One of the big highlights of Square Enix’s E3 presentation was the surprise announcement for a standalone Final Fantasy game.
Team Ninja, known for the Ninja Gaiden series and Hyrule Warriors among other games, created Final Fantasy Origins: Strangers in Paradise. The game seems to follow the three warriors of light as they try to kill Chaos, which they have made clear many times. It seems to be a marriage of certain Final Fantasy elements and Dark Souls-like gameplay.
The new game is heavily inspired by Final Fantasy Dark Souls.
This may have surprised many Final Fantasy fans who were waiting for news on other games. There were rumors that there might have been some news about a Final Fantasy 16 Awakening, but that didn’t turn out to be true. Instead, Square Enix focused on this Final Fantasy highlight, along with the Marvel Avengers and the new Guardians of the Galaxy game.
The trailer doesn’t show much of the gameplay, but the main character is shown using a few cool new attacks. There seems to be a single trick that involves turning enemies into crystals and shattering them, which has been shown several times.
Other than that, it was mostly a story announcement. The game features three Warriors of Light dedicated to killing Chaos, located in the Chaos Shrine. An unnamed character mentions that the enemy may be Garland, but this enemy denies the claim, saying that he has become “chaos”.
Given the fact that the origin is mentioned in the game’s title and that Garland/Caus was the final boss of Final Fantasy I, it seems that this game is closely related to the first game in the franchise. However, it is not clear how it connects. It’s possible that this symbolizes the first Final Fantasy, or it could just be an alternate story.
In the first Final Fantasy game, Garland creates a time loop in which the Four Fiends send him 2000 years into the past. By sending the Four Fiends back to the present to repeat this process, a scenario is created in which he can live forever. The heroes in the game kill Chaos in the past to break the loop.
The fact that time travel is already an element of Final Fantasy means that placing Aliens in Paradise on the timeline will already be difficult. Yet, another possibility is that the story follows the three warriors trying to defeat Garland before this time loop began. The game is slated to release in 2022.
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