If there’s one game that was a surprising hit, for both the devs and the players, it would have to be Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins. Now, after its shock success, Tetsuya Nomura is considering the possibility of making a sequel.
Final Fantasy Origins’ reception when it was first announced was a bit iffy, particularly after players got to hear the title’s corny dialogue. Paired with an edgy main character and fans got a game that was meme’d on just from its trailer.
However, when it was released, it received praise from different outlets for breathing fresh air into the Final Fantasy franchise with its gory and stylish gameplay. The reviewers still pointed out the dialogue was corny but the story itself is pretty interesting as it expands on the lore of Final Fantasy 1. Ultimately, the title ended with middling reviews.
The final DLC, Different Future, was recently released. Apparently, this DLC’s popularity will be a measure of if the title deserves a sequel. The game currently is in people’s minds and some of them are even putting it on their must-play lists by the end of 2022.
This spells a good future for the game, but we don’t know what Tetsuya Nomura’s bar for “popularity” is. It’s certainly not a game that can compete with the popularity of the mainline Final Fantasy series, it’s not a game that will pop up in the same sentence when you’re talking about them. But the spin-off has certainly done well for itself as a cult hit.
Stranger of Paradise was released as part of the 35th anniversary of Final Fantasy. The game sold 57,000 copies in Japan during its launch month and was one of the best-selling games of March 2022 in the U.S.
