I played this game. Played it for a hundred hours, in fact; played it until I noticed I had gotten every trophy it had in it through just interacting with it outside of specifically targeting that goal structure. For the commentary to follow, you have to understand: I was always going to play this game when I had the hardware that permitted it, but the other reason that I played it now was that I needed something to wash out and counteract
Final Fantasy XVI--an action game, RPG, and a
Final Fantasy that I disliked in almost every conceivable way there was.
Stranger of Paradise was deliberately positioned by myself as a potential alleviating draught to everything I found lacking or absent there to what I would like a
Final Fantasy action game to be--a progression that is of course reversed in how these games came into the world, and I wonder how many others will view and experience the two in this way, from this perspective. The only thing
Stranger needed to do was build a case for itself as meriting that kind of tentative faith in whatever it ended up being, beyond the surface... and happily, I feel energized and rekindled in my enthusiasm for the series it's part of, instead of frustrated and disillusioned.
Part of why this game clicks for me stems from the lineage it's part of on multiple ends of itself. It is Team Ninja-developed, who'd previously done (the maligned and mistreated, but great)
Dissidia NT, a game through which multiple pleasing expressions of this branch of the series shine on and filter outward despite its sordid individual reputation. For one, there is that developer pedigree; Team Ninja whether in the old days or their current string of works know action design, and thrive on fast-paced high-execution brands of it. For
Dissidia itself, there can be no doubt that
Stranger is a direct continuation of those themes, narrative stylings, and other signifiers; it is all over this game and incorporated beautifully to a shifted genre occupation, but also importantly:
Dissidia as a series represents the best, most overwhelmingly granular and dense self-tribute that any game series has engaged in--frequently ingenious in its application of series material, and always painstakingly thorough in the range of elements drawn from. The series that it ushered in 2009 in a sense codified the style guide for
Final Fantasy spinoffs to follow, especially the works that engage in the practice of "talking about themselves" as metafiction or serial referentialism, from
Theatrhythm to
World of Final Fantasy, and I think the larger series is better for it if the homages are compartmentalized and contained in their own self-perpetuating niches like this, instead of infesting ostensible new works and creations through contextless, arbitrarily reflexive referentiality to the detriment of new stories being told--a major point of criticality I have towards
FFXVI.
Stranger then has its established bonafides; its textual story is pulled from a whim of Tetsuya Nomura's and fashioned into a legible narrative by Kazushige Nojima and Tomoco Kanemaki, the latter of whom is mostly known, if at all, for
Kingdom Hearts novelizations, and this collaboration "makes sense" in the tonality reached for: Nomura's fascination with and respect toward his predecessors' and seniors' work is what powered much of
Dissidia in the syncretic adaptations of his own work and those of Amano's, and it's where the prominence of Garland as something more than a fond memory of a childhood speedbump really kicked into gear; the loud gravitas of the ultimate bodyguard to his own, chaotically ascended self lounging on his throne. Nojima for his extensive career is also not a boring writer no matter what other opinions of his work you may have, and that kind of superficially convoluted but ultimately emotionally resonant touch needed to be applied to the story
Stranger tells, because it is extremely authentic to the sensibilities of an 8-bit RPG in a way, with slight archetypes instead of greatly shaded characters occupying its cast... and yet, it is that very light touch that allows it to grasp at party-driven RPG narrative greatness because these people, Jack and the Four Friends, are always together for the duration of their adventure, and have to be understood as a unit bouncing off each other as they go about torture-racking sahagin and powerbombing robots. It is "Jack's story," but the emotions that eventually come into play are seeded by the jovial camaraderie between a very angry but supportive man and his compatriots that accept him with his self-admitted foibles and have his back no matter what may transpire in their weird travelogue through a patchwork world.
