Thanks to a witch’s curse, I am obligated to write about any videogame I have played for longer than a half hour, so let us contemplate World of Final Fantasy.
Long story short on the whole game? It was a noble attempt at… something, but it is hard to say if it ever succeeded at anything. I’m trying to work out those “goals”, though, so I’m thinking a good start would be…
World of Final Fantasy is World of Final Fantasy, dummy, it’s about the Final Fantasy heroes
There’s one reason that everyone bought this game (well, everyone that actually did buy the game), and it is Final Fantasy with a capital F. Final Fantasy has one of the greatest pedigrees in the history of gaming, and, while Mega Man, Castlevania, or alike has dropped off in recent years/decades, there has never been a year without a Final Fantasy or Final Fantasy-adjacent product since the advent of the Buster Swordcitation needed. Final Fantasy may be right up there with Mario and Madden as one of the most established gaming franchises out there, and, like it or not, we’ve got Final Fantasies filling up shelves all over the place.
And, in a weird way, that might be a problem.
I know a lot of people reading this have been gaming all of their lives, right there from the advent of the Nintendo Entertainment System. And that likely means you’re damn well near forty. And you know what that also means? You’re old! There were an awful lot of people that were born in the intervening four decades! And they might like Final Fantasy, too! Except, you know, their first Final Fantasy game was Final Fantasy 7. Or Final Fantasy 10. Or, wonder of wonders, they may have played their first Final Fantasy game this year, and it’s a MMORPG involving a strangely high number of cat boys. And that’s before we even get into the people that got into gaming later in life, or just recently decided it was time to see what this “Final Fantasy” was all about, or just picked up Final Fantasy 6 because it came with the Super Nintendo Mini, or even they’re interested in finding out the deal with these weird dudes from the Kingdom Hearts 3 expansion. Point being is that there are 35 years of Final Fantasy out there, and people could have started with Final Fantasy “one” or fifteen.
And, if you’ve found you enjoyed Final Fantasy, it’s only natural to have a desire to see what else is out there in the franchise. Only issue? That could take you the rest of your life. There is a lot to any given Final Fantasy, and, before you get into the idea of how even the smallest FF takes like ten hours, nearly every FF also has wildly disparate moving parts. The battle system in Final Fantasy 5 isn’t going to effectively help you learn whatever Lightning is flipping around about in Final Fantasy 13, and everything you ever learned about harvesting Flan Princess in Final Fantasy 4 is not going to be relevant by the time you have to complete all the “hunts” of Final Fantasy 12. Even if you had infinity time for playing as many videogames as you ever wanted (I want to live there), the Final Fantasy franchise is still daunting, as you have to rapidly switch tracks between mastering materia and farming playing cards. And then you never see a reason to have that “skill” ever again in the franchise (or, for that matter, anywhere else in any other game).
I am a master of the gambit system. That didn’t even survive to see Final Fantasy 12-2 (it happened! It was on DS!)
And, to be absolutely clear, it is in Square-Enix’s best interest that you have not only an affection for the whole of the Final Fantasy franchise, but that you also know it inside and out. Easy example? Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is a fighting game (basically) that relies on you having a familiarity with its cast of Final Fantasy luminaries. And when SE decides to release expansion materials like new fighters, management is literally banking on you not only knowing who Zenos yae Galvus is, but also that you like said character enough to shell out five bucks for the experience. Locke Cole isn’t going to put cyberdollars in cyberwallets if everyone that ever cared about the dude stopped playing videogames in 2010. And this is just one game! Mobile experiences like Pokémon Go, Fire Emblem Heroes, and the entire Fate/Stay franchise are all at least partially based on the concept that people will do godammned anything to get a shiny Pikachu wearing a party hat (or, for the equivalent in the Fate franchise, a shiny, sexy Benjamin Franklin wearing a party hat). Square Enix needs every man, woman, and lilkin on Earth to love Cloud Strife, because the quarter 2 profits are already based on the idea that a million people are going to buy Lara Croft’s Tifa crossover outfit.
Oh, and I guess it’s good for gaming discourse if everyone has the same Final Fantasy knowledge, too. But that’s not super relevant to the people that choose which games get greenlit.
This finally brings us to World of Final Fantasy. It is clear what World of Final Fantasy was trying to do: in the same way that Kingdom Hearts condenses entire Disney movies into “worlds” that feature five characters and two dungeons, World of Final Fantasy boils down its Final Fantasy “guest stars” into their component parts with generally distinctive plots and locales. Yuna the responsible summoner is hanging around the Pyrefly Forest where she first boned a ghost, and Rydia the more cheeky summoner has a peppy adventure where she faces her fear of fire. Final Fantasy guest characters show up just long enough to make an impact on the player, but not outshine the “real” heroes of this tale. In short, by the end of World of Final Fantasy, the player should have a general fondness and understanding of characters from a solid fourteen or so Final Fantasy games. And it’s reasonable to say that playing one 40-hour game is a faster path to understanding the Final Fantasy pantheon than playing fifteen games that could potentially suck up the rest of your life.
