World of Final Fantasy - Initial Impressions (PS4)

(image credit goes to Steam)

The Back Story

I wanted this game so damn bad I could taste it.  It was 2016 and I played on my Vita a lot.  At the time I must have been playing Odin Sphere or something on it, but I didn't have much in the way of rpgs for it.  My wife, Katie, talked her mother into buying it for me for Christmas, and I was stoked.  I put it in immediately, turned on the Vita, and fired it up.

...and I hated it.  In all my wisdom, I never looked up much about the gameplay mechanics, and I didn't realize monster capturing was so important.  At the time, that was a huge deal breaker for me.  I knew she had paid full price for it so I begrudgingly tried to plow my way through it.  Eventually, about 6 months and 5 hours of gameplay later, I admitted defeat.

Last year, during the pandemic, I decided to go into a Game Stop near my house, and since I didn't have a ton of money, and I was a bit more opened minded, I picked it up for like 15 bucks.  I then set it on the shelf and forgot all about it.

Flash forward to this week, when a trophy hunting competition I participate in over on PSNProfiles.com brought it back into my life once more.  The competition is RPG themed, and I've been doing a bad job keeping up.  You can make call outs to other players, and someone called me out to platinum this.  I have been called out before, but playing either of those games felt like pulling teeth.  However, this has been different...

(image credits to WCamicase Gaming on Youtube)

Initial Thoughts

I'm only about three hours in or so, but I am definitely glad I picked this up last year.  Having played through some other games that incorporate monster capturing, I will admit I'm still not the biggest fan of how it's implemented here. I'm sure as time goes on, catching Mirages (essentially the games Pokemon) won't be nearly as difficult, but for now, it feels like a blue moon when I can actually capture one.

The games sometimes ties Mirages to other, unseen users, whom you need to defeat if you want to capture the Mirages themselves.  It's basically the equivalent of finding a kid to beat to death in order to steal his ferret.  Or ya know, some kind of less morose analogy.  Regardless, this is frustrating at the moment, but hopefully as time goes on, it will lighten up.  I do enjoy the Mirage boards though, which essentially function as mini-Sphere Grids or skill trees.  I like me a good skill tree, and this one is small, fluid and easy to understand.  Big fan.

What I am really enjoying are the characters.  Newer Final Fantasy titles seem to have really good characters lost in a story that is surreal and often underwhelming.  The story here so far is a bit "high concept, low interest", but I do really like the characters.  The back and forth banter between the Reynn and Lann is fantastic, as is the back and forth between Lann and Tama.  Tama took a second to get warmed up to, but now I'm very much interested in seeing where this character goes.  My personal favorite so far is Serafie, who sounds familiar but I cannot place her voice.  She is, to put it simply, ridiculous and I'm all about it.

Again though, the story is a bit up it's own ass at the moment.  Perhaps once I get out of the earlier chapters and see it culminate, it will flow better, but I'm not holding out hope.  I love newer Final Fantasy's for the combat and the characters, but rarely is the story very compelling from a narrative stand point.  I would actually argue the series has always had a problem with this, but the metaphysical bs has really gotten bad since probably 13.  I haven't finished 13, but it contained that same vibe that Final Fantasy XV, VII Remake, and even the Kingdom Hearts games seem to contain.  I wonder if there's a common thread.

As someone who enjoys trophies, I will say the line up of story related trophies here is a bit ridiculous.  Some games just pick random events to assign trophies too (here's looking at you Dragon Quest XI), and here it's clearly to pad the list with a bunch of cliche JRPG trophy list types.  Beat the coliseum?  Check.  Fight a ton of battles?  Check.  The dreaded "open every treasure chest"?  Oh you betcha.  It's not a great list but it has you do everything, so at least there's that.

Before I Finish...

I need this game to figure out it's story before I stop caring.  I love the characters so far so much that I want the story to work out.  It doesn't need to take me to a different plain of existence, or move me to tears with stories of the after life.  I would also like the Mirage system to feel a bit more diverse.  I don't care about most of my Mirages so far.  I know it's too early to really complain, but I am worried I will find one or two Mirages, and harp on them the rest of the game.