YMMV / Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

• Awesome Music: The final trailer for the game unexpectedly veers into Frank Sinatra's "My Way". Out of place for a Final Fantasy game? Possibly. Awesome? Hell fucking yeah.
• Complete Monster: Nil, a high-ranking and truly vile Lufenian, is Jack Garland's Arch-Enemy. Complicit in Lufenia's attempts to control Cornelia and the rest of the world, when that is foiled by Jack becoming Chaos Nil takes drastic action. Using Gilgamesh to smuggle the Death Machine—driving him to painful madness—Nil tries to use said machine to assassinate Jack and his allies, threatening to destabilise and destroy multiple dimensions in the process. In a final attempt at purging Chaos, Nil summons an army of Manikins that slaughter all the other Lufenians, intending to destroy Chaos and erase the entire dimension, creating it anew as a utopia free from "corrupting elements".
• Demonic Spiders: Nightmares are named after the experience of fighting them. These damned hell-horses are durable enough to survive Ultima, zip around the battlefield, can break Jack with a single charge and very quickly render him dead, have no elemental weaknesses, and are damn near impossible to stun or stagger unless you use the Berserker job. They are especially dangerous when accompanied by other monsters (especially other Nightmares) who can distract you so they can blindside you and render you into thin gruel.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game:
  • Some fans don't care for the gameplay and are only interested in how the game expands the lore of the original Final Fantasy, which over numerous ports across the years is still a Cliché Storm Excuse Plot with not much depth to it.
  • The DLC demands a lot of Level Grinding higher and higher difficulties out of the player to progress in it. Ignoring the first two DLCs if you're done with the gameplay isn't too hard since they're fairly barebones in terms of story but you need to play through them to get to the third DLC, which does have more story with some big payoffs. It's not uncommon for players to stop playing at the end of main game and just YouTube the DLC cutscenes.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • The reveal trailer had the party declare themselves to be the Warriors of Light, but there were only three of them at the time, and there are four Warriors of Light in the original game. This prompted a lot of speculation over if there would be a fourth party member who hadn't been revealed yet and who it may be; Garland, Sarah, the Dissidia Warrior of Light, or an original character. The TGS 2021 trailer managed to both Joss and confirm this — the fourth Warrior of Light is a young woman named Neon, but Jack's full name is Jack Garland, and it is heavily implied that he is/will become the Garland. Then came the announcement a few months later in December that another character, a woman named Sophia, would be joining the group, leading to the entry below.
  • With the knowledge there were five party members in total, it prompted speculation that the four of them besides Jack would become the Four Fiends, as artworks and posters featuring the full cast tended to associate each of them with colors reflective of the Fiends. In turn, fans guessed that the game was actually a Stealth Prequel to the original Final Fantasy instead of a retelling or re-imagining. They were off a bit as the producers confirmed before the game launched it'd be an alternate universe that sits along side the original.
  • While the Lufenians' collaborator is only mentioned through in-game reports, many were quick to speculate that their true identity is that of Shinryu due to the terms of their agreement with the Lufenians (granting them the ability to manipulate the flow of time in exchange for absorbing the energy released by each timeline reset) sounding rather similar to Shinryu's deal with Cid and the gods throughout Dissidia's Forever War.
  • In a meta example, Gilgamesh's appearance takes a lot of cues from Dissidia; his weapon designs are the same, he wields them two at a time like in Dissidia, some of his attack lines are the same, and his animations and attacks are reminiscent of Dissidia. Since datamining for Dissidia Final Fantasy NT had revealed that Gilgamesh would eventually have gotten into the game had it not been Cut Short, some speculate that Gilgamesh was already being worked on at the time and his assets were recycled for Stranger of Paradise. Both games were developed by Team Ninja, and they had already reused other assets from NT, namely the models for the Warrior of Light and the Emperor, so it isn't out of the question.
