Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has a pretty confusing name, but thankfully creative producer Tetsuya Nomura was on hand to break down its meaning, including how Origin is not actually a sequel to the first Final Fantasy.
In an interview with Famitsu that IGN has independently translated, Nomura shared how the name Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin came about. And how despite having “origin” in the title, the game is not a direct continuation, or prequel, to Final Fantasy 1.
That’s because Stranger of Paradise actively incorporates the same setting as the first Final Fantasy and even elements of the story. In this way, Final Fantasy Origin sounds kind of like a remix of the first game.
“[Stranger of Paradise] is not a direct continuation to FF1’s story, but a new story inspired by it,” Nomura says. “The trial version consists of a part in the beginning of the game in which you enter the Chaos Shrine, which is the same as in FF1.”
Nomura says the title is a reference to Jack, the protagonist, and his friends who find themselves in the world of FF1.
“The game was inspired by FF1. The setting is based on FF1 as well. Where did the Warriors of Light come from and who are they? This is something you find out in the ending of FF1,” Nomura explains.
“Jack and his friends are strangers in the same way. Who are Jack and his friends? Are they the Warriors of Light? These function as the main themes of the story, so in the story they are depicted as [the eponymous] strangers.”
Stranger of Paradise director Daisuke Inoue added that while the title can be interpreted literally to mean Jack and his friends as strangers in a new land, Inoue says that it can also be interpreted as “those that do not belong in paradise.”
This sounds a bit meta, so we’ll have to wait until 2022 when Stranger of Paradise is officially released for answers. A demo is also available now exclusively for PlayStation 5. While there were some issues with the demo on the first day, they have seemingly been resolved.
Final fantasy Origin leaked ahead of Square Enix’s E3 press conference. It is a collaboration between Square Enix and Team Ninja that takes the events of Final Fantasy 1 and combines in with Nioh-style combat.
As we accelerate towards Amazon Prime Day 2021 (June 21 – 22) it’s worth noting that there are plenty of deals to be had beforehand. Likewise, the winding down of E3 and State of Play means that a lot of the digital stores are flush with deals, too. We’ve therefore gone and found you the best bargains in the midst of this multi-cell perfect storm of price reductions.
Just another quick reminder that Prime Day 2021 is imminent (June 21 -22). And hey, you can’t get any of the discounts if you’re not a Prime member.
Fortunately, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Prime. Once you do that, you can take full advantage of all the Prime Day deals you want. Better yet, if you choose not to continue your membership, you can cancel before the 30 days are up. You’ll still get the discounts on what you bought, but you won’t have to pay anything at all.
Even if you’re not eligible for the free trial, perhaps because you’ve used it before, you can still pay for a month of Prime to get the Prime Day deals, and then cancel after the sale ends.
Final Fantasy VII Remake‘s tone often slides between light, funny moments and dark, tragic drama. But from the first moments of Intermission, the DLC mission added to the game with its Intergrade PlayStation 5 upgrade, it’s clear this new episode is mostly a comedy. In jumps Yuffie, one of the original game’s optional characters, and immediately her dangerous espionage mission to infiltrate the evil Shinra Corporation in Midgar is played like a kid goofing off. It’s a vibe that really works for the DLC, trading on the fact that Remake continues to be great about establishing fun, eccentric characters.
Taking place in the middle of Remake’s story, during the portion in which Cloud is separated from his compatriots, it follows Yuffie as she embarks on a mission to steal a secret Shinra weapon on behalf of her homeland, Wutai. Though the mission is dangerous, Yuffie approaches it with all the seriousness of a kid playing pretend–even though she’s on her way to first meet with Midgar’s Shinra resistance movement, Avalanche, and then sneak into the headquarters of a company that recently concluded a full-scale war with her home.
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The trouble with Intermission is that this side story doesn’t feel essential to anything going on. Sure, the DLC is providing context and backstory for a character that fans of the original Final Fantasy VII know will show up later in the story, but Yuffie’s mission is largely about her wandering around areas we’ve already seen, floating past but barely interacting with Remake’s cast, and taking part in minigames to waste some time. Yuffie’s a fun character to spend time with, even if you don’t have history with her from the first iteration of Final Fantasy VII, but it all comes off as a tease for something better down the road in FF7 Remake’s next installment. And after the remarkably deep and excellently realized version of the story that is Remake, Intermission feels like exactly that: a half-measure to fill time while we wait for the real show.
