Stranger of Paradise is to Final Fantasy what Metal Gear Rising was to Metal Gear Solid. Top tier action combat married with a ridiculous yet sincere story that is simultaneously a departure from the mainline games and somehow nails the tone perfectly.

The job system is a blast and allows for tons of creativity, magic is powerful and satisfying, weapons are varied and awesome, tonberries are terrifying as they waddle towards you knife in hand, and you get to kill chaos.

It's not perfect and has plenty of problems, similar to what you'd find in other recent Team Ninja games. Performance is mostly good on a 3080ti, yet there's still massive frame drops and slowdown during certain segments where lots of animations happen at once. The game in general runs worse than it should for how it looks. There are a handful of difficulty spikes that I just ended up cheesing with guns/magic rather than approach as a "fair" fight. Some ultrawide issues when certain events happen.

However, the biggest failure of this game is that Square Enix stuck it on the Epic store for a year then slapped it on Steam with no advertising, no buildup, not even a store page until the moment it released, nothing other than a tweet a few weeks before it finally came to Steam. Square Enix apparently hates money. I'd wager most Nioh and Final Fantasy fans don't even know this game released on Steam, or that it exists at all.

If you like Team Ninja's combat and the Final Fantasy setting, this game is a knockout. Like all games, even better with friends.

I wish I could refund Wo Long and buy this one twice.

to reduce the slow motion after doing a soul burst.

basic settings -> shorten soul burst animation on

and turn off Screen Space Reflections from graphics settings.

Game stutters like hell, but luckily it has a pretty simple solution and it involves using Special K and activating "sleepless render thread and sleepless window thread"

Here I wrote a steam guide to configure and hopefully make this easier for everybody
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2992053221


I have come here to chew bubblegum and kill chaos. And I'm all out of bubblegum.

As mentioned, game is like a mix of DMC, Metal Gear Rising, and a bit of soulsesque with big bosses at the end of each mission.
You got plenty of jobs (classes) to pick from, and the level up system is quite cool. At the start it might be hard for you to click with the game, because it might seem way too easy, but just give it a try till you pass that chokepoint (assuming you are playing on hard)
Overall, pretty cool systems in place!

Just with that, performance and gameplay is buttersmooth.

Story-wise? Eh... It's hard to justify the way the story is being told, sometime it feels its all over the place and make you think "Did I skip a cutscene or something?". But gameplay is just all you need here.

Edit: Well, the story thing I mentioned? Well, fully intended. And it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing.

Edit 2: Game is a slow burner, as others have said, the vanilla game acts as the tutorial, and the DLC's are where the hour sink begin (in a good way)
What does this mean? You can think of this game as you would play Diablo 2 or 3, you got the initial difficulties and the story, right? But the real deal is farming and refining your build
Well this is exactly that, once you finish the game, harder difficulties unlock, and new tools to play around with your items are handed to you.
It took me a good while to get "hooked", but once it did? Oh man... I'm really enjoying this one.

Note: I have played this on console previously so this is based on having beaten the game before

PROS
>Jack
>Astos
>Voice acting is surprisingly good all things considered
>Controls are responsive and has good levels of input buffering so that you aren't dropping combos
>If you like Nioh you'll probably like this game in terms of combat
>Huge variety in your crystal kill move, effectively every unique enemy type has its own animation which keeps it from getting too old
>Better road trip story than FFXV, the game that was written first and foremost to be a road trip story
>The game radiates the feeling of late-2000s need to be "badass" yet at the same time is wierdly self-aware at that fact without being quippy. It almost feels like a Tim and Eric skit half the time, like we're all in on the big joke and that's what crosses it over from stupid to fun.
>Has a much more compelling narrative than anyone expected out of the game

CONS
>Let's not beat around the bush, the game runs like ass
>Like seriously, you will need to set it to performance mode to get 60 fps out of it, and even then the game will go into PS2-tier graphics on the tutorial field because of all the bloom it has to process and thus discard in order to maintain performance mode's framerate
>Even putting aside performance issues, the game looks like a PS3 game from around 2012ish. Which fits the mood the game is going for but still

You all know the memes, you know how everyone joked about CHAOS at the game's reveal, I don't need to repeat that. We expected cringekino at best, what we got was a far better game than anyone thought was possible. I'm not going to lie to you and say the combat is as good as Nioh because it's not, it's objectively worse, but as someone that has beaten the final difficulty in both Nioh games, it's only SLIGHTLY worse. Not enough of a difference to be a big deal.

