I’ve been playing Elden Ring pretty much nonstop since it came out. I’ve played other games here and there, but I always return to Elden Ring. I watched Eurogamer (Aoife and Ian) play a few hours of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (Team Ninja) (the video is below), and it’s bonkers. The main character is Jack, a glowering, dour, brooding guy who is all about KILLING CHAOS. He is teamed up with Ash and….other guy in a boy band party of swordfighter (Jack), pugilist (Ash) and duelist (other guy). Jed. His name is Jed, apparently. He is the emo/anime-looking one. Ash is the buffed beefcake, and Jack is the brooding one.
But wait! The prophecy foretold about four warriors, and we are but three! With our crystals vibrating simultaneously (SO funny), we are KILLING CHAOS and taking names for later. Or something. Normally, I would play in Japanese, but the English voice cast is just so campy and funny, I have to have the audio set to English.
I will preface this by saying I have tried several of the Team Ninja games. Nioh, Nioh 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and now, Stranger in Paradise; Final Fantasy Origin. I made it about a third of the way through Nioh, two or three bosses into Nioh 2, halfway through Wo Long, and I’ve beaten the tutorial boss (and, *SPOILER* the fourth member of the party. She is the best; I’ll get to her later).
The game is pulpy, unapologetically so. I have no issue with that; in fact, that’s the reason I decided to play it. Also, I saw that the combat was serious, but not soulslike hard–apparently. Nioh and Nioh 2 are really fucking hard, which is one of the reasons I gave up on them. Another is, well, I’ll get into that later as well.
It’s a forty dollar game that was half off. The port seemed to be ok, but not great. The story is ludicrous, but I expected that from a Team Ninja game. Also, janky. In Wo Long, I was at the tutorial boss for three hours. I thought it was just because I was shit at the game, but it wasn’t. I mean, I waws shit at it, but there was a glitch in the PC port, apparently, that did not allow a cut-scene to prock when it should have. I found this out by giving up and Googling it. I don’t remember how the forum told me to fix it, but I managed to do so and beat the boss thereafter.
I was so furious. I should have beaten the tutorial boss in six tries, but because of this glitch, it was closer to thirty or so. I knew he was supposed to be really hard (a real skill check), but apparently not like that.
I found things I liked about the game and things I disliked. And they are the same things I’ve liked and disliked in each of the Team Ninja games.
Let me start with one thing I like. The sheer flexibility in what you can upgrade. Weapons are upgraded by using them and in this game, your job upgrades as you play as that job. In this case, job means class. I’m swordfighter and mage right now. Also, they make it really easy for you to switch from job to job (you can equip two at a time) by simply htitting Y. This is probably the best thing about the game. Also, it’s best to mix up the jobs and not just rely on one. Oh, wait. I’m lancer and mage right now–I just recently switched beacuse the lancer can throw the lance with the RT ability. I like a bit of range.
Here is something that irritates me in every game. It’s not a big thing, but it’s so fucking pervasive. There is just too much shit the game throws at you. The constant barrage of items is never thrilling because there’s no meaning to each item. Every time you kill an enemy, you get something. There’s a chest every room (it seems), and it’s just more junk. Normally, when I get an item, I check it out and read about it. In this game, I wait until Ifind a cube (savinng point), and then I quickly scroll through allllll the new shit.
My other problem with the items is that the stats are so fiddly. This top has +3 in stamina, but -2 in strength. It’s a plus for a mage, but to what extent? Who the hell knows? I am not a min/maxer at all, and I just get tired seeing all the numbers go up or down minutely. If there’s a piece of equipment in which all the new numbers are blue (positive), I’ll switch to it. If there are a mix of blue and red (negative), then I just ignore it.
If they would cut out half the drops and make them meaningful, it would be so much better. I do like that your weapon levels up as you use it, but please, please, please just get rid of the trash. There is no reason to have a million drops if they don’t stand out from each other. I remember in Wo Long, I would dutifully try the new weapons and still stick with the one I had been rocking for hours. For the beginning of the game, it was the weapon the first (bugged) boss dropped–the pineapple. It looked like a pineapple, if I remember correctly. It was simply better than any of the other weapons–which I think was a deliberate choice on the devs part in order to let people use it to carry them in the first quarter of the game. I don’t even look at anything other than a purple or blue, honestly. Rather, I just scroll rapidly through the new equipment and only stop if anything is all blue numbers.
One bigger thing I dislike is the level design. One thing FromSoft does that is beyond compare is subtly guide you where you need to go. At least in the old games and in the legacy dungeons in Elden Ring. In Team Ninja games, every path looks the goddamn same. I can’t tell if I’m coming or going most of the time. Sure, there are times in From games when that happens, but that’s few and far between. Also, some of that is on my very bad sense of direction rather than lackluster level design.
I remember an area in Wo Long in which there were four or five ways to go. I looked around, and there was no indication which way was the important way. Pair this with another thing about their games that bothers me–the clusterfuck of inexplicably difficult enemies in a very small area with no way to draw one away from the pack.
Level design in Team Ninja games is just bad. There, I said it. It’s not thoughtful at all and often feels very slapdash and haphazard. In addition, there are shortcuts that miss the whole goddamn point of shortcuts in soulslikes. The reason players love shortcuts in From games is because we feel like we’ve earned them and they cut out a huge chunk of the area that we had previously explored and feel no need to do it again. Team Ninja seems to believe that the joy of the shortcut is simply finding a shortcut–which it very much is not.
I have more to say, but I’m done for now. More tomorrow.