On March 10th, 2022 the final demo for Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin was released. It lets you play several missions of the beginning of the game. Your progress in the demo carries over into the full game. The demo was played on Xbox Series X for this impressions article.
Souls-like
Stranger of Paradise is a Souls-like game in the Final Fantasy universe. More accurately, it could be called a Nioh-like, since it was made by the same developer as Nioh. If you don’t know what this means, essentially combat is much more punishing than in other action games.
The game pulls off this gameplay style rather well. The level design definitely isn’t up to par with how amazing the first Dark Souls was, for example, but it is generally serviceable and has some interesting gimmicks. The enemies have a pretty good variety, although most of them definitely weren’t designed to be interesting to fight repeatedly.
The most notable things about the demo are the boss fights. They are all executed rather well, and put up a pretty good fight. They felt a bit samey as far as their arenas go, but the attacks you have to deal with vary a lot.
The Memes
The reason that most people are aware of this game is probably the memes. Although Final Fantasy games have had a lot of questionable and awkward moments (in their English releases, at least), this game might just have the most.
Basically every interaction in this game feels a bit off, and not necessarily in a good way. It probably isn’t like anything you have seen before. This might be appealing to some people, but it’s hard to call this a selling point in a review.
Somewhat surprisingly, the party in this game isn’t so bad. Jack is similar to characters Bayonetta or Dante in how he makes fun of exposition in video games. You barely get any time to learn about the other characters, but their personalities still come through pretty clearly and they aren’t overly weird or awkward like other video game characters you might see in games like this.
The Other Stuff
Graphically and aurally this game isn’t overly impressive. Probably the best aspect of it is, on Xbox Series X at least, is how it manages to keep a relatively high frame rate. At least in this demo, there isn’t any moment where lag really affects the gameplay.
The graphics look like a game that could have come out in 2015, but it’s not like we have advanced too far since then anyway. Some places that are really lacking in detail do stand out, though. In the demo this is particularly true in the town area that you go to.
The soundtrack isn’t too notable, but it’s definitely not blatantly bad or anything like that. Some of the licensed music is a bit off-putting, though. The characters not being awkward is partially because the voice acting is pretty good. The English script might be better than you would expect given the circumstances this game was made under.
Overall
Definitely check out this demo before it goes away if you like action games or Souls-like games. It is pretty interesting to see what happens, even though the game is presented in a pretty odd way. The gameplay is easily above most other games, though.
If the full game is as good as the chunk this demo provides, it is definitely worth getting for fans of this style of gameplay. Otherwise, you might want to wait for a sale.
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