more generic than I’d have liked. But after a barnstorming finale that goes completely off the rails in a blizzard of macho screaming and vows to destroy the universe (all elevated by the ridiculous hat I’d picked for Jack).
And then, the delicious cherry on the cake, the credits are soundtracked to Frank Sinatra’s My Way. Tetsuya Nomura was apparently adamant that no other song or version of it would do, presumably paying a whole bunch for it and, the approval process from the Sinatra estate taking a long time. In my wildest fantasies, I imagine someone trying to explain this game to a skeptical Nancy Sinatra…
Is it worth playing if you’re as curious as I was? Maybe. If you’re just after the plot there’s a story-only mode that makes it almost impossible to die and it’s nothing if not unique.
But it’s not quite as off the wall as I’d hoped it’d be and while I respect its goofy and unfiltered ambition I can’t hand on heart say it’s a good game. Memorable yes. Worth 20 hours of play? Ehhn.
Pixel Hunted 