That’s not to say Intermission isn’t fun to play more often than not, though. When Yuffie is in combat, which is pretty damn often, she’s a blast to play. Like all the characters of Remake’s main cast, Yuffie has her own unique combat style that distinguishes her from how everyone else has played up to now. As a Wutai ninja, she packs a throwing star that’s good as both a close-range melee weapon and at long ranges. The options allow you to control the distance as you fight enemies–you can get in close to wail on them, bounce back to create a gap, then throw the star for distant damage that Yufife follows up with elementally charged “Ninjutsu” attacks that keep her out of harm’s way. Tap the Triangle button and you can retrieve your thrown star, not by drawing it back to you, but by sending Yuffie to it, allowing you to quickly close gaps and use enemies to maneuver around the battlefield.
Yuffie’s combat is all about controlling space and landing combos, and the string of melee attacks, star throws, and Ninjutsu allow you to absolutely lay into enemies for long barrages that can knock them off their feet and make them easy to dispatch. Once you get a rhythm down, there are times when it can be almost too easy to dismantle foes with all the options Yuffie has on-hand, especially as you add more weapons and materia to the mix. She’s a fast-paced fighter who can be devastating when you string her attacks together, and it’s a lot of fun to deftly mix all of her attacks together to dominate the battlefield.
Partway through the first chapter, Yuffie is joined by Sonon, her partner on the mission and a slightly older Wutai operative. In combat, Sonon acts as another means by which Yuffie can build out combos. You can’t control him, but you can trigger “synergy,” which has Yuffie and Sonon executing ability attacks for big damage and added effects. It’s a cool, if fairly simple, system that provides another tool for combat, while keeping the focus on Yuffie and her specific style.
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It’s in the dynamic between Yuffie and Sonon where we see shades of Remake, and Intermission at its best. Because Yuffie is technically the senior ninja despite her age, Sonon defers to her, while bouncing between exasperation for her overconfident, just-wing-it antics, and trying to give her a little helpful advice. For her part, Yuffie takes it all in stride. She knows how great a ninja she is, but she also never lets go of that air of excitedly performing “cool” for whoever happens to be looking in her direction. She’s a kid of incredible talent who’s still desperate to be taken seriously, while Sonon is a protective older brother type looking for a middle ground between annoying overbearance and risky overindulgence.
While the dynamic between Yuffie and Sonon is an interesting one, it doesn’t get tested or pushed much. That’s because the DLC neither covers an especially long time, nor puts the pair in especially impactful situations (you can wrap up the main story in four or five hours, longer if you decide to do some side content). The first chapter sees Yuffie and Sonon helping an Avalanche member avoid getting captured by Shinra by wandering through a sanitation plant in the undercity; the second has them running around the Shinra building. There aren’t any real twists or turns and there’s not much in the way of conflict except for the mission itself and the robots Shinra dispatches to try to stop you.
The same goes for what the story adds to the overall tale of Remake. Intermission plops you in the middle of Sector 7 during the tumultuous time before the story’s midpoint, but you mostly just get a few lines that flesh out the backstory of the squad of Remake. What’s more interesting are the bits in which Yuffie and Sonon have idle discussions about the political situation in Midgar and the rest of the world, as well as their ideological similarities and differences to Avalanche and its anti-Shinra operations.
Those little tidbits are where what Intermission adds to the story seems useful. It gives these little looks into both Yuffie’s character and the larger political landscape of Final Fantasy VII Remake, in a way that helps you understand the world a little better. But these small items are pretty few and far between, and while the character-building for Yuffie is nice, it’s not super clear why we’re revisiting this point in time or these places, or what revisiting them adds to the game overall.
There’s a big swing in this feeling right at the end of the DLC, where Intermission starts throwing deep-cut FF7 characters into the mix. It seems pretty clear that the idea here is to bring the wider FF7 universe, fleshed out in spin-offs like Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus into the main storyline, but the DLC doesn’t provide any context for what’s going on or, crucially, who these people are. Again, it plays into the idea that Intermission feels like a tease for where things are going later on, when we’re likely to get a more complete look at some of these elements. For now, it mostly adds confusion, especially if you’re not overly familiar with all that extra FF7 lore, and makes for some less than satisfying moments as the DLC wraps up.
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Apart from the main story, Intermission also adds some side content to keep you busy, but it mostly seems to exist to pad the runtime. There are a few new combat challenges and minigames, like Whack-A-Box (in which you break boxes by hitting them, earning points before a timer runs out) and Fort Condor, a sort of light strategy game. Fort Condor is the big new item in Intermission, mixing the spirit of chess with the creature summoning of Magic: The Gathering, in the broadest sense. You get a series of characters you can place on the board, who then march toward your opponent’s side and try to destroy their three forts. Your opponent can also drop characters, and who wins a fight depends on a rock-paper-scissors system that determines which types of characters get the upper hand. Its simplicity makes it very easy to pick up and play.
