World Of Final Fantasy came out nearly 3 years ago, and quite honestly until Luke leant it to me and told me I’d love it I hadn’t heard of it, and quite honestly it’s just bloody amazing and addictive as all hell… So I’m writing this in the hopes that you’ll read this, and go and pick it up and have a damn good time, because I believe this is a game that shouldn’t be missed. It’s essentially a mash up of Final Fantasy and Pokémon… What more do you want?!
Now for sure if you’re not a fan of JRPGs, this won’t be for you. Now I’ve written about JRPGs and how I love them, but even I have a limit for things that can be too… Japanese. Anime? I don’t know. It’s complicated… Now it’s worth mentioning at this point that this is one of the main characters and I love it (Usually I would hate something this sparkly in a game):
This is Tama who will be your first ‘Mirage’; Mirages act like your Pokémon which you need to capture and level up to continue along your journey – I don’t need to explain basic monster capturing mechanics to you! There are however a few significant things which differentiate this from games such as Pokemon and Digimon and Final Fantasy itself:
- The main characters (Which I’ll come on to) also fight and have their own abilities.
- You can stack your Mirages with the characters to combine abilities, you can also enhance powers, for example if 2 members of the stack have Fire, you’ll be able to use Fira, add more to get Firaga. The stack can be 3 high and is stacked up of a Large, Medium and Small, and you can endlessly mix it up.
- The Mirages can walk around with you and you can even ride them after unlocking certain abilities (Take that, Pokémon Sword and Shield).
- Every single Mirage has it’s own skill board (Much like the Final Fantasy X sphere grid).
- You can freely transfigure (Evolve / Devolve) your Mirages and you can use skills from each level of the transfiguration.
- The world you explore is a mixture of a hub world, towns and dungeons and you can travel freely between all of it at any time.
There’s probably even more i’m forgetting, but you get the idea; the main takeaway is that Square Enix have just made this game EASY to play, but not in a way where it’s a dumb kids game. You still have the Final Fantasy tactical gameplay of choosing what attack to use, and you need to carefully plan your stacks to ensure they’re powerful and have the right elemental resistances, as there’ll be certain bosses (Usually non story bosses) that you’ll have to come back to later.
The main selling point for this game however is that it’s chock full of charm. You play as 2 main characters – Reynn and Lann – who are brother and sister, and their banter and interaction makes the general travelling around a lot more exciting than a lot of solo player experiences; they’ll often comment on the atmosphere of where you are (Making jokes about falling off a cliff for example), and rib each other more than being serious. The main storyline is that they have lost their memory but have the extremely rare ability of being able to capture Mirages – This leads them to also wanting to find out about their mum, who MAY have been a great figure of power (Of sorts). Couple this with your usual ‘the kingdom is in peril please send help’ plot, and you’ve got enough to keep you going.
In the kingdom you travel to (After waking up in the ‘hub’ area), everyone is super small; they’re essentially Pop Vinyl figures in the visual department, and your characters are regular sized folk… But in this world they’re giants! You quickly gain the ability to switch between small and regular size and this provides different ways of stacking your Mirages (So when you’re big, they sit on top of you, when small you can sit on them).
To add another level of extreme fun to this crazy ride, you’ll visit various locations famous in Final Fantasy history, and also meet lots of tiny versions of famous characters such as Yuna, Lightning, Squall and many many more. Quite often they’ll stay with you for part of a dungeon or sometimes battle you (Before they realise who you are); this instills a feeling of nostalgia as you’ll most likely recognise something from one of the games you’ve played! Also very early on in the game you can choose an Aeon who becomes a Mirage instead of a summon; the choice is between Ifrit, Shiva and Ramuh. They’ll shrink down so you can spend your time levelling them up, and most likely be sticking around as your strongest pocket monster.
I am honestly kind of shocked with how much I love this game; it’s fun, charming, and a joy to play. You can fast forward cutscenes and battles, meaning that the annoying stuff isn’t so annoying and level grinding is a little easier! A lot of reviews I’ve seen for it give it a 7 but I’d say it’s easily a 9. This will most likely be my main game for a while (It’s made me forget about Dragon Quest and Dark Souls 2) so expect to hear from me again about the amazing World of Final Fantasy.