The story in this game might as well not exist. Or rather, there's a shadow of a semblance of a plot for the first 90% of the game, then an entire game's worth of plot is dumped on you at the last 10% that re-contextualizes the entire journey up to that point. Is that a terrible idea? Of course it's a terrible idea, and yet at the same time they somehow managed to make it work, which shows all you need for a terrible idea is to execute it well.

If you can somehow get it running well on your machine, it's a solid 8/10. If you can't it's probably a 6 because the performance issues can genuinely get THAT bad, the performance is holding back a really fun game.

This isn't the best game I played in 2023, but it is definitely the most underrated one. This game is definitely made for a specific kind of person, but if you are in that camp it absolutely checks the right boxes that make for an excellent experience. If you've played Nioh 1 or 2 you already pretty much know what to expect coming into this game with some caveats.

The good:

-Excellent Combat. High tier action gameplay.
-Insane degrees of customization to modify your gameplay experience. There are like close to 30 playable classes and you can swap between 2 classes in the middle of combat on top of designing your own custom combos. You are constantly going to be doing pretty awesome things in combat.
-Mostly great co-op experience for up to 3 players. It's very easy to invite your friends and can play through almost the entire campaign together, outside of a couple of instances that force you to (briefly) separate. Class design allows for players to even take on roles if you wish, such as running dedicated support , tank, or dps. Or you can ignore traditional party roles entirely.
-The base game has multiple difficulty settings make the game as easy or as hard as you want it to be. Beware the optional DLC is extremely difficult post-game content.
-Great levels of polish to the mechanics. There are a ton of build templates that you can create to easily swap between classes and item sets, auto-dismantle features to make the loot pinata far more manageable, auto optimizing gear for your entire party, and million other controls that the game lets you use to really fine tune your experience.

The Bad:
-Absolutely trash tier level design. Things start out as serviceable and become increasingly more annoying as the game progresses. Multiple layers to levels with poor visual landmarks and very little direction mean you are often going to be running around going "Where TF do I go? Have I already been here before?" This is made even worse by the fact that there's NO MAP.
-This was a minor point for me, but the loot and levels progress at such an insane pace that you are basically going to just be constantly hitting the auto optimize button and calling it a day, at least until you get to the higher tier of difficulties where it starts to really matter. Your first run through the game will have a sort of disconnected feeling with the loot system where you are lacking meaningful decisions with your gear that give you a tangible impact on your gameplay.
-While the story does eventually become at least coherent, the pacing is absolutely awful and it's really not great overall. There's essentially no character development to be had and the entire cast is completely one-note and forgettable. If you're looking to primarily get something from the story experience in this game, stay far away.

Chaos...

Given that the reviews for this are just meme spamming garbage:

Kingdom hearts combat.
FF 1 story retold as if the protagonist was Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Job system + gear as expected from an FF game.
Controls well. Feels good.

I don't have enough hours to tell you if the game is good yet. But this is what it features.

P.S Can we just stop doing memes and cat pictures and ♥♥♥♥ as review content?

Think third person, looter dungeon crawler ARPG, with missions that plays around the flavor of the original Final Fantasy.

Choose a class, learn how to dodge, block, attack, and counter. Then be introduced to more classes, and figure your very own end-game build.

Gameplay is close to Nioh combat-wise. There's a health/stamina gauge system for you/enemies. There's staggering when stamina is depleted, so mind your own while trying to wittle enemies down. Once enemies are staggered there's a super critical attack you can do that will auto-kill most enemies.

The class system is a lot of fun, the story... it's cheesy.

PC port has some problems. There are mods to fix. Buy on sale, lots of fun, grindy.

I want to kill Chaos. Literally kill Chaos. No other character can come close to relating to how much I want to kill Chaos. There is no way you can convince me not to kill Chaos. Killing Chaos could not possibly be anymore me. I want to kill Chaos, and nobody can convince me otherwise. If anyone approached me on the topic of not killing Chaos, then I immediately shut them down with overwhelming evidence that I want to kill Chaos. I want to kill Chaos, it is indisputable. Why anyone would try to argue that I shouldn't kill Chaos is beyond me. If you held two pictures of me and killing Chaos side by side, you'd see no difference. I can safely think of killing Chaos every day and say "Yup, that's me". I can practically see killing Chaos every time I look at myself in the mirror. I go outside and people stop me to comment how much I want to kill Chaos. I chuckle softly as I'm assured everyday that I want to kill Chaos in every way. I can smile each time I get out of bed every morning knowing that I've found my identity with wanting to kill Chaos and I know my place in this world. It's really quite funny how much I want to kill Chaos, it's not a hope or a dream, it's like a hunger. A thirst.

10 hours in, I still wan kill chaos.

I came here for one reason and one reason only. To kill Chaos.