• Evil Is Cool: Astos has his role considerably expanded from the original Final Fantasy. His backstory and motivations actually make him rather sympathetic and complex, even tragic, and his new design is ruggedly beautiful while still maintaining an air of power and danger. Oh, and he transforms into the Ultima Weapon. The result is that he's one of the most interesting and well-received characters in the game. Not bad for someone who started out as a Filler Villain Flat Character with barely any dialogue.
• Fan Nickname: Yahtzee is kinda bummed out by the game, which he calls "Stranger on Top of Paradise", "Stranger in the Vicinity of Paradise", "Stranger Along the Lines of Paradise", and "Stranger of Paradise: Anal Man-tasy Squidgybums".
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The game provides a lot of new context for the characters and story of the original Final Fantasy, but there's still plenty of unanswered questions and things that don't line up, allowing for speculation on how to make the two games fit together perfectly. The full scope of the story when it comes to the Lufenians lines up rather nicely with the lore of Dissidia Final Fantasy, too.
  • Who was the mysterious "benefactor" that helped the Lufenians become as advanced as they have and become a trans-dimensional race? And why did they do it?
  • The ending shows the iconic Warrior of Light, and for the first time shows the other three who accompany him on his quest, but they're all in silhouette. Who are these other warriors and what are they like?
    • Trials of the Dragon King shows their appearances in full, with their armor sets and weapons suggesting the other three are — in accordance with this game's selection of job classes — a Sage (who may or may not be the lone female of the group), a Dragoon/Breaker, and a Ninja. Any other details are still fair game, as Jack removes them from the fight and faces the Warrior of Light in 1v1 combat.
• Fountain of Memes: Jack has been a massive source of memes ever since the game was announced and every reveal, trailer and demo up to and including the game's release saw him spawn more and more memes. Variations of Jack saying Chaos are especially popular for meme creation. The reveal that Jack is Garland (memetically known for knocking you all down) furthers this, as the same character has been making new memes decades after his original appearance.
• Funny Moments:
  • In the area just before you confront Chaos Advent, one finds a treasure chest guarded by... a single Tonberry. This Tonberry, however, is exactly as ferocious as they've always been, and to see Jack and his crew laid low by a tiny fish-man stabbing them with a chef's knife can be quite a sight to see. In addition, Jack's Soul Burst on the Tonberry has him simply pet it like a small dog only for it to explode seconds later.
  • Using a Soul Burst on a Cactuar has Jack pick it up by the leg where it... just sprouts crystals before he tosses it in the air to explode. Given the crystals only typically show up when he deals a killing blow to an enemy, it's likely the Cactuar was literally scared to death about what Jack was going to do to it otherwise.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Tyrant's main ability, Enhance, is easily one of the best class specific skills in the game, because it is based around being a Spell Blade melee class that applies elemental effects to Jack's weapon. Not only is that strong on its own once you find out an enemies elemental weakness, but when combined with skills such as the Dragoon's Lancet ability, Jack can become a melee beast who exploits the enemies weaknesses to continually regain HP and MP, amplified by the classes already baked in abilities supporting it. Since the class gets a wide variety of weapons to use, the player can easily make it a broken class by finding a weapon moveset they like, then going to town on the enemy, especially bosses.
  • The Dark Knight's 400% affinity ability Last Resort gives you access to "near death" abilities at all times. This can give Jack incredible damage and bulk when combined with the various abilities only meant to trigger at low health, including the Berserker's 250% affinity ability (which gives you Protect and Shell when near death).
  • The Sage is among the most powerful expert jobs, combining the potent buffs from the White Mage, and the powerful elemental coverage of the Black Mage. What it lacks in being able to cast Holy, Flare, and Meteor, it more than compensates with its unique spell Ultima, a humongous nuke that deals immense damage, instantly breaks most regular enemies, and chunks off massive portions of bosses' break gauges. Simply spam 3 white spells, swap to black magic, spam 3 black spells, then cast Ultima. It's also among the easiest expert jobs to unlock, only requiring points in the White Mage and the Black Mage, both being unlockable through the basic Mage job.
  • Seal of Blood is an extremely powerful buff designed to bolster area of effect attacks to the next level. For a modest 100 MP, the next spell does 80% extra damage and instantly Soul Bursts any enemies broken by it. Soul Burst causes further break damage, meaning one successful kill can spiral into the entire room becoming broken. Pick Sage or Black Mage, pop this buff, and then cast Meteor, Flare or Ultima and watch as enemies die in waves.
  • The Chaosbringer ability is unlocked through the post-game Cyclic Warrior Job, and in addition to costing less MP than the normal Lightbringer gives Jack infinite MP for its duration. This can be used and abused to throw around your strongest attacks with absolutely wild abandon, and if you have some way of restoring the max MP spent to activate Chaosbringer then you can spam it pretty much indefinitely.
  • The humble Swordsman easily becomes this, once you unlock the Conquerer subclass, as it allows you to guard while performing Spinning Slash. This seems rather simple, but once combined with effects that increase the damage of Spinning Slash and reduce its MP consumption (or just use Lightbringer/Chaosbringer for infinite MP), allows you to become a literal spinning top of death that's invulnerable to anything beside unblockable attacks. Even then it's likely you'll shred an enemy before they even have a chance to unleash their more deadly attacks.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The game ends with Jack defying the Lufenians and freeing the world from them. Connect this game to Garland in Dissidia, and it turns out Jack ended up agreeing to help another Lufenian trap another world in another cycle of endless conflict, and he eventually abandoned all hope of freedom and immersed himself in his Blood Knight philosophy. Mitigated by Word of God saying Jack is from an Alternate Universe, and is possibly not the same Garland who ends up participating in Dissidia.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The subtitle "Origin" became this when Monolith Soft, a studio headed by former Square employees who worked on the older Final Fantasy games, had the final dungeon of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 — which released only four months after Stranger of Paradise — named "Origin". And then it gets doubly hilarious when Final Fantasy XVI's final dungeon was also named "Origin". For bonus points, the main villains of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Final Fantasy XVI share the same voice actor.
• Ho Yay: Some of Astos' behaviors towards Jack dip into this. Even more so when Jack regains his memories and realizes they were friends through all his previous adventures, and the only friend Astos ever had and his only hope to derail the Lufenians' plans. Take this excerpt from one of the Fool's Missives (written by Astos):
  "Heart is what defines my Jack, and I will put my faith in that."
• I Knew It!:
  • Invoked and discussed by Tetsuya Nomura. After the reveal trailer and demo, even based on the limited knowledge of the game's story they had, a large portion of the fanbase guessed that Jack is/will become Garland. The second trailer directly confirmed this. In an interview Nomura said he wanted this to be The Reveal, but there was little point trying to hide it since players had figured it out, and marketing for the game shifted from teasing the twist to emphasising the mystery of how it happens.
  • By that same token, it was rather easy to guess that his companions would become the Four Fiends based on the fact that there were four of them, two being male (like Lich and Kraken) and the other two female (like Tiamat and Marilith).
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: A common complaint aimed at the game's first batch of DLC, which requires players to complete missions on Bahamut difficulty in order to earn enough Dragon Treasure to progress through the story. While the option to enable Extra Mode (which permanently places Jack in Chaosbringer at the cost of subpar enemy drops and no Dragon Treasure^*though the amount of Dragon Treasure a player would have earned is counted toward the total for the next story milestone) was added in alongside the new difficulty level, the base game didn't force players to deal with massive, even downright unfair Difficulty Spikes in order to access new story content.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Jack Garland is a snarky agent sent by the Lufenians to act as a "Warrior of Light" and fight against the darkness of Cornelia. In reality, the Lufenians are trapping Cornelia in a constant cycle of darkness and light to keep it under their control, so Jack decides to break the cycle after falling in love with Princess Sarah of Cornelia. Knowing his memories get erased during every cycle which ends with a time revert, Jack convinces his friend Astos to allow him to get his memories back since Astos is immune to the effects of the time revert. Eventually playing at being an insane psychopath to take the Lufenians off guard, Jack seizes their time reversion crystal and becomes the new embodiment of the darkness, Chaos. Jack reveals at the end he plans to shroud the world of Cornelia in darkness, all so that he can train Warriors of Light from Cornelia to break the cycle themselves and stop the control that Lufenia has over them for good.