But there is a bit of an issue with using the “Kingdom Hearts approach”. No one is going to mistake Pinocchio for Aladdin for Jack Skellington. However, when you hit the FF games, well… Squall is a competent SeeD “hero” that has some issues with confidence. Cloud is a competent SOLDIER “hero” that has some issues with confidence. Lightning is a competent… ah, crap, we’ve already hit a wall. A lot of Final Fantasy characters kind of boil down to the same character once you remove them from their more complicated home plots. Squall and Cloud are very different protagonists in their respective adventures, but, in the limited World of Final Fantasy, they’re practically the same as Tidus. In fact, in a weird way, the “knights” of World of Final Fantasy become something approaching a boy band. Tidus is the funny one, Lightning is the serious one, and Squall is the one that is interested in gardening for some reason. They are only graphically distinguishable, and, frankly, the funko-ization of the gang doesn’t help in that department either.
And, while this at least gives a new audience the cliff’s notes on a particular hero or supporting character, it’s disapointing for anyone that is in this to see those beloved Final Fantasy characters again. Tifa is in “Nibelheim flashback” mode, so she’s… what? A martial artist in training/cowgirl? That’s a far cry from the confident “mom of AVALANCHE” that starred in Final Fantasy 7/Remake. King Edgar comes off as little more than an aggravating flirt compared to the original king that was willing to participate in a hentai to rescue his countrymen. Vivi had practically an entire game’s worth of meditation on mortality and the meaning of life in Final Fantasy 9, and here he barely even has a name. It’s cool that the “intervention quests” all seem tailor made to please people that want to see Pirate Princess Faris and Ifrit have a conversation (I have been writing that fanfic since I was thirteen!), but everything here is so shallow as to be nearly insulting. Final Fantasy fans want a phoenix, yet World of Final Fantasy offers chicken feed.
So World of Final Fantasy is shallow as an introduction to Final Fantasy characters, and even shallower for anyone that wants to spend more time with particular protagonists. But maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree! Maybe it was never supposed to be about the “cameo” characters, maybe…
World of Final Fantasy is its own game, dummy, this is about the original characters and plot
First of all, to break kayfabe for a moment: ha ha ha, oh man, that’s a good one.
Second of all, this is a place where World of Final Fantasy knows what to do, but refuses to put in the time on the “homework” to make it actually happen. As previously stated, World of Final Fantasy follows the usual arc of a Kingdom Hearts story: the plot and main characters are introduced, that is then ignored for hours as our heroes have a ball with a pile guest characters/worlds, and then it all comes back to an original “point” in time for the finale when guests met across the adventure may or may not find a way to help in the concluding, ridiculous battle. Unfortunately, what works for Kingdom Hearts absolutely does not work for World of Final Fantasy for one simple reason: you are never given a reason to care about Lann and Reynn.
The twins are, like, your main characters, right? So you probably feel something there. But beyond that? I technically spent entire days’ worth of hours with those two, and I could barely tell you their defining attributes. Yes, they’re both generally well-meaning heroes that will fight against injustice and love their parents… but past that? Lann is the goofy one, Reynn is the responsible/contemplative one, and, aside from a certain woman’s hatred for cactus men, that’s all I got. They are not really characters beyond broad archetypes, and, when bad things happen to them, nobody cares. Oh, they were wholly responsible for a hundred years of hardship? Yeah, alright, I could buy that. As believable as anything else in this world.
And a reminder that this game is from the same people that brought you Kingdom Hearts 2, which somehow made the fans demand an entire Kingdom Hearts “miniseries” game based on some dork from the opening skateboarding tutorial or whatever. KH2’s Roxas is a fully established, sympathetic character inside of like seven seconds. His own featured game made him a tragic hero that could rival the likes of Shakespeare (or at least anything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Lann and Reynn never come close to that over the course of an entire game.
And don’t try to claim the other original supporting characters in World of Final Fantasy fare any better, because there aren’t any. Wynne and Enna both alternate between macguffins and lore dumps, and then we have… Tama the fox mascot? Do not waste my the-time.
But maybe it’s about the overarching lore, right? Maybe this is another Final Fantasy 13 situation wherein the cool, established world is masked in data entries and other “data logs” hidden around the world. Maybe this is the kind of story that isn’t necessarily about the characters, but about the world (of Final Fantasy).
