Whew, that was a very long week, and a few things fell by the wayside, as you may have noticed from the lack of daily posts! There's still lots of Things to Do in the coming weeks, but I think the mad flurry I've been dealing with for the last couple of weeks or so will start dying down a little bit from here. It's been a busy and somewhat stressful time, for sure, but it's also been fun to feel like I'm doing something useful and helpful to others.
This evening I've spent a good few hours playing Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. I picked it up on PS4 and it runs just fine. The "performance" mode puts the whole thing in a low-resolution mode the likes of which I haven't seen since Doom in low-detail mode, but it does run lovely and smooth, but the "resolution" mode runs perfectly acceptably and still looks nice. I can only assume the PS5 version has its in-game graphics looking more closely in-line with the FMV cutscenes — but rest assured, if you've been considering this one on PS4, you can absolutely enjoy it even on a base model system.
I really like the game, too. It's absolutely not Final Fantasy Souls in the slightest, though I suspect lazy reviewers and commenters are going to call it that. No, rather it feels more like what I think they were going for with Final Fantasy XV, with a lot more in the way of refinements, variety and satisfaction. It is combat with a great sense of weight and impact to it, but which also rewards (and provides ample opportunity for) tactical play. It also features what is, I think, one of the best implementations of a caster in an action RPG that I've seen to date, so I'm likely going to be focusing mostly on the magic-user job progression paths first of all.
I won't say too much more because part of my own personal joy of this game has been going in fairly blind. I will, however, say that if they had called this Final Fantasy I Remake and positioned it like Final Fantasy VII Remake — as an alternate retelling of the story — then I don't think anyone would have complained!
Not looking forward to the inevitable deluge of "I'm going to kill Chaos" memes from people who haven't engaged with the game on anything more than a surface level, though. But then, I don't look forward to any memes these days. Oh well. Not to worry. I have better things to do. Like play more Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin!
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