  • Jack's Party — Ash, Jed, Neon and Sophia — are loyal companions that nonetheless guide their leader on his dark path. Working together with their fragmented memories and Astos' guidance, they subtly push Jack into regaining some of his memories and all his strength. When Astos dies, darkness veils Cornelia which finally results in Princess Sarah's death. The four are pleased with this result, attacking Jack and forcing him to kill them to fully push him past the Despair Event Horizon. Even after death, they are reborn as the Four Fiends — Lich, Kraken, Marilith and Tiamat respectively — and are happily complicit in Jack's plan to cover Cornelia in darkness to bring about the true Warriors of Light.
  • Astos, King of the Dark Elves, is Jack's loyal and committed co-conspirator. Bred by the Lufenians to serve Strangers, Jack earned Astos' undying friendship, asking him to help him defeat Lufenia by any means necessary. After being direct proved fruitless, Astos became more duplicitous. Tipping the scales in his favour by giving Neon a Dark Crystal so she could attempt to become Chaos, he went on to guide Jack and his party, offering just enough advice to help them along, so that they'd defeat the Fiends, restore the Crystals and recover their memories. At the same time ensuring their safety and having his bats guide them, Astos goads Jack into killing him, ending his miserably lonely existence while also releasing the darkness within his heart, ensuring the destruction of Cornelia and Jack's rebirth into Chaos.
• Memetic Badass: Jack's single-minded goal of killing Chaos, his incredibly vicious fighting style, him fist-bumping his friends, his generally manly appearance, his foul mouth (including being the first Final Fantasy character to drop an F-bomb), and his habit of interrupting monologues have earned him this status. In the eyes of his fans, he is an absolute chad, the epitome of the sigma grindset and the most badass protagonist in Final Fantasy, who skips cutscenes and ignores the story so he can focus on killing things. The typical challenge of the genre to go around wearing no armor and beating enemies up with your bare hands only adds to the effect.
• Memetic Loser: The Warriors of Light quickly got this reputation when the Trials of the Dragon King DLC released, as three of them are thrown back and either knocked out or killed in one wave of darkness from Jack and he faces the iconic Warrior one-on-one. This quickly had fans labeling them as Jobbers who only exist to fill out the team's ranks. To make it even worse, during the Post-Final Boss of the Different Future DLC when you take control of the Warrior of Light, unlike Jack's party, none of them join you in battle.
• Memetic Mutation: See here.
• Memetic Psychopath: Jack is often portrayed as a violent templar who kills anything related to Chaos or is named Chaos (like the entire Chao population from Sonic Adventure or the mutated Chao, Chaos). The fact that he canonically makes many a manic grin during several boss battles and describes himself as a Blood Knight looking for the next enemy to fight only adds to this perception, though his love for battle is implied to be thanks to the Lufenians' memory/personality tinkering and his lategame Drunk on the Dark Side stint is largely an act.
• Misaimed Fandom: Ironically, despite his personality being, explicitly, a horrible, obsessive corruption of the person he actually was, and both incapable of actually solving the problem and a pawn of the real villains of the story, Jack has many unironic fans who see him as a Memetic Badass.
