To be fair, Square Enix has not held the greatest E3 conference. This Square Enix Presents for E3 is frankly a bit frustrating, even if it does announce a good-looking Guardians of the Galaxy game and the long-awaited Final Fantasy 1-6 remake. There always seems to be a problem; there are too many guardians, it occupies half of the broadcast, and the announcement of the FF pixel remake should have been an easy dunk, so sad that the most loyal fans spent hours trying to get it. Know what these remakes actually like.
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However, these are not program elements that people are talking about.The star of the show on social media eventually became Strangers in Paradise Final Fantasy Origins. Again, this should be a dunk, a rebounder. It combines the sensibility of Final Fantasy, the world of the first game, and the bloody, heavy soul-like battle of the Ninjas. As soon as the news came out, the fans were very excited. The forum is full of speculation. However… well, this revelation mainly encountered memes.
The memes are pretty good, to be fair.Compared with the stars in the game, it looks more realistic model video game white dude Fast and Furious Cast with slim Shady. Facts about the word chaos Eight times in the two-and-a-half minute trailer Also came in Some mockery. In most cases, I don’t think anyone would be so mean: this is just a stupid revelation.
In the media broke the news, creative director Tetsuya Nomura said that he has been considering “a series of new Final Fantasy games around the’Stories of Angry Men'”, which is very serious and has incorporated memes about contemplation and muttering in some way. In the narration, the general violent white male protagonist appears in the trailer.
However, scratching from the surface of the meme, I think a more general problem of “Stranger in Paradise” has been revealed. The game calls it “Final Fantasy’s bold new vision,” and it does-but the vision is almost incompatible with the game on which it is based.
Any right to return to the original Final Fantasy should be rooted in Yoshitaka Amano’s art. When FF1 characters and locations are recreated in games like Dissidia, people always feel that colorful characters, gorgeous armor and more traditional fantasy locations are used to pay for these costs, which is not in the modern version of the FF series. common.
When I saw Stranger of Paradise and its tough vision for Chaos/Garland from the first FF and Chaos Shrine (the key location of the game), it made me very disgusted. Let’s look at the fact that it looks a bit clumsy visually (I’ve seen people compare it with PS3 games, which of course is a stupid exaggeration, but it doesn’t look good)-let’s assume the visual effect repair. Something in the vision itself does not work for me. It does not look or feel particularly like “Final Fantasy 1” or “Final Fantasy”. They are talking about words and names that I know, but these words sound very hollow.
A few days later, after Square Enix repaired the demo that was originally broken during download (because this is another thing that happened, making it a perfect reveal), the game is ready to play. The frustrating thing is that the same tone problem also appears in the game. In fact, as fully presented in the demo, it can be said to be worse.
Final Fantasy is all about reshaping-I would never dare to tell anyone, let alone Square Enix, what this series should be. Having said that, it is fair to say that there is a kind of energy and feeling throughout the entire FF series like a stone-and this feeling has not been particularly obvious in “Strangers in Paradise” so far.
To give a concrete example from the playable part of the game, let’s talk about music. Most of the content of the demo is set in Chaos Shrine, which comes with a memorable piece of music from the original FF. Strangers in heaven do this-but emotions just don’t feel right. The music is great and clear-but the way the chaos temple melody is woven feels compelling, and it ultimately matches the rest of the game. This is a reminder behavior to tell you that this is a world you know, rather than simply feel that it is indeed the world you know.
I’m not saying you can’t try and make a dark, violent, bloody Final Fantasy world-you can obviously, but you must find a balance. It just doesn’t make sense to feel completely unfamiliar.
There will definitely be some explanation. The protagonist Jack was severely ridiculed for his generic name and appearance, but it is worth noting that the key art of him and his compatriots showed them wearing ordinary, real-world street clothes. This may imply that this is actually an Isekai story-a type that transports people from the real world to another world.
This is a very popular story format in Japan, and if this game does — it will be tracked under the nickname “Stranger in Paradise” — it won’t even be Square Enix’s only one on the road. Because it certainly seems that Forspoken is also Isekai. If this is the case, this explains the appearance of these people-and convincingly, when you pick up and equip the trophy, the streetwear of the protagonist Jack slowly disappears into layers of tradition and visibility. Under the RPG equipment.
Still, even if we put the characters aside, the mood of the game still doesn’t feel like the shocking genre classic it evokes by calling itself the Final Fantasy Origin Story.
This really makes me angry, because as a fan of Souls and Nioh, I can definitely see how this formula applies to Final Fantasy and its countless tropes. In fact, the demo showed incredible prospects, with flexible combat and Final Fantasy abilities cleverly adapted to the Soul formula, which has been simplified and more easily adapted to the mainstream appeal of FF.
The way you can switch jobs quickly is the perfect combination of Nioh’s position system and FF’s classic focus on work. You can immediately see how much work is possible in this combat system, which is enough to make people feel more like a traditional action RPG without losing some weight and soul-like structural design.
However, it is difficult to go beyond the tone of the game and its appearance. In a way, it feels like the game is free of time warp from the muddy, gloomy Unreal Engine 3 games of 360 degrees and the heyday of the PS3 era. Obviously, it is more technologically advanced than those old games-but the pure energy of origin is a direct product of that era-this is not the element of my nostalgic retrospect of that era.
The stranger in heaven prompts people to consider an interesting question that has been asked many times before: What makes Final Fantasy Final Fantasy? Series creator Hiroshin Sakaguchi once joked that this is a “blue text box”, but this rule was broken in the eighth and ninth entries. Since the first 34 years, with countless fingerprints throughout the series, the answer is undoubtedly more complicated than ever.
To be fair, in FF Pantheon, some games may have this energy more than others. But they are all immersed in it, from Crystal Chronicles to Mystic Quest, or My Life is a King. The saddest thing about Fortress is the cancelled FF12 sequel developed by the West. Although the developer’s culture has changed, its concept art seems to “get it”. And, yes-somehow, even Chocobo racing has it, kind of.
FF’s identity has nothing to do with owning Moogles or Chocobos. It’s not about big swords, over-headed hair, or magic spells. Nowadays, it is not even about the music of Nobuo Uematsu, which is unthinkable in the PS1 era. I think it is deeper and spiritual. I think its creators usually don’t even know it well-they just added the secret recipe by coincidence. By the way, the ill-fated FF movie The Spirits Within is completely immersed in this energy-despite all its flaws. In fact, this energy may even be the direct cause of many of its ills.
But playing Origin Strangers, my overwhelming thought is: no matter what the vague final fantasy energy is, this game has no visual design and tone. If this story is a prequel to the original Final Fantasy, that might be a problem.
Having said that, I still have hope for the strangers in Paradise where Final Fantasy originated. What I am interested in is how it will deal with classic FF enemies, how it is intertwined with the established FF1 world and story, and how it combines soul-like combat with the feel of FF. The way it actually works is always the most important element in any video game, and Stranger of Origin has a solid enough foundation in its demo-but so far, what’s built on top of it doesn’t matter to me at all . I hope it turns out to be wrong.
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