Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Demo Out Now on PS5, PS4 for a Limited Time

This might get announced during the State of Play today. Stranger of Paradise falls under the Japanese partners umbrella.

@RBMango For sure, seems very likely alongside a launch trailer or something.

Been eagerly waiting for this one loved the first demo even with all its graphical shortcomings (I'm hoping things have been cleaned up a little)

Not sure what to think about this one. Used to love FF but now it's just them screaming chaos and their weird names. Maybe it'll be fun.

This game needs to be chaos and die. It looks terrible.

Just in time for the state of play tonight, a demo will get announced during the direct and will probably be a available on Friday 11th

Not sure if diving into another Souls-like immediately after Elden Ring would be good for my mental well-being.

But.. it IS Final Fantasy though!

The first one was god awful, was definitely too early, so hopefully this one is better

Something something chaos something something.

Is this a demo of the final version ?
Cause we've had 2 "demos" already

Guess that means the game will be in the SoP. I just hope they don't focus too much on it, I don't want to see a lot of information on a game that releases soon anyway

Fingers and toