#and yes you may say that means Reynn didn’t get much either and yes! But! I mean she got Edgar if you can count him at least later after

[keepermcge]

Anyway, can someone tell Lann they love him.

[cosmiciaria]

World of Final Fantasy Review! (Spoiler free)

I know the game is pretty old by now. It was released in October, 2016, before Final Fantasy XV wrecked the fandom. I've always wanted to give it a shot, but the apparent light-hearted approach didn't suit me well – so I waited for a decent discount in PSN, and I finally managed to get it in my hands! Disclaimer: this is a review of the vanilla version of the game. Saw there's a big expansion adding quite a a lot of stuff, including gameplay mechanics, so… either way, the game is quite enjoyable as it is, I don't deem an expansion necessary in my case to make me like the game more.

So yes, this is a GUD game. Even GUDER than I'd thought it would be. Like REALLY. Real good.

I'm not explaining myself. You see, this game seems made for younger generations. It was the result of the 30th Square Enix Anniversary, and it's the cocktail boiling in the cauldron every Final Fantasy fan wanted to have. It's a crossover, it's the perfect fanfiction across all the universes we've learned to love and care in this franchise. It's a love letter to fans, and I want to stress this idea, because… this game is great, is awesome, is moving, but only if you're an FF fan.

I mean, you'll still enjoy it for what it is, but… there are a thousand nods and references to the previous FF games that you won't get if you at least are not familiar with their premises. I, for instance, haven't played many of the mainline FF, including I, II, V and XI. I knew about their characters and some of its most characteristic thingies (like Gilgamesh being from FFV), so I still could get some of the references, but it's not the same.

It's not the same, because, like I said, this game is a love letter to fans. And it shows.

But – wait, are those chibis? Is this a children's game? What are you talking about? I know it's hard to take chibis seriously, but hear me out – this game is more serious than it seems at first sight. I expected nothing but RPG tropes and I did get many of those, but DUDE (pun intended) did I had a great (TRAGIC) time with those twists and turns!

So we follow Lann, a fifteen year old ginger boy who goes to work at his usual café. He doesn't seem to notice the Pokémon – I mean, the Mirage on his head, a cute white little fox that seems to defy the laws of gravity by gripping to his hair. In the café, Lann meets Enna Kros, a mysterious woman who asks for a very sugary coffee. Minutes later, we meet our other protagonist, Reynn, Lann's twin sister, who crashes into the place to tell her brother that there's nobody anywhere. Lann is like, hey, there's this woman over here, but truth be told… the neighborhood is empty.

So this woman, Enna Kros, introduces herself and tells them that she's a goddess of some sort (her nature is, eh, well, never fully explained and that's fine). She reveals they are in a place called Nine Wood Hills, a land that looks like it's stuck in time and space. Lann and Reynn had forgotten what the hell they're doing there, or who their parents were, or anything, so Enna Kros gives them (or more like, reminds them of) the Prismariums: the ability to imprism Mirages, like the little fox I mentioned, and bend them to their will. The purpose, she says, is to catch as many Mirages as they can, across Grymoire, the world she's the goddess of, and collect memories about their past. Then the little fox is introduced as Tama, a very important Mirage that is going to accompany the twins for the rest of the journey.

Off they go to Grymoire, and this is where the crossover starts: here people are tiny (chibis) called Lilikins; Reynn and Lann remain normally proportioned (Jiants), but they can turn into Lilikins whenever they want. Jiants had disappeared from this world a hundred years prior, so the twins kind of attract everyone's attention. This only feeds the mystery that shrouds this pair.

Grymoire is full of towns, regions and dungeons. Across all these places, the twins will irremediably come across the chibis we all know and love: the FF characters. Their storylines are so well intertwined that you forget that they belong to an original game, for their personalities and backgrounds fit this story very well. We have a Bahamutian Federation who's conquering everything in its stride, except for a few kingdoms that still fight against it. The League of S, the resistance group, wants to recruit as many people as they can, and it's up to the twins to help this insurgence grow. But this is not everything: it seems that in the Federation there's a prophecy, a Crimson Prophecy, that foretells the arrival of two Jiants twins who are Mirage Keepers…

The story gets more and more complex, until it reaches a point where I couldn't believe my eyes. And this was a game for "children"! But I won't spoil it for you. Instead, let's talk about the gameplay first!

I said Pokémon earlier – It's the closest approximation and I'm not lying. If you wanna be the very best, you gotta catch 'em all. Mirages will appear as your ordinary enemies in dungeons, and every first time you encounter one, Enna Kros will give you a new prismarium to imprism them in it. But to do this, you first have to create a prismunity: a chance that leaves the Mirage vulnerable to the imprism. This prisminuty is quite easy to achieve in the early levels, but they get more and more difficult and specific to attain as you progress. Each Mirage has an ability tree to develop, in which you'll spend SP points, and most Mirages have also evolutions (is it Pokémon enough yet??) that you'll be unlocking once the requirements are met.

Catching Mirages is not everything, though. Mirages are actually useful: you can equip them. Since we don't have equipment or ability tree for the twins, the Mirages are our only source of power, so their stats and their abilities become our own when we fight. Each twin in Jiant form can 'stack' on their heads a Medium and Small size Mirage, and in Lilikin form, they can stack on a Large Mirage and still have one Small Mirage on their heads. The stack becomes your shield in battle, and at first it looks ridiculous, but once you understand how it works, you can create MAGIC out of its mechanics. Careful because the tower you form can topple and your Mirages can fall from your character's head in a quite funny animation.