It is Jack who comes to embody so much of what makes this game exceptional. Everyone made fun of him at first blush: who was this nü-metal blasting, rude and abrasive asshole mumbling about Chaos? The memes progressed--or ossified--as they did, and for many that's where it stopped; the idea of Jack as he was presented and perceived from second one and no further. This isn't lead-up to a contrary treatise that people were somehow hoodwinked into believing untruths about Jack through promotional material and their own interpretive lenses--no, Jack remains what he appears as, but the difference is that the easy laughs at the ridiculous over-the-topness only tell a partial story. Because Jack is at such maximum intensity all the time, and because the game's narrative is set up as an amnesiac, interiority-degrading recursive time loop, the premise of Jack calling bullshit at exposition and trying to sucker punch bosses during their villainous monologues was taken as indication that
Stranger was engaging in genre parody or skewering of conventions--that it was ashamed or condescending of them in a way that mirrored some of the audience's views. It's not, in my understanding, something the game ever intends or even suggests it might be doing, because it becomes clear that this is an exceedingly sincere game in its emotional content and the character interiority it grants Jack and his friends. It veils itself in a layer of exploding ultraviolence (which isn't very gore-driven or lingered-upon... just very fantastically explosive) and intimations of a false "maturity" because the cast leans older and sometimes there's blood splatter, and so invites a narrative that it's
Final Fantasy gone hardcore... but it remains idealistic at its core and absent of a cynical streak in what it strives to communicate through Jack as the narrative's fulcrum. Jack Garland's story is "dark" in the sense of where the cyclical nature of his destiny will take him, but it is mature in my eyes because it leaves those aspects as the marginal letter of the text, while its spirit remains hopeful and heroic throughout. There is a startling line encountered at one point in the game, in which a character describes Jack as "pure and innocent," and the kneejerk reaction is to dismiss the read... but the more you invest in the narrative, the more earned and insightful the assessment comes off as, and is as ridiculous an encapsulation of his appeal as everything else about his vicious, violent self.
Jack is then a protagonist who is superficially anathema to my preferences for being an angry white guy, but who I grew to love to inhabit for how his story was told and how he expresses himself during the course of it, much of what transpires during play and battles. Jack is the most serious person in the room most of the time, which by the law of comedy renders most things he does inherently comedic, and his frequent battles are part of that. This is significant to me because video game violence, while not usually enough to deter my interaction with media, is however something I'm always cognizant of and which does end up colouring my read on a game in how it's handled.
Stranger is a hardcore action game from a studio that made its name on exploitative, glitzy ultraviolence, and that throughline maintains in how it depicts Jack's violence upon the
FF critters and denizens with each receiving their customized deathblow animation as a coup de grace... but it is difficult to be unsettled by the act as it is so performatively extreme in each case, and elaborately choreographed for the boss finishes. Importantly, Jack is not cruel in these bursts of violence, but depicted as overwhelmingly efficient even in his more fanciful moments; his enemies do not have time to suffer because he does not allow it--the "thirst for Chaos" that powers the character's initial motivations is resonant in how he behaves throughout his journeys where everything else is an unwelcome distraction from the obsessive, solitary goal, and so obstacles are dispatched in the most practical and quickest ways possible, using whatever tools are present.
The Jack-of-All-Jobs aspect of the character is as important as anything else about him, and in the game's mechanical design I especially want to draw in the "unlike
FFXVI,
Stranger does this" comparative context which filtered much of my understanding and appreciation of the game through contrast, and particularly in how it goes about things as an action RPG. To list some things: unlike
FFXVI, there are different weapon types--ten of them in all, with completely different, distinct movesets in both the primary strings and their own MP-using combo abilities; said movesets are completely customizable depending on learned job skills, the weapon-granted unique abilities, and such. A Job may and will have influence on the modifiers certain weapon attacks enjoy, but you can just as well play whatever weapon a particular Job allows for according to preference--after an extended period of leveling and enjoying the diversity of all the weapons, what I eventually settled into was a gun-toting Gambler, who spent meter on rolling roulette wheels, often striking out, but frequently layering on successive buffs and blessings, and occasionally lucking out through an encounter or even boss-deleting Ultima or The End cast. The gun and luck fundamentals were supported by castings of Teleport, transforming the useful and satisfying dash-dodge and spacing roll into a forever-continuing string of rapid teleports, aiding in spacing. I played this game like a human-sized, strafe-boosting
Armored Core mech up to its meanest (and they are absolutely vicious) challenges, and that such an approach was not only feasible but shockingly effective and, importantly, some of the most absurd fun I've ever had in action RPGs, speaks volumes about the kind of breadth and diversity that exists in
Stranger's fundamental character-building options. It is not a game where I ever tried something and could not see a practical use for it, despite the niche and indirect applications of the singular tools--everything in it feels like you could build a play strategy around with enough dedication.