Fort Condor can be fun, especially as you add new pieces and boards to your repertoire, which give you a variety of options for your attacks and defenses, and the ability to use some magic spells during a match. But it’s all pretty simplistic, ultimately. You don’t control the character, you just choose where to put them, and the strategy is all about what pieces you use and when. Boards that let you get pieces out faster and in greater numbers tend to win, and there’s just not a lot of brainy options or strategic thinking that can help you to win out if you happen to have the wrong set of pieces of a particular matchup. With only a handful of matches to play during your first run through the story, it also won’t keep you busy for very long.
Altogether, Fort Condor, the story of Intermission, and all the other content in the DLC suffer from the same problem: They feel exceedingly thin. Not that an add-on chapter to a game needs to be especially enormous, but Intermission is a DLC that mostly takes place in one of the hub areas of FF7 Remake, and yet lacks meaningful character interactions or side quests to flesh out its world. Hanging out with Yuffie and Sonon is fun, but while you have run-ins with a number of important characters in key moments, the whole thing brings little to your understanding of the story of Remake as a whole.
In the end, Intermission is a pit stop, a quick jaunt into the gas station minimart of Final Fantasy VII to refuel, grab a snack, and get ready to wait some more. With its fun combat and quirky character moments, it’ll likely remind you of what you like about FF7 Remake–but it won’t be enough to hold you over.
This episode was recorded live immediately after the Xbox Extended Showcase, hosted by Gamertag Radio’s Parris Lilly. Parris joins us for this episode to discuss big games (like Halo Infinite, Redfall, Starfield, Forza Horizon 5, and many more), stunning indie games (like Replaced, 12 Minutes, Somerville, and more), whether or not this was Xbox’s best E3 presentation ever, and more!
Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our new YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 download of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out the latest episode of IGN Unfiltered, featuring an interview with The Elder Scrolls Online boss Matt Firor about his RPG roots, the future of the popular MMORPG, and what else the studio is working on as part of the Xbox Studios family:
The father has (possibly) been found. According to a report from Deadline, Hulu’s gender-swapped How I Met Your Mother reboot–How I Met Your Father–has found its male lead to star opposite Hillary Duff. Chris Lowell, who you likely remember most as Bash on Netflix’s GLOW or Piz from the final season of Veronica Mars and the movie that followed, has snagged the role.
How I Met Your Father sees Duff as Sophie, a woman telling her kids the story of how she met and fell in love with their father, using that storytelling device to explore love in the digital age, when everyone’s staring at their phone and dating apps are all the rage.
Per Deadline, Lowell plays Hesse, “who is smart, with a bit of an edge and cynical about love. He’s an aspiring musician who works as an Uber driver to make ends meet and lives with his best friend Tom.” Will he be the father? Nobody knows at this point.
Hopefully, though, this romance goes better for the character than Piz’s did on Veronica Mars, where the titular private investigator dumped him to reunite with her high school boyfriend. Of course, said high school boyfriend was ultimately blown up in the not-so-great Hulu continuation of Veronica Mars, but the less said about that the better.
No other cast members have been revealed for How I Met Your Father. The series is being executive produced by How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, with Adam Londy serving as co-executive producer. A release date has not been announced.
Watch live streams, videos, and more from GameSpot’s summer event. Check it out
Amazon’s biggest sale of the summer is around the corner, which means Prime Day soundbar deals will be plentiful starting June 21. Whether you’re looking for a top-of-the-line soundbar for your home theater or making your first-ever purchase, it’s safe to assume Prime Day 2021 will have the soundbar and speaker deals you desire.
No Prime Day soundbar deals have emerged early–so far the early deals are for things like the Echo Show 5 and the second-generation Echo Buds–but last year there were plenty of prime soundbar deals to take advantage of–pun intended. This included brands like JBL, Q Acoustics, and Vizio, with discounts up to 40% off.
There are a few early deals to jump on now if you can’t wait, specifically on name brands like TCL, LG, Yamaha, Polk Audio, and Samsung, but we don’t know if they are going to stretch into next week as official Prime Day soundbar deals yet.
TCL’s Alto 8i at $100 is an absolute steal, making this the perfect time to jump if you need a new soundbar. The Alto 8i 2.1-channel soundbar features Dolby Atmos surround sound, dual built-in subwoofers, and specialized sound modes for listening to TV, music, and more.
