The easiest way to sum up Stranger of Paradise is that it’s a bit like Nioh, but worse. It takes some of the things I liked from the best-selling soulslike series like the plethora of skills and customisable combos, but also brings over the bloated loot system, repetitive side missions, and questionable story.
I suppose to be fair, the story isn’t all bad, especially the last couple of hours where a great plot twist I won’t spoil here really turns the entire game on its head. It’s just that you have to slog through a whole lot of anime gobbledegook to get there, and while some people may enjoy interminable cutscenes of fashionably-dressed one-dimensional NPCs waving their hands around and clenching their fists, I ended up wishing I could advance some of the dialogue to get to the good stuff.
I mean, all you really need to know is that amnesic protagonist Jack is here to destroy Chaos, and that’s exactly what he’s going to do, over and over again, using an interesting and addictive combat system that’s just deep enough to be enjoyable, even if by the end of the game it starts to overstay its welcome.
Nioh’s class system has been replaced by jobs, something Final Fantasy fans will instantly recognise, and you can equip any two at one time, switching between them on the fly as the touch of a button. You never level-up your stats directly, your strength is determined by the weapons you find and the jobs level up, both directly by killing enemies and indirectly by wearing pieces of specific gear. As you progress through each job’s skill tree, you’ll be unlocking two types of abilities : those that can be used only if that specific job is equipped and others that are permanently added to your character’s weapon or command skills and are kept even if you change jobs.
It’s a cool idea, and fun to plan out the fastest way to unlock some of the more powerful jobs such as the Sage or the Marauder. The problem is once you actually get your favourite jobs to level 30, there’s no real point of earning any more xp as it does nothing further than offer a tiny increase in job affinity. I mean, you could switch to another job you don’t really like and level that one up, but where’s the fun in that? Once I’d settled down into a good groove with my Berserker and Sage combo, I didn’t see why I’d swap them out for anything else.
Both enemies and bosses have a health and break gauge, with the latter being way more important as once you stagger them you can execute them, sekiro-style, with the touch of a button. You can customize your own combos so it’s fairly easy to plan your build around stagger-breaking abilities, which makes the game a tad too easy, but allow to smash even the strongest enemies in the face with you chaos-destroying fist in just a couple of well-placed hits.
Everything around the combat seems to have been added as a bit of an afterthought. Missions are chosen from a boring mini-map. The smith is selected from a menu and allows you to upgrade or modify weapons, though there’s no real point as you’ll be changing your equipment every few minutes. The amount of loot in Strange of Paradise is ridiculous. I though Nioh went overboard on loot drops, but this game dials it up to eleven. Almost every single monster exploded in a rainbow of colour-coded boots, swords, and bandanas, to the extent that you’ll be maxing out your 600 item limit on most missions. Thank Chaos there’s an auto-optimizing option or the game would have taken twice as long to finish.
One last little niggle. At one point the game asks you to choose between two different paths, both at more or less the same level. The problem is that when you complete the first one, you’re sent down the second one anyway, and end up being vastly vastly overlevelled. As one of the only ways to get stronger is to pick up better equipment, being forced to play through nearly an hour of content where the drops are ten levels lower that what you’re wearing is a waste of time.
I’m struggling a bit to decide if I really enjoyed my twenty or so hours with Strange of Paradise. I think I did, but barely. The addictive fast-paced combat made me want to keep playing, but a lot of the surrounding design choices just didn’t work for me, from the lacklustre repetitive environments, to the jobs that max out too early, and overflowing loot system that makes weapon upgrades superfluous. A higher difficulty level is unlocked upon completing the game and maybe this changes the experience somewhat, but as it stands I’m not sure I can recommend this to anyone but the most die-hard of Final Fantasy fans, or those looking for a new drinking game when you take a shot every time you hear the word ‘Chaos’.
