Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin tends to have darker themes than its other counterparts. This is an action focused role-playing game developed by Team Ninja, and published by Square Enix. The game stands as an alternate universe prequel of the original Final Fantasy that released back in December of 1987.

The story line follows a cast of characters brought into a fantasy world to face down something known as “chaos” and features something of a twist for an ending. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin was released in March 2022 for plenty of platforms. You can play it on Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox One. In a small way it’s kind of like the Dark Souls of Final Fantasy games, with a darker feel to the story. There’s some real grit here, and it’s worth at least a watch, if not a play-through of your own.

As always beyond the playlist there’s more information about the game below. We hope you enjoy it!

As I said above, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is an action focused role-playing game. That means it’s a little more fast paced than your typical fantasy style story. There is fall damage too, a fact we learned much too late and hilarity ensued.

In any case, players will take on the role of our main protagonist, Jack. You’ll be exploring environments and fighting monsters and visiting locations based upon the main titles of the Final Fantasy series. From the ever famous Tonberries and Crawlers, to spiders and bats if you’ve played Final Fantasy games before the callbacks are endless. You’ll traverse new areas inspired by the series classics and there’s a little something for everyone.

Combat takes place in real-time, with Jack being able to switch between jobs. Once again, if you’re a Final Fantasy fan, there’s a lot to like here. For those unaware, though, some jobs do physical damage. Others heal or do magical attacks. You can also do a finishing move that violently and crystallizes the enemy. Doing that causes them to explode with volatile intent, but its worth doing.

The boss fights are pretty decent, Team Ninja did a very good job subverting my personal expectations. As a long time Final Fantasy fan myself, I’d expect to see one area boss only to find out that Kresh would be facing down something entirely different.

I do think that ultimately if you’re looking for an action packed adventure you’ll probably find it here. There’s a lot of really neat little additions, cool nods to the wider series, and revisiting some of those old locations in a new light is pretty nice.