And, sorry to say that I’m continually setting you up for disappointment here, but World of Final Fantasy flubs there, too. This wasn’t explored much on the stream (what kind of maniac would make a “let’s read” let’s play?) but there are “datalogs” and glossaries to spare in World of Final Fantasy; and, spoilers, they all add up to a big fat nothing. Yes, there are multiple, fascinating stories in World of Final Fantasy’s backstory (and even more in Maxima), but they all combine to form a Voltron of oblivion (and Enna Kros forms the head).
The ultimate punchline to the lore of World of Final Fantasy is that there are some people that merge with powerful summons to ascend to godhood, and, once they have established their nigh-omnipotent powers, they can create worlds. So there are worlds of fantasy, there are worlds of sci-fi, and (since some people are jerks) there are worlds of death-spewing dragons. And some worlds are proper Final Fantasy games, some worlds are obviously implied to be the spin-offs, and some worlds are like this one: where there’s a little sprinkling here and there of the familiar, “main” worlds, but they’re still fairly bonkers. And, of course, sometimes the worlds fight. And, end of the day, that’s that. There are infinity worlds with infinity permutations, and World of Final Fantasy 2 could have equal odds of being another adventure in “this” world, or one where you’re piloting a space ship in a shoot ‘em up (Einhänder is unquestionably implied to be another world). And when your final word on lore is that “all worlds happen and could happen and are happening” it kind of makes the whole thing feel… pointless? Like, I saved this world, I saved Wynne, but apparently there a bunch of other worlds? And even other Wynnes? There’s possibly a great moral here about how saving your own world and the people you love really matters in the face of infinite choices, but that lesson is seemingly absent here. This is one World of Final Fantasy, there are a thousand out there, too, and good will always triumph over evil regardless of what anybody does.
By Alexander, it’s Bioshock Infinite all over again. That’s never good!
But it’s possible that this is all purposeless anyway. Maybe you’re not even supposed to take these characters seriously at all…
World of Final Fantasy is a comedy, dummy, just laugh it off
There are 100% funny moments in World of Final Fantasy, and a lot of lesser jokes that could conceivably be funny to an audience that has not become jaded after years of watching Poshul die on the cross in complete earnestness. There are also some amazing mirage entries that are hilarious, and a few that are… well, that one where they keep trying to make "Lich" rhyme with a naughty word. And the twins really are the classical "straight man and goofy man" partnership.
That said, if you’re trying to make something a comedy, maybe don’t hang it all on a story where you’re required to kill your parents. Twice. If World of Final Fantasy is a comedy, it falls under the same issues: it can’t fully commit, and the parts where it veers into drama stand out a lot more than Lann playing football in the background of an info dump. It can be a funny game! The characters can be enjoyable! But if you’re going for funny, go for actually funny, and don’t hang it all on a world that is literally based on a genocide that was instigated by the "wacky" heroes.
While my contemporary, BEAT, believes “the choice of character models being those dead-eyed funko pop abominations prevent the kind of expressiveness required for any sort of character-based comedy,” I take the opposite position: it feels like, maybe, the fact that Cloud is a wee puppet man is supposed to automatically add levity to any situation. Mini Cloud and Lil’ Tifa are facing Ultima Weapon, and Nibelheim is in danger, but, ha ha, they’re action figures, who cares? It’s silly! But nothing else about the narrative seems to indicate the Lilkin Heroes are anything but serious about their world, and, yes, you’re supposed to take Cloud fighting an impossible monster as seriously as in Final Fantasy 7 Remake. So, yeah, Lann might make a crack about something being ridiculous in the midst of that, but you’re still in a situation as "serious" as real Final Fantasy, and, give or take a cactuar on your head, you’re in a battle that is exactly as serious as your average Final Fantasy.
This game was intended to be comedic. And there are funny bits! World of Final Fantasy sincerely tries. But, end of the day? There were more genuinely funny bits in Final Fantasy 7 Remake than World of Final Fantasy. And, in some cases, it came from the exact same characters! It can be done! Just WoFF doesn’t seem to know what it wants enough to stick to it.
