WORLD OF FINAL FANTASY
Not quite the adorable adventure you were hoping for
After seeing the FF series in various slick, cutting-edge forms since the PS1 days, the bobble-headed heroes here make for a great change of pace. Somehow they’re taking almost 30 years of series history and stuffing it into their oversized noggins for a grand tour through all things Final Fantasy. You play as twins Reynn and Lann, who have helpfully lost all of their memories and need to travel to the world of Grymoire to catch Mirages (Final Fantasy lingo for monsters) and restore their memories. Along the way you’ll meet classic FF heroes and creatures… and, of course, become embroiled in a far more sinister plot.
It’s actually remarkably similar to Nintendo’s Pokémon – you need to catch these Mirages, train them up, and make sure you have the right ones in your team to progress through different areas. There are over 200 of them to find, and some can even evolve into bigger, nastier versions of themselves. For instance, to get a classic chocobo you’ll have to train up a chocochick first.
MONSTER HUNTER
Unlike Pokémon, though, you must wear Mirages on your heads like toothy party hats to combine all of your powers. Not weird enough? Well, the main heroes can also change size from large to small – if you’re big you can pop two small Mirages on your head, and if you’re small you can ride on the back of one while wearing another. It opens up a lot of strategic options as you figure out what works best for different situations, though how you do it is cumbersome.
Combat’s the traditional turn-based sort, with two ways to control it: a ‘simplified’ version where you map four actions to the face buttons, or a classic option that lets you navigate through menus to select your actions. Sadly the simple version’s fiddly as you constantly need to go back and forth through menus anyway to map new abilities to your buttons when learning them. You can fast-forward by holding down u, but it still feels slow and out of place. For a game that’s meant to entice newcomers and a younger audience to the Final Fantasy franchise, this approach doesn’t work as well as it should. As much as I love Final Fantasy VII to X, they’ve definitely aged, and transplanting certain mechanics across wholesale proves to be a less-than-ideal way to honour the past.
There’s also the not-sosmall matter of juggling lots of different menu screens and complex system explanations. Your Mirages don’t learn their skills automatically, you’ll need to go to a separate ‘Mirage board’ area to assign them yourself. It works a lot like the Sphere Grid in FFX, which is
“YOU WEAR THESE GUYS ON YOUR HEADS LIKE TOOTHY LITTLE PARTY HATS.”
no bad thing, but it feels like an unnecessary extra step to deal with here. With so much already going on with the stacking and team-building, this just overcomplicates matters. It’s hard to enjoy all the cute monsters when you have to spend five minutes sorting them all out in various menus after every single scrap.
FINAL BANTASY
There’s something off about the tone, too. Grymoire is the ideal setting for a lighthearted adventure, but the story gets pretty dark and complicated and is totally at odds with the heroes’ frequent japes.
It’s surreal watching Lann, Reynn, and their irritating sidekick Tama goofing around with puns after learning some hard truths. “Everyone we’ve ever known or loved is missing, but there’s a magic door to jump through here, WHEEEEE!” That’s not to say there’s never room for both jokes and seriousness in a game, but when they run so closely on top of each other all the time neither element has a chance to properly shine.
Likewise, the old doesn’t quite gel with the new. It’s strange seeing iconic, touching moments such as Yuna doing The Sending in FFX recreated in bobble-headed form without any context leading up to it. What is a beautiful, poignant moment in the original is completely meaningless here. These inconsistencies are a shame. There are many little bits to love in WOFF, but there’s far less cohesion than there should have been when it’s all thrown in together.
VERDICT
An adorable, intriguing world undone by far too many unnecessary systems and irritating heroes (oh, Tama…). The individual parts are all solid; they just don’t all play nice when mixed up. Daniella Lucas