  • The game's over-the-top edginess, corny dialogue and hilarious moments like Jack's infamous "Bullshit" scene have a number of fans convinced the comedy and silliness of it all is an Intended Audience Reaction and that the game is supposed to be satirical or comedic, simply because they find unbelievable that the developers could write this in earnest. However, it's clear from the developers' reactions to the "Chaos" memes where they weren't happy with the audience reaction and defend writing that they want the story and characters to be taken seriously. Moreover, looking at previous games headed by creative producer Tetsuya Nomura and written by scenario writer Kazushige Nojima, their work tends to be extremely unironic and full of the same kind of cheesiness and awkwardness that is present in FFO, which strongly suggests that the game is totally earnest.
• Moment of Awesome: The intro scene, where Garland single-handedly slaughters his way through the knights of Cornelia to abduct Princess Sarah, with darkness roiling off of him all the while as he leaves a trail of blood, bodies, and crimson crystals behind him. With Sarah slung over one shoulder, he still kills anyone that comes at him with one swing — or in the case of one poor sap, Garland just grabs their helmet and flings them into the ceiling, crushing them and leaving their blood to drip onto him. By the time he's at the castle entrance and the few stragglers are there waiting for him, they see what he did on the way in and don't even try to fight him, they're so terrified that they just step back and let him pass, and Garland walks past them without looking at them, like they're beneath his notice. The scene makes it clear that when the characters in Final Fantasy talk of Garland as a One-Man Army who none but the Warriors of Light could hope to stand against, they weren't exaggerating.
• Narm:
  • The ridiculously self-serious, edgy tone and a voice direction that sounds more like a Synthetic Voice Actor or pre-2010 bad dubs of Japanese games than something natural drew more than a few snickers from viewers. On the other hand, this did attract more attention than the game might have received otherwise, thanks to Memetic Mutation.
  • The above "We're here to kill Chaos!" line in particular was the subject of much mockery, furthered by how some viewers were instantly reminded of the similar "I'll kill you and the night!" from Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (which at least was generally regarded as cheesy in a good way by comparison). Fans counted how many times "Chaos" was said in the preview trailer — eight times, six of them coming from Jack, including one line where he simply say the word in an accusatory way. An interview with the developers stated that they weren't really expecting it to blow up the way it did and aren't exactly happy with the reception (albeit they consider this better than the game getting no attention at all), indicating that the game is indeed playing this all completely seriously.
  • Later with the release of the second demo, the developers actually went on record stating that the story of Stranger of Paradise is meant to be taken 100% seriously. This is in spite of Jack's behavior and fight scenes taking another level in crass and craziness that seems intended to persist throughout the full final game — attracting attention to drama and plot is difficult when the main character's default reaction is Talk to the Fist.
  • The trailers repeatedly showed enemies turning to growths of red crystal that Jack shatters, variably by slamming them on the ground, delivering a Finishing Stomp, or in one case, grabbing a wolf by the jaws and headbutting it. These death animations are obviously part of the game's attempt at being Darker and Edgier, but the trailer showing the same thing several times as though it's supposed to be impressive and badass made it instead come off as silly to many viewers. This isn't helped by Jack yelling at his (already dead) enemies "You're done!" or "Say goodbye!"
  • Sarah's narration describes Garland's appearance thusly: "He always wore such splendid armor, with a helmet that was terrifying to behold." Garland's design is quite intricate and does a good job of painting him as an imposing Black Knight motif, but to call his helmet anything beyond intimidating is more than a bit of a stretch. With the trailer pairing the narration with a close-up of Garland's helmet like it's a big reveal, calling it "terrifying" almost seems like a punchline, as if Sarah is a sheltered and naive princess who genuinely thinks Garland's helmet is scary. While the final game made it clear this is exactly the case, that wasn't how the trailers framed it.
  • The combat banter is not only repetitive, as you'd expect from combat banter, but it's recycled throughout the game and thus is irrelevant to what's actually happening in the fight, making it seem like the characters are shouting at each other just for the sake offering generic encouragement and warnings instead of saying anything actually helpful. This problem only gets worse when you fight the possessed Bikke and later Astos, which should be epic and emotional moments for the party, but they keep spouting the same banter as if it was a normal monster fight, and the banter is now very out of place.
    Sophia: It does not fear us!
    Jack: Just keep hitting them!
• Narm Charm:
  • The main appeal of the story. While few would call the plot and characters "good," many consider them So Bad, It's Good, and happily embrace themselves in the memes and cheese of it all.
  • The dialogue may be rather cheesy, but some fans quickly and happily embraced it out of a sense of nostalgia for the Darker and Edgier tone many fictional media adopted in the mid-2000s, with many of the people who grew up during that time being the target audience of Final Fantasy Origin. There was even an uptick in AMVs specifically for this game, featuring many of the mid-2000s heavy metal artists like Skillet, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, and more.
  • "My name is Jack Garland." This name sounds incredibly silly, but it is also a Walking Spoiler that has big implications for the story, so viewers who saw the second trailer were delighted either way.
  • The ending of the first mission has a notable exposition about darkness and Neon explaining she'll sacrifice herself to become Chaos for someone to eventually kill after she believes that Chaos doesn't actually exist yet. Cue Jack's "Bullshit" moment above out of absolutely nowhere and no one responding to it. It's so hilariously over the top and tongue-in-cheek that it became a highlight for players, showing how Jack couldn't care less about alternatives to taking care of the problem. There is also the diagetic aspect of the music in that he turns it on, walks away, and then the scene cuts to them outside where he turns the music off. Because there's no break in the music, people joke that either the trip outside was really really short or he had the song on repeat the whole time.
  • The final trailer infamously uses "My Way" to surprisingly moving effect. The way the music swells as the cast stand silhouetted in the iconic shot with Cornelia's castle in the background is stirring enough to almost make you forget you're hearing a Frank Sinatra song in a trailer for a Final Fantasy game.
  • The full song "Shadows Rising," the song that gets played after the "Bullshit" scene, is so edgy that it reminds you of a hybrid (theory) of Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. Observe. For those who lived throughout the late 90s and the 2000 decade, this makes them relive that nostalgic factor of listening to the radio.
  • Early in the game, Jed points out Jack has a cut on his face, and he replies "Nothing a little spit can't fix." At the time it comes off as incredibly lame and another expression of Jack's overblown machismo. Later in the game when he regains his memories of Astos, we see Astos give Jack the same line when he's injured as a joke to lighten his mood. Jack's use of the line demonstrates that he still remembers Astos after multiple memory wipes, making it almost a Tear Jerker.
• Nintendo Hard: The first demo was incredibly challenging, with enemies able to plaster Jack in three hits if you let them. However, there is an easier difficulty with an optional casual setting that is able to be turned on.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: As noted above, the memes mocking the edginess of the dialogue and overall tone did a lot to advertise the game pre-release. Jin Fujisawa, one of the developers, stated that they did not expect the "Chaos" memes and weren't originally pleased with this. However, looking back at it, even the developers admitted that this kind of publicity is better than no one talking about the game.
• Older Than They Think: One point of criticism on the story is that it makes the Lufenians a highly advanced society to the point of being futuristic, a Retcon of the original game and anachronistic with the setting. However, the original NES version of Final Fantasy, both the original Japanese and the English localization, explicitly described the Lufenians as being so advanced; the Floating Castle was explicitly a space station, the Lufenians are implied to have been interested in space exploration, and they had teleporters, robots, and memory transference. It was later ports of the game that retconned the Floating Castle as just floating in the sky, removed any references to space travel, and made the other technology of the Lufenians unexplained but implied they were more Magitek than technology.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The opinion expressed by many reviews. The dialogue is corny, the characters start off underdeveloped, the plot is very convoluted, and the ways in which it expands the setting of the first Final Fantasy are controversial. If you can't get into the mindset necessary to enjoy the story, it won't have much to offer you. On the other hand, Team Ninja's Nioh-esque gameplay is still fun enough to make the game worth playing (and is the reason that some people otherwise uninterested in the Final Fantasy IP picked it up at all).
• Porting Disaster: The PC port of the game has some big problems. Firstly, it only supports a handful of resolutions, potentially forcing you to play at a much lower quality if your monitor resolution happens to not be supported. It is also very poorly optimized, using up disproportionate amounts of power from the graphics card and CPU for a game that shouldn't be nearly that intensive. And worst of all, for many people it struggles to keep a smooth framerate and dips noticeably in many situations even with powerful PC hardware, especially during crystal attacks. Modders investigating the issue found that one major source of these problems comes from non-optimized hair and fur, and turning such models bald or removing their fur coats completely solves the frame issues for those specific characters. At the very least, the non-optimized textures were fixed in a patch.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • The "Naked Run" challenge requires you to strip Jack of all armor, leaving him in just his underwear, while fighting on Hard.
  • Invoked with the Bahamut Trials from the Trials of the Dragon King DLC, which award you with a greater amount of Dragon Treasure (needed to both progress the story and to exchange with Bahamut for high-grade weapons and equipment) in accordance with the amount and intensity of debilitating effects the player can toggle on and off prior to a mission on Bahamut difficulty.
• Shocking Moments: The end of the Trials of the Dragon King DLC. After fighting the Warrior of Light at the start of the DLC and dealing him a Curbstomp Battle, you'd expect the rematch now to be the time the Warrior won and defeated Jack. And it seems to be going that way, as Jack goes to deal the final blow only for the Warrior to knock him back and dive at him — and then Jack stops him in midair and impales him on a spear of dark energy and crystallizes and shatters him. Seeing Jack deliver the same kind of brutal execution to the face of Final Fantasy in the same manner as he has so many other monsters is bound to make your jaw drop from the sheer audacity of it.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The game doesn't start off too slow, but the opening several hours are a bit slow story wise, and the player only gets a few classes to play as. By the third mission though, the player will start getting classes with more unique mechanics, the story starts offering more than just seemingly like an edgy remake of the first game, and gradually the characters really open up outside of the basic personality traits they seem to have. A common positive players have mentioned is how much better it gets after the first few levels.
• Signature Scene:
  • Jack saying "I'm here to kill Chaos, that's my mission" at the beginning, because of Memetic Mutation due to Narm Charm.
  • The QTE of Jack punching Chaos became ripe for edits, for the same reason as his motivation of killing Chaos.
• So Bad, It's Good: The story and writing is so ridiculously edgy and over the top that it becomes completely entertaining to the point of calling this game a video game shitpost or simply Chaosposting.
• Tainted by the Preview: On top of the extremely mixed reaction to the trailer, the release of the demo was utterly botched, with it being unable to even boot up until a patch arrived three days later. This was especially problematic due to the timed availability of the demo and the game being exclusive to the infamously understocked PS5. However, those who were able to get their hands on it generally came back with good impressions.
• That One Boss: The first fiend Tiamat is considered by many to be one of the hardest bosses in the game. It is very aggressive, with many different attacks that come out quickly, cover a wide area and force you to either soul shield or disengage, and its second phase functions as a very harsh DPS check where it will heal to full if you don't deplete its break gauge in time, also restoring a significant amount of said break gauge. Without a good ability loadout and good use of soul shield (while not over using it) to constantly use abilities, it can make the fight drag for a long time, making it much more likely you will die. Tellingly, the level it comes from is one of the most consistent levels players use multiplayer on (outside of the demo levels), so players can get help beating Tiamat.
• That One Level: The Ruins of Machina is a contender for the most annoying level in the game, primarily because of the layout looking almost the same, but also the Soul Cannon near the end that acts as the final gimmick of the level. The Soul Cannon's layout is a hard to navigate room with a specific path needing to be followed to disable the cannon, but the cannon itself fires so often that it is really hard to actually get to the weak spots. Worse, theres a section where to get to the other side of the room, you have to climb a ladder, but the ladder is facing the cannon, meaning players can quickly die and be unable to climb up, not helped by the enemies nearby attacking constantly to distract the player. Oh and the annoying mini cannons introduced in the Flying Fortress level return, meaning you have to deal with those as well. It isn't uncommon to see players get to the boss at the end with the base amount of potions due to having to exhaust extra ones just to get to the boss.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Fans of Final Fantasy and the additions to its lore and characters in Dissidia Final Fantasy were not amused to see that the setting and the faithful and forgiving Warrior of Light were seemingly replaced with a generic main cast in a DmC: Devil May Cry-styled reboot, with the only carryovers at the time being Garland/Chaos, common Final Fantasy monsters, and the Chaos Shrine itself (plus a voice-only cameo from Princess Sarah). Other fans, however, were more cautiously optimistic (if still skeptical), expecting the game to throw in some kind of Prophecy Twist centered around the title ("stranger of paradise") so as to not invalidate the original game. Some on the more optimistic side noted that the Dissidia version of the Warrior of Light wasn't in any way present in the original game outside of the promotional artwork, with all four characters in-game never having a speaking role or given any sort of characterization or suggestion of personality outside of what the player planted. There was also hope that Jack and his team would get equipment reminiscent of the classic promotional artwork. Thankfully, it turned out that by the end of the game, the main characters are revealed to be the (eventual) villains from the first Final Fantasy on a quest to engineer that game's Stable Time Loop for altruistic purposes (complete with a cameo from the actual Warrior of Light), which managed to soften the blow a bit.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Of all the characters in the game, Sophia is often pointed to as being the biggest waste of the cast. She shows up slightly after the halfway point, and doesn't get much to do unique to her after compared to the other protagonists. Ash and Jed join at the start, and Neon joins after the first level, meaning the player gets several levels to interact with them and see more about them, while Sophia joins later and gets about as much focus from then on as the others, meaning she gets very little chances to stand out due to not having the early levels to give characterization. Her unique role as the fifth Warrior of Light is barely discussed either, only being really talked about by the townspeople. For as important as she is, she comes across as having been thrown in later into the game than was likely meant to.
  • The game lines up fairly well with Dissidia Final Fantasy by expanding the lore of the Lufenians and revealing they became a trans-dimensional civilization that recreated locations from other Final Fantasy worlds in their homeworld, and they purposefully inject darkness or light into the world to keep things balanced. With the Lufenians taking such a major role and providing more connective tissue between the original Final Fantasy and Dissidia, one would think that Cid of the Lufaine would appear. He isn't even so much as alluded to outside of an easily missable conversation in the second DLC. Not even when the end of the base game and the Trials of the Dragon King DLC feature Dissidia's very own incarnation of the Warrior of Light, who was established in 012 to be based on Cid.
  • Speaking of the Warrior of Light, while the Trials of the Dragon King DLC follows up on WoL and his group's fated arrival at the Chaos Shrine, nothing of particular import is done with their characters. Jack takes three of them out of action with a single wave of darkness, and while WoL has lines for his attacks (as well as his Turns Red phase in the rematch), he is otherwise completely silent in the manner of a No-Nonsense Nemesis and the battle — which ends with the Warrior's death at Jack's hands — is devoid of any true Boss Banter. Considering the pains the main game went through to flesh out the rather minimalistic plot of FFI, along with Trials of the Dragon King expanding upon Bahamut's role by implying him to be the same entity as Final Fantasy XV's Bahamut and having him strike a deal with Jack to empower the Warriors of Light, the lack of characterization here can feel like a step back. By comparison, the game's second DLC, Wanderer of the Rift, gives Jack multiple interactions with Gilgamesh, with the latter eventually mentioning the incarnation of Garland he knows from Dissidia's cycles of conflict.
• Unexpected Character: The reveal trailer for the third DLC, "Different Future", reveals that Jack will come face-to-face with a character no one could have predicted — The Emperor!

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