You heard that right. After vowing to find, hunt down, smell and kill chaos in its preposterously memorable E3 trailer, Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise just managed to announce a release date without saying the word once.
Appearing during Square Enix’s Tokyo Games Show stream, the publisher finally revealed a broader look at Team Ninja’s action-RPG throwback to the original Final Fantasy. Frankly, it’s looking a whole lot less like an Evanescence album cover this time around, as a montage introduces us to lush landscapes, baddies, bosses, and new characters.
We’re introduced to Neon, a mysterious woman who rounds out our party of four Warriors of Light. Together, they’ll be hunting down four corrupted crystals that are devastating the land, running into swashbuckling pirates, elemental orbs and dragon gods along the way. So far, so Final Fantasy, though with a more hack ‘n’ slash action bent to the actual gameplay.
While less immediately hilarious, this new trailer feels a bit less, well, special than the first (above). Our leading lad Jack isn’t walking around in a Hollister shirt and jeans, nor is he barking out “chaos” every 18.75 seconds (thanks, Steven). It’s missing that bizarre character, a personality that fellow news writer Mollie unashamedly loved.
“Final Fantasy Origin’s E3 trailer tapped into some weird dormant fragment of my teenagehood. It’s the kind of game that would’ve directly appealed to 15-year-old Mollie, who adorned her bedroom with posters cut out of Kerrang! (a popular rock and metal magazine in the UK) and was brimming with teenage angst. Final Fantasy Origin is cheesy, moody and painfully unaware of how cringy it is, just like my younger self.”
Will the final release recapture some of this endearingly cringe personality, or did E3 spook Square Enix into toning down our chaos-hating edgelord? We’ll find out when Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise launches on March 18, 2022.