Unlike
FFXVI,
Stranger is not hesitant to embrace its RPG pedigree in the numerical stat-cruncher part of itself. It may in fact be the most systems-fixated action RPG I've ever played; up to the end of all the DLC it had, it was unlocking and introducing new wrinkles on the play modifiers and mechanics. It's overwhelming in the sense that options exist, but in practice the laser focus of play helps ameliorate any analysis paralysis; you are in effect doing stat housekeeping to support your reflexive and reactive skill and not depending on your build choices outright. There is great responsibility placed on the player to make their own decisions, but only in the moment: almost no choices are irreversible and the game thrives on cycling the options for test drives and perusal to play around in its toybox. The numbers-game can largely be left to automation and optimization for the bulk of the game, until it cannot be, mainly for the DLC--and should you be committed to that, you are delving into spaces where the game demands engagement with its full systems to survive, so it's just as well. The "walls" I hit in play otherwise were such that instead of labbing perfect reactive dodge rolls and pattern-learning, preparatory play was often more decisive and efficient. It can happen that some boss fights turn into endurance bouts, but it's not where the game's balance lies: it is tuned for bosses to dismantle the unprepared in seconds, and happily you can often do the same to them; some encounters were over before they really began just because of how I'd set up Jack and the others beforehand, making my own execution threshold a triviality. It's an anomaly in this branch of self-professed "masocore" action game subgenre in that it's not afraid at all to let players trample over parts of the reflexively demanding designwork if they're more interested in optimizing the RPG systems on the other end, and treats those approaches not as "cheese" or systems abuse but equally valid and facilitated options for players to pursue. It's simultaneously one of the fiercest, most merciless action games of its type, and one of the most accommodating and diversely mutable, to an almost infinitely variable degree that never stops being a joy to experiment with, and undeniably one of the apexes the concept of the Job system has found in any game.
Unlike
FFXVI, this is a game about an RPG party. Jack's story doesn't mean anything without Ash, Jed, Neon, Sophia and Astos being there, and it is both narrative conceit and mechanical relevance. That you can dress up Jack and the others through equipment is a degree of stylized ownership on its own, but they are constantly present in every way throughout the game. They pace each dungeon excursion through scripted conversations and pre-packaged exclamations both, they are always part of the main narrative cinematics and interactions which are undertaken as a group, and they certainly affect play through their presence. Kitting out Jack's allies with their own respective Jobs is not as granular as it is with him, but you are still party-building toward a cohesive united front and which makes an impact in how you approach battles... which unlike
FFXVI, can just as quickly signal your end as any major boss fight should you approach them carelessly. Every enemy is dangerous, and the group dynamics of your people versus the enemy crowd result in melees that are chaotic and in their own way, as fun to parse as fights against solitary bosses. The party members are supportive in impact instead of members of equal parity in the party makeup, but crucially their effects are legible in a way that you can determine and appreciate when they happen, and lament their unavailability when they're not possible. Bosses are not won through party members alone, but they make a significant difference when utilized to their fullest... and the bosses are just as interesting to fight with Jack going it solo, the design being able to support either permutation of the scale of battles.