But it’s possible that this is all purposeless anyway. World of Final Fantasy shouldn’t be judged like a dedicated comedy…
World of Final Fantasy is a videogame, dummy, it’s supposed to be fun to play
Look, let’s get one thing out of the way (he said 2,000 words in): this is supposed to be Final Fantasy: Pokémon. Like a lot in WoFF, it only half commits, as the whole “mirage keeper” aspect of this adventure is arguably generally ignored in the plot (being a mirage keeper is super important to the plot, but you could also replace the nuts and bolts [and backstory] of “mirage keeping” with “making coffee”, and very little about the story would change.) (“Oh, your mom was a high barista of the cappuccino lineage? How interesting.”) But it is everything during battles. The meat of World of Final Fantasy’s challenge isn’t so much about fights that are “hard” to actually manage, but more that you have to manage your mirages before every bout, and be sure you’re prepared for whatever is going to happen this time. A new mirage can only be captured by casting fire on it? Great, be certain you have a fire mirage. This boss is weak to ice? Well, you might lose once, but come back with a Shiva in your gang, and you’re set. And the stacking aspect makes this replacement for “equipment” interesting every time: you can’t just don an anti-lightning ring accessory, you have to “stack” an anti-lightning mirage with another mirage that isn’t going to negate your prime immunity. You have the ability to create completely contradictory stacks, and then never get anything done! Or properly manage all your mirages, and blaze through a volcano with all the (metaphorical) ice armor of the Light Warriors of lore. It might take some time, but it is empowering to “get it right” with your stack for a particular area.
Of course, if World of Final Fantasy is biting on Pokémon for this gameplay, they missed one key feature in that experience: being able to switch Pokémon on the fly. Like in Pokémon, you have a limited number of mirages that can be on your belt at one time; however, unlike the Gamefreak original, you absolutely cannot switch your mirages in the midst of a battle. Whatever you chose to start this battle with is stuck until you either win, run, or die. And, while it’s not difficult to solve the puzzle of maybe you need an electric team in the robot-based dungeon, many of the later areas are more generic, and require a greater swatch of abilities and resistances. And there is nothing worse than facing down a gigantic behemoth, knowing you have you the proper instrument in your toolbox right over there, but, sorry, you’re stuck in this battle right now, and you’re going to have to whittle down those health points in the most boring, least satisfying way possible. And then you switch in your trump card for the next behemoth battle, only to face a mag roader team that requires a totally different solution. It’s exhausting, and another place where World of Final Fantasy falls just short of being a great game. It’s not terrible! It’s just… close enough to great that you can see exactly what went wrong.
And while the battle system may be satisfying when it comes together, the dungeons need some serious work. Final Fantasy hasn’t ever been a franchise that was particularly known for its dungeons (monster closets? Yes. Dungeon design? No), so we’ve got an uphill battle there to begin with. But here the dungeons are generally extremely generic locations (ice cave, volcano, basement) with marginally interesting gimmicks (ice sliding puzzle, put out fires, turn on machines). There is exactly one dungeon in this entire adventure that I found remotely memorable (underwater temple complete with wall-walking action), but even that wound up overstaying its welcome by about 20%. Past that, the only other dungeon that even came close was the Train Graveyard, but that loses some significant points for being an extremely confusing maze of platforms that easily loop on each other.
And speaking of the Train Graveyard, that was a dungeon that absolutely required bringing particular mirages with particular abilities (in this case, “zap” and “smash”), whereas previous dungeons only relied on the “map screen abilities” as a way of accessing extra treasure. Was there some warning that I absolutely had to bring a smash-based mirage to this dungeon? Not that I saw. So did I waste a solid half hour trying to figure out if I could solve this “puzzle” without needing a specific mirage, like I had in every dungeon prior? Yep! And that doesn’t leave an impression at all.
And if this entire writeup makes World of Final Fantasy sound like a bad game, I apologize, that is not the intention. This has been a list of the significant problems in World of Final Fantasy, but it is also a list of the only significant problems in World of Final Fantasy. I will admit now, before God and audience, that there were moments when I absolutely did not want to stop playing World of Final Fantasy. The whole adventure really clicked around the 30% completion mark, and, from that point on, I was tempted on a weekly basis to play without my streaming company. Hell, I technically did play the game during those times, I just played the less cinematic bits, like fighting through the coliseum or completing mundane fetch quests. This is a fun game! World of Final Fantasy is a fun game! And it does hold up to its pedigree a lot better than many other spin-offs of popular franchises. This ain’t no Wand of Gamelon.
But my theory has always been that if you’re going to do it, you should do it right. That’s why everything I have ever written, including this article, is absolutely prefect. Final Fantasy is a pedigree in the gaming sphere, and this Final Fantasy product falls short of its forbearers. It’s still a fun experience, but it is also flawed in some very obvious ways. Maybe a World of Final Fantasy 2 will correct these problems, or maybe a third World of Final Fantasy released seventeen years later will address the issues. Maybe it will always be a weird, one-off “quirky adventure” in the Final Fantasy pantheon. Whatever the case, the game we have here, even in its expanded state, is still just “good”, and far shy of flawless.
But, hey, it’s still a fun way to spend eleven nights of streaming.
What’s next? Welp, I feel like we’ve covered an awful lot of World of Final Fantasy at this point, but there is still that whole “lore” thing I’ve admitted to ignoring. Maybe we could take a more focused look at that…