Stranger in Heaven is cool, but I’m craving a simpler Final Fantasy anniversary game

final fantasy be 35 years old this year, and Square Enix A bunch of stuff has been lined up to celebrate the series’ birthday.By far the biggest and most visible part of the celebration is Stranger in Paradise: Final Fantasy Originsa new derivative that looks both forward and backward.

Of course, a lot of the stuff that’s causing the biggest buzz this anniversary is probably the stuff we don’t officially know yet. We haven’t officially announced the console versions of the next batch of Final Fantasy 7 Remake or Final Fantasy 1-6 Pixel Remake; obviously that’s something to come. We don’t yet have a release date for Final Fantasy 16, and it’ll likely land somewhere in the “anniversary window” even if it’s not done this year.

But three months on so far, and as FF’s December birthday gets closer, we have two big celebrations. The return of Chocobo Racing is a Switch-exclusive Chocobo GP format – the other being Stranger of Paradise, a strange new collaboration between Tecmo Koei’s Team Ninja and some of Square’s biggest creatives.

Stranger in Heaven is basically two things. First and foremost, it’s an attempt to port the Soulbound-style gameplay to the tropes and worldview of Final Fantasy. Team Ninja also developed Nioh, arguably the most successful Soulsborne ever developed outside of FromSoftware, and you can definitely see the connective tissue between Nioh and FF Origin. As Dom said in their review, this is a competent enough attempt at this type of game – although I think if you dial down the difficulty to more casual modes that are designed for those who don’t like the smashing difficulty action FF fans of RPGs, the house of cards has collapsed. And too much damn loot; like Nioh, it keeps throwing useless crap at you, and I really hope it doesn’t.

Excuse the tangent, sorry. The second element of Stranger in Heaven’s identity may be more interesting to fans — as the name suggests, it’s the origin story of the first Final Fantasy. The trailer depicts some familiar characters and locations from the original FF, and the title of the game is fairly clear; after all, its subtitle is “Final Fantasy Origins.” No spoilers here, but suffice to say that this game lives up to its name in terms of what it tries to do with its story.

do you know? It’s okay, but…I don’t like it. In fact, I think this game’s connection to other FF stories and worlds is undoubtedly its worst element.

As far as being a 35th anniversary celebration, Stranger in Paradise brings two things. First, it’s tied to FF1, which is set in the same world and has a location with the same name. Second is the reason the locations only have the same name: each FF1 locale is paired with a stage from another Final Fantasy game, and the lore dump explains that the locations were built “based on” areas in other dimensions. For example, when you visit an overgrown forest, the loading screen directly points out that the forest is similar to a location in the 9th dimension. When you load the level, lo and behold, its music bears a striking resemblance to Final Fantasy 9’s evil forest dungeon.

These things cool down for about 10 seconds each time Stranger of Paradise finishes – usually when you first hear the region’s iconic musical chorus. But the truth is, it’s a cheap trick that doesn’t make sense. After getting excited about the feature before playing the game, it plummeted in reality.

Where the game’s creative threads try to find meaning is to tie the story to the first Final Fantasy – a game with a simple NES-era plot, with a clever time-travel and time-loop-related twist, anti- Come over, opening up quite a bit of freedom for the classic experimental “plug-in”. This was even done in the previous anniversary game: the 20th anniversary game Dissidia Final Fantasy (and its 2011 sequel). But, honestly, I don’t think this will work. The initial fan service gave way to unsatisfactory delivery, those who didn’t know FF1 wouldn’t understand what was being quoted, and those who did would feel that what was presented often didn’t really fit.

I would say that, in that sense, Stranger in Paradise feels like the best in the world. It’s not a particularly potent anniversary celebration, nor is it a strong-toned prequel to FF1. It has a crunchy, fun, deep RPG system – but I kind of wish it had just created its own FF universe to inhabit. Its story, glorious camp and stupid (though I don’t believe the devs are joking), is actually held back by the need to stick with FF1. Many of the best FF games are spinoffs of successful new worlds, such as Final Fantasy Tactics and the much-maligned but endearing Crystal Chronicles. I hope this game can do that.

As for the anniversary? Well, I just wish there was more…basic stuff. There’s nothing wrong with just relying on fan service, especially if that’s the point of the game. FF has a rich history that deserves to be celebrated.

I wanted a Final Fantasy celebration that felt like the first Hyrule Warriors gave my Zelda fans. That game created a new version of a familiar world, then put together locations and characters from the classic game in an absurdly fun, non-classic romp full of aerial moments and callbacks. Not bound by the need to “connect” to any other classic, it’s just fun. Of course, I’m specifically mentioning that game because it’s also a Team Ninja game.

Final Fantasy comes close to this with Dissidia, but its format as a one-on-one fighting game for the PSP really hinders its abilities. When Dissidia went HD, Square Enix completely missed the point and tried to build a weird team-based esports.

Anyway. If you want a Final Fantasy story and aren’t interested in a Souls-style game with a deep system, you should probably skip Stranger in Heaven, or wait for a sale or the inevitable Game Pass inclusion. If the content of the story doesn’t bother you and you’re in the middle of a fight, you might be in for a surprise. I love these systems, but I’ll continue to hope the series deserves the kind of fan-service mashup that it deserves. Maybe for the 40th anniversary, eh?