Twins don't have ability trees, I said. Well, that's partially true. You see, in the ability trees of the Mirages, every now and then you can come across a Mirajewel: this is the equivalent of a skill card in the Persona franchise – meaning that you can equip that Mirajewel into Lann or Reynn as you please. The Mirajewel doesn't lock to just one character, you can switch it between the twins as you like. The slots for these Mirajewels take a while to unlock, though, and it's related to the twins's levels.

Battles are your good old friend turn base combat. And it's great. IT'S GREAT. Like really. They can STILL do this and it's still loved, I don't know why people say that turn base combat is outdated and old fashioned. It's pretty slow paced, but fear not, because there's an ACCELERATOR button that lets you fast forward battles. Isn't it convenient? In fact, everything in this game is so convenient it makes me wanna cry: you wanna leave the dungeon? No prob, just use this unlimited teleport stone; wanna change your Mirages for others? Never fear, you have a save point every half hour. You wanna fast travel to this place? Nine Wood Hills got it covered for you. You're not enjoying this minigame? You can skip it and still advance in the main story! You kinda not dig this new menu we created for this game? Try the old style FF menu and play like you did in the old FF titles!

Really. Everything is there for you, at your disposal. The option to choose how and when you play is available, and it's kind of heart-warming they did this. I just wish every new FF could work like this one, on terms of gameplay! This game is SO Final Fantasy that I wanna cry a river.

Alright! Too much gameplay. What about characters?

Lann and Reynn are just hilarious. Their interactions are natural and casual: they truly make us believe they're twin brother and sister who deeply care for each other. Each of them has their own quirks, like Lann being quite slow, always saying "dude!" and protecting his sister at all costs; and Reynn being determined, direct and fearless, but also hiding her nervousness behind blurting trivia into the void whenever things seem to get nasty. There's one particular funny scene in the game where Reynn is angry with a Cactuar and she wants to, basically, punch it to death, which she can't, because Cactuars have their agility skyrocketed to high heaven more or less, and her hysteria is so relatable that you want to get yourself inside the screen and pat her on the head.

On that note, voice actors for the main protagonists were a delight. I was kind of surprised to discover that the guy who voices Lann also voices Shiro from Voltron: I couldn't recognize my favorite gay spaceship leader anywhere in this upbeat character, but there were moments where Lann became serious and angry, and damn, did that Shirogane emerge! All the other FF characters that we know have their original actors returning –not only that, but also we hear some characters from the older FF games that had never ever had, in any other media, voices. I swear my control almost fell to the floor when I heard Vivi f*cking SPEAK.

The FF characters remain in their personalities and they're never out of character. They bring about a thousand references from their original games, that are not forced at all. The script is clever enough to blend these moments inside the main story in such a way that you never see them coming, and more than once I was at the verge of tears, specially with Tidus and Yuna who belong to, I may very well say it now, my favorite Final Fantasy game (Oh I never wrote a review for FFX, even though I played like six times). I won't tell you, just play the game and discover these scenes for yourself. They make the game ten times more loveable. There are also instances of 4th wall breaking so beware yourself for a good laughter. Read the Mirage's Manual, I fully recommend it.

The game has all the RPG tropes you can ask for: the mandatory ice, fire and water levels, the really really bad guy you can tell he's bad because of his demoniac appearance bad villain bad oh bad he's bad because reasons, treasure chests, chocobos, cactuars, tomberris, flans, malboro menaces and anything you can expect from an FF game. But this isn't a copycat of previous installments. Towards the second half the game shows its true colors and we're faced with an original story, with huge twists that left me open mouthed, and you forget about the first few hours of the game that seemed taken straight out of any other FF, because, you know it, honk's got real. (Oh, btw, Lann used 'honk' every time he should've used the f-word, it was so funny, once he says 'shut the honk up' I'm cryinggG)

On the music department, I just couldn't really get into it. There were some boss fights that caught my attention but that's all there is to it. Nine Wood Hills background music gets under your skin after a while of continually listening to it, and sometimes it plays during important sequences, so I guess it's the most memorable piece of music. On the other hand, we have remixes of all those FF's themes we liked so much that play during certain characters' arcs and they may bring more than one tear to players' eyes (I did NOT cry when Suteki Da Ne started playing I did NOT). Visuals are nice and all – you can tell it had less production than, let's say, FFXV, its contemporary companion in release dates, but damn, some places were vivid and realistic! And lighting and shadows were real enough! And who cares about an anime appearance or chibi characters when everything SHINES and the story is good either way!

This game made me for some reason ship Cloud with absolutely everyone? What the honk?

All in all, this is a Final Fantasy game in all its glory, and it shines bright in many aspects I believe it was done even better than most of the newest games in the mainline. I just wished it had a more 'independent' story, in the sense of what I first mentioned: that this is a game for fans, that the experience would be very different if you haven't played the majority of the FF titles (and even some spin offs!). Still, the main story holds up well and at the end of the day, the main characters are the twins, not Cloud or Squall.

I do have one or two tiny complaints: there are some FF titles vanished to oblivion in this vanilla version. Firion from FFII only appears in the expansion and Balthier from FFXII, although he is a free dlc, he's not part of the story and he doesn't even have a page in the people's compendium, his appearance being the only silent presence of that title in the game. Also there's something spoilerish I wasn't really fond of – I'm just gonna say, without revealing anything, that I don't like how certain character was handled. And no, I'm not speaking about the masked woman. Anyway, that's all I can complain about, actually.

I think credit must be given where credit is due. And this game is due a lot of credit. For its amazing gameplay, giving us a taste of what we've been asking for years, and for the good use of the Extrauniverse to weave this story for us. Interactions between characters are a delight because of how well written they are. And there's a lot of post game content so, here I go, the route to platinum!

If you enjoy FF, then you'll love this game.