Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin isn't the first time that Square Enix tried to add a meatier narrative to the first game in the series. That honor belongs to the PSOne version, which was included in the Final Fantasy Origins package and retained the game's original 8-bit look but added some CG cut scenes. It worked well enough, but for many fans of the series, it didn't add much to the lore, and there wasn't a big demand for it considering that players had already embraced its simple tale. Square Enix felt differently, and with the first part of Final Fantasy VII Remake being so well received, it decided to take on the same approach with the first game, only with Team Ninja taking on development duties.

The story gets the basics from the original game but adds in enough twists to make it more substantial. You play the role of Jack, a man whose singular goal in life is to destroy a being known as Chaos. He meets up with Ash and Jed, two other people who possess the same dark crystal that he does, and they attempt to save the kingdom from Chaos' machinations while embodying the prophecy of the Warriors of Light.

There are a multitude of things to unpack. Jack and his friends all happen to be amnesiacs ripped out of time, and no one else in the new land bats an eye. The opening cut scene throws together disparate things, like a slaughter featuring Chaos holding an unconscious body and the introduction to Jack featuring a Frank Sinatra song playing in a wheat field. Cut scenes are brief, with Jack being a completely serious one-note character and everyone slightly more fleshed out. The dialogue sounds more and more ridiculous as the game goes on. If you're looking for the kind of narrative that later Final Fantasy games displayed, this isn't it. If you're a fan of movies or TV shows, you'll find this tale to be enjoyable, even if it's just to laugh at its outlandishness.

As far as gameplay goes, what you're getting in Stranger of Paradise is less of a traditional RPG and more of an action-RPG — with a heavy focus on the action part. Combat is very much influenced by the developer's Nioh series, with its focus on getting perfect dodges and blocking to make the most of counters. Basic button-mashing can do the job well enough, since there's no stamina meter. It also means that the fighting plays out at a much faster rate as opposed to being drawn-out and methodical.

That said, the game still requires you to play with some amount of caution, as enemies tend to attack with combos or with one big hit that'll send you scrambling to quaff a potion. It also features save cubes that act the same way as the bonfires in the Dark Souls series; they save your progress and refill all your meters at the expense of making most non-key enemies respawn, but they also omit the need to backtrack to your corpse to get your items back.

There are several mechanics that do a great job of fleshing out the experience for all types of players. There are three basic difficulty levels (easy, normal, and hard), where the real differences between them isn't in the monster difficulty but what you can do, such as being able to block normally unblockable attacks. Beyond this, the game also contains a few modifiers that do things like get rid of the magic meter decrease upon death. Even if you hate the masocore type of action game, you can tweak this enough to make it possible to reach the end without much frustration.

Players also get help in the form of their AI companions. As in Kingdom Hearts, you'll always have at least two companions at your side, and you can give them some basic commands or let them fight on their own. They do a good job of fighting off enemies, so you'll never need to babysit them, but unlike that Square Enix series, you can also equip them with weapons and armor. You can also apply magic on them to the point where you can play a support role most of the time and let them do most of the fighting — and do so effectively.

The blocking system is fascinating, since there are two versions at your disposal. The first is a basic block, which can be done successfully so long as you still have some energy left in the break meter. You also have a parry that doesn't consume any break energy if you perfect the timing. The more interesting version of the block is the Soul Shield, which lets you absorb certain attacks and use it against enemies yourself. It takes up a good deal of that block meter, but being able to throw fireballs and other projectiles adds some dynamism to the basic combat.

The biggest wrinkle to the established combat system are the jobs. Instead of being completely different characters, Jack can embody the traits of some of the series' more familiar classes. Paladins, various colored Mages, Tyrants, and others are all here, and players can switch between two of them on the fly; the rest are swappable at save points. Each job has different skill trees that greatly change up your style of play. Keep in mind that the jobs work with any weapon and armor, and since those have their own abilities, you're faced with plenty of combat combinations. Give the Thief a mace, and they become proficient in magic, which makes them great from a distance since they can combine stolen magic with their own concoctions. It's a wild system that does a great job of adding variety to your fighting. You'll wish you can switch between more than just two classes at a time.

As for the game's length, it clocks in at roughly a little over 20 hours if you aren't trying to grind away to hit the level cap on all of the jobs. That's pretty good for a modern adventure game, but it can also feel short when compared to the rest of the games in the franchise. The game does have three DLC packs to lengthen the adventure with a few boss fights and classes, and while buying it alongside the current game is a bit cheaper than the base game was when it launched a year ago, it would've been nice to see it packed into the game from the start.

The one part of Stranger of Paradise that can seem like a negative is the presence of multiplayer. The mode works well, and anyone who jumps into a session will take over for any of the AI-controlled companions with their own set of abilities and skills. The online performance is smooth, and as good as the AI is, having a powered-up human playing alongside you provides a much better chance at difficult boss fights. However, the game makes no concessions for offline players in that pausing doesn't exist. That is fine for online sessions, since that can make gameplay slower and cause other issues. If you really need to take a break, the only thing you can do is either find a safe spot to hide or quit the session.

The presentation is quite good overall. Corny lines aside, the voice acting is very well done, with a delivery that matches any of the more mainline series titles. The music is in the same position; it's well done, even if it can often feel out of place. Visually, the game looks very nice, with the environments doing a good job of mimicking ones you'd see from past games. The animations for enemies and allies are smooth, while the hitching that was seen when the game first launched on the Epic Game Store has been cleaned up considerably. The frame rate is a bit unstable, as cut scenes top out at 60, but the main game can go higher. You can implement frame rate caps if you want to keep things consistent. While the game doesn't feature any ray tracing, it does have upscaling via DLSS and FSR, but be aware that it's only 2 and 1.0, respectively.

With the game finally on Steam, we can see how it runs on Steam Deck with the first set of shader caching that Valve does on its end. The game's save file ports over the settings from your last machine, so you'll need to constantly fiddle with them when going between devices. When everything is set to High, MangoHUD states that the game runs at over 40fps, but the actual performance sees the game running in slow motion. It's smooth but certainly not what's desired. Drop everything down to low or off, and you'll see the frame rate jump to around 50fps, which does a great job of making it feel smoother. This comes at the cost of battery life, which averages at around 90 minutes on a full charge. You can probably mess with FSR 1.0, resolution scaling, or turn off a few more options to see if that helps.

Your assessment of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for a deep and serious story, you'll be severely disappointed. Even as it holds some Easter eggs for longtime fans of the series, the dialogue and characters and haphazard way it's all told will only appeal to fans who love bad but ultimately lovable cult classics. If you enjoy action games, this is a surprising treat that takes the Nioh base mechanics and loosens things up to make it more appealing. It's a fun title that's worth trying out — despite what the initial trailer might have led you to believe.

Score: 8.0/10