Sitting near the top of LG’s soundbar line, the SL5Y features 2.1 channel configurations and DTS Virtual:X technology to create a 3D sound that will enhance every movie night. Its built-in Bluetooth 4.2 tech will also let you connect your phone to play the latest hits with a crisp, clean sound.
Polk Audio’s Signa S2 is a mid-range soundbar that boasts top-of-the-line features at a modest price, included performance-tuned surround sound and Polk Adjust technology for crisper voice audio. As if the Signa S2 coming down to $149 wasn’t a good enough deal, this bar also comes with a wireless subwoofer for filling the room with sound from your favorite show, movie, or game.
Normally $360, this JBL soundbar is $160 off ahead of Prime Day, offering a slim soundbar with Dolby Digital, JBL surround sound, and 300W of power. It comes with a wireless 6.5-inch subwoofer for deep bass and immersive sound, whether you’re playing games or watching TV/movies.
Stock is limited, but right now Samsung’s HW-Q900T soundbar is at its lowest price yet. This 7.1.2-channel soundbar features speakers on both corners of the soundbar for a wider range of audio, and Alexa comes built in for voice control. It offers Dolby Atmos and DTS:X audio playback.
Sony’s SSCS3 Floor-Standing Speaker will enhance any home theater system with its high-resolution, reinforced audio. It includes a 3-way, 4-speaker bass-reflex system, a 5-inch woofer for low frequencies, and clear faceplate edges that eliminate extra noise.
If the Polk Signa S2 is the soundbar of your choosing, these companion bookshelf speaks make for a perfect extra perk. These speakers are engineered with Polk’s patented Dynamic Balance technology, creating a balanced sound with equal attention to all frequencies.
Watch live streams, videos, and more from GameSpot’s summer event. Check it out
Nicolas Cage has certainly made a lot of interesting choices throughout his career, but even more so over the last decade. And, by the looks of it, that streak continues with his next movie. In Pig, which releases on July 16, he’s a truffle hunter (which is evidently a real job) on the hunt for his friend, an actual pig, after it’s kidnapped. How’s he supposed to find truffles to sell to high-end restaurants without his trusted sidekick?
The movie looks equal parts creepy and dramatic, as a bearded Cage is attacked in the woods and his pig is taken. As the search begins, he appears genuinely distraught without his companion as he makes his way into the city to find out who wronged him (and his pig).
The film also stars Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin, Gretchen Corbett, and a number of others. Michael Sarnoski serves as director of the film, making his feature debut.
Pig is scheduled to hit theaters on July 16. Later this year, Cage has another project releasing that’s highly anticipated. In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the actor plays a version of himself who is suffering through debt and a strained relationship with his daughter. He also gets wrapped up with the CIA and a Mexican drug cartel because, why not? A release date for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has not been announced.
Watch live streams, videos, and more from GameSpot’s summer event. Check it out
When EA revealed Madden 22’s cover earlier today, fans were quick to take note that something was amiss. Despite being the MVP edition cover of the annual NFL sim, it was lacking the most recent MVP.
That would be quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who led the Green Bay Packers to a 13-3 record and another NFC Championship Game appearance (he lost, a fact that brings me great joy as a Minnesota Vikings fan). Right now Rodgers in the midst of a tit-for-tat feud with the Packers (again, great joy), but that hasn’t stopped some fans from wondering about the lack of the current MVP.
From earlier today, the new Madden football game cover is out, featuring two MVP quarterbacks!
Madden had a pretty rough 2020, but as the only NFL sim in town, appearing on the cover still carries with it a certain amount of prestige. If not Rodgers, then Madden 21 could have gone with any number of candidates, such as Aaron Donald or Derrick Henry, or rising stars like Justin Herbert. Instead, Madden 22 is rolling with familiar faces in this version, and people are already bored. Maybe EA should bring back fan voting so Peyton Hillis can be on the cover again.
Either way, Madden 22 is on the way to the Xbox Series X, PS5, PS4, and Xbox One, and we have a preview up listing 10 major improvements. They include homefield advantage, the ability to hire offensive and defensive coordinators, and lots more.
A catastrophic accident results in the death of Captain America and, with public opinion against them, the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes disband. Years later, the planet is under threat and, to save mankind, the Avengers must assemble once again.
Welcome back to IGN Game Scoop!, the ONLY video game podcast! This week your Omega Cops — Daemon Hatfield, Justin Davis, Sam Claiborn, and Michael Swaim — are discussing all things E3 2021. Starfield, Halo Infinite, Breath of the Wild 2, Metroid Dread, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more. And, of course, they play Video Game 20 Questions.
Watch the video above or hit the link below to your favorite podcast service.