Whatever mitigating factors you apply to keep the fighting edge and advantage in
Stranger, there's no denying that it is a hard game. It is intended to be, but not punitively so: there are hardly any penalties for failure, even psychologically attritional ones, and instant retries are the game's lingua franca. Because it exudes a demanding baseline, I was motivated to learn how to play it, in a process that never really stopped until I simply ran out of game to realistically play (rest assured this is a grinder's heaven if so desired), and I kept making new discoveries up to that end of my time with it. It's an almost embarrassingly packed whole in what it does, but depth in its case does not invite dilution--there's hardly any filling for time in the game, because all it knows are its interweaving core systems, the spaces to place them in, and the narrative to contextualize them with. Even the DLC components, which are more mechanically driven than anything, always take care to narratively integrate their ultra-demanding stage modifiers or roguelite floor-based dungeons as part of Jack's ongoing narrative and its eventual finale in a way that never falters. And in all this cornucopia of content, there's levity and humour that never feels out of place because Jack Garland from the outset is a comedically attuned figure should you find his schtick funny or endearing--only over time it may shift into a "laughing with, not at" dynamic between character and audience. Some of the game's strongest writing happens in the Rift Labyrinth DLC, through a subsystem of conjuring
FF monsters through summonstones and witnessing their individual interactions with Jack and the Friends as you fulfill their tasks as side objectives of play; a perspective of Chaos and its monstrous subjects interacting from a protagonist perspective, a rarity in itself. It is an unexpected vehicle for the game to pursue, but then what has Jack Garland's story been but unexpected and heartfelt commitment to a bit? This game has a tone that it never breaks away from, whether it's what defines it mechanically or as a narrative experience, and its fragmented, recursive self keeps it anchored to straightforward sincerity that is almost entirely lacking in pretense.
Who really thought this game would be made, or that it would pull off half the things it does half as well as it manages to? "Jack Garland, the tragic hero-villain of
Final Fantasy" is not in itself an unique proposition--the series has tried similar with its villains several times over, and some may have their favourites from the lot, but Jack has something the others frequently don't: a group identity despite being the star of the show, and the "power of friendship" that the series is so fond of extolling the virtues of. It's entirely up to the depiction of those relationships that dictates whether I can emotionally buy into the ostensible message; games like
FFIV,
FFXV and
FFXVI utterly fail it in my eyes because they loathe and exclude women or elevate their protagonists to messianic proportions at the cost of everyone else around them.
Stranger of Paradise doesn't do either: Neon and Sophia are treated with shocking parity and context within the group, where fears of machismo on Jack's part turn entirely unfounded; he will include them in his ritualistic, affectionate fist-bumps the same as anyone else, and they reciprocate his clumsy means of expressing himself in turn. If the game has any "villain behind the curtain" it is the Lufenian Nil, who is not discarded as Anabella was in
FFXVI, but is fought as one of the last challenges Jack ever faces on his journey, the instigator and perpetuator of many of his ills, and she is dealt with it in the same way Jack always does at the culmination of boss fights: exploded into crystal, quickly and with finality. Whatever catharsis exists in this game doesn't come at the expense of the rest of its cast and its chronologically repeating story structure means it never has to treat any character death as the end, and instead utilizes them as elements of the stories told about those characters. Who would've thought Astos--Astos, who so haunted FUKT's ever-dying existence--would or could be refashioned into an emotionally resonant character, or a character at all--but here he is, the star of basically his own love story with the man who would kill and become Chaos. For that reason and others, I place
Stranger of Paradise in the realm of
FF games and stories I value the most in what is narratively achieved with them, through their casts and otherwise--the
FFVs, the
FFVIIIs and the
FFXIIIs of the world--because it's almost entirely absent of the kind of thematic caveats that would pull the rug from under my sense of investment, and instead dedicates its entirety to a recontextualization of a formative RPG narrative that even in its time was an overachiever in the narrative contexts of its time, and that maintained sensibility is what makes this the best possible prequel, sequel or spin-off to
Final Fantasy, the first of its name, that could be realized in the form that it settled into. Jack Garland is here to kill Chaos, and in so doing he has kept
Final Fantasy alive.
