It’s no secret I like playing video games, whether it be from stress, boredom or just slacking off. One game came out this year that was something else! It didn’t really blow me away with amazement, it didn’t change my life, it wasn’t even that good, but personally, I would have to say it takes the crown for the 2022 game of the year. In Japan 28,944 units of the PS4 version of this video game were sold during the first week that it was released, so it achieved first place in Japan’s retail charts.
The game I’m talking about is so bad that it’s good. The game that I am talking about is called Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. I’m not a big Final Fantasy fan, so you might be wondering why I would consider this my favorite game of the year. The only Final Fantasy game I’ve played before this was the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which got mixed reactions from fans for being more of a reimagining than a direct retelling of the original game. I never played the original Final Fantasy 7, so I never had any real issue with the remake. Anyway, I’m getting off-topic. This blog post is about to tell you about my favorite game, this year. Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin is an action role playing game developed by Koei Tecmo’s Team Ninja and published by SQUARE ENIX and it’s supposed to be a retelling of the original Final Fantasy game that came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987. It isn’t a retelling really at all! The game just sort of takes the original game as a backdrop and does whatever it wants with it.
The story is confusing, yet simple. You play as “Jack Garland” who is a stranger and the strangers don’t remember any of their past. Jack doesn’t have any memories of his past aside from the fact that he has a violent urge to kill “Chaos”. Chaos is some giant monster that was basically a fairy tale around Cornelia the town that the game takes place in. Anyway, Chaos is basically just a driving force for whatever Jack does in the game, it might be explained better in the lore menu in the game, which attempts to tell you more of the story in-depth but I’m going to be honest, I didn’t read that. It is sometimes difficult to follow the story because stuff in this game just happens too fast and without enough details to really understand what happened, but you get a vague idea of a plot. It feels like a story from a video game that came out in 1987, but with the graphics and technology we have today. Graphically, the game doesn’t look that great. It looks like something that would be on the PlayStation 3 in 2013. When I played the game, I played it on the PlayStation 4, but it should look better on the PlayStation 5. The game can be played in “Resolution or Performance” mode. Resolution makes your game look as pretty as possible and performance makes it run as smooth as it can. I picked performance, so that also made my game look worse.
I would say the highlight of this game and the reason people even care about it are the cutscenes. The cutscenes are over the top stupid, edgy, and badass. They feature usually the protagonist interrupting the villains during a monologue that is supposed to be telling you more of the story. Our protagonist Jack really doesn’t talk about anything aside from wanting to kill Chaos and making his friends/party members that follow him uncomfortable. I’m going to be honest with you this game feels like a B-movie more than a video game, but I’d just advise you to watch the cutscenes and you’ll probably have a stupid smile on your face after that. I know I did! The ending will shock you!
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