Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

Unpleasant by design, and, but, hauntingly beautiful. There seems little point in mastering the (very) difficult combat when it's all in the service of something so fragmented, maddening. For Jack It's like a hunger, a thirst, and for us it's an endless grind that doesn't even have the decency to feel continuous. Princess Sarah looks at Jack's face You have more scars — and so within the world of Stranger of Paradise he's an enduring Jack that rises and falls and comes back insistent. But to the player he's a wind-up toy, materialising in spaces, soaking himself in blood, repeating phrases, and dematerialising again. The central hub is only the menus available in the world map; the world map, stripped of navigation, is only the holographic top-layer. Every level is a different Jack with the same programmed phrases, the same lost memories, the same vague sense that if he gets to the end of this tunnel maybe this will be the last one. But over and over another appears at the end, a hollow shell reproduction from another Final Fantasy stripped of context and placed within the amnesiac Stranger of Paradise. The context without context. The origin without origin.

The will to remake something is the nostalgic return to Paradise. That timeless time where everything was okay and every new thing seemed to open a horizon for future discovery. Notably, beginning with Kingdom Hearts, it's Testsuya Nomura who has been elected custodian of Paradise: the one evoked by childhood memories of Disney, and Final Fantasy's turn of the millennium futurist spectacle. It's also Nomura who is chiefly concerned with the fact that terrestrial Paradise is an impossibility that only reveals itself in hindsight. To have the tools with which to recognise Paradise is to find oneself on the other side of the Fall, only now with the ungraspable that one cannot let go of lodged into the heart like a wound or like a chasm. Many speak of the opening of Final Fantasy VII as one of those rare moments where the future was here and everything felt possible, and so they cast the infinite promise once experienced within the language of nostalgia, which is the romance of the past's finitude. Note this paradox, because this is the difference between Paradise as another name for Eden, and Paradise as the thing that comes later. One unfolds hopeful into the unknown, and the other retracts, chasing only that originary feeling of the infinite. Nomura will simulate this feeling in Final Fantasy VII Remake, but then he will tell you that it stops there because this is only the simulation of a feeling. While you can simulate the idea of Paradise as much as you desire through each new generation of technology, terrestrial Paradise as you know it is gone.

The Paradise we now desire is not the arrival of the future but the prelapsarian point of origin. Nomura's rejection of Paradise is that of the Origin, because he knows that under these conditions if Paradise were to arrive, we, ever occupied by the unrecoverable origin, would be Strangers to it. And so what he does is present the Origin but fills it with ghosts who recognise that this is not the real Origin, because they have already been here, a hundred times before. Working within the repetition of simulation immanent to the videogame system, the Paradise we desire remains outside of what can readily be simulated. This is why Nomura's pursuit of futurity is so optimistic, even if it means campy iconoclasm. The game system must become unbearable in its inability to deliver us to Paradise, and then it must self-destruct in order to reveal the gap where Paradise may enter.

This game manages to strike that balance of being both a complete mess and being better than it really has a right to be due to being so unpolished. If you like Nioh and more of those kinds of action rpgs where there is some thought put into equipment and class builds but you're more or less still allowed to just mindlessly slash through stuff with a giant anime sword you would probably like this, too. Just don't go into it expecting it to be the pinnacle of video game storytelling since it wants to be Drakengard so bad but fails in telling a story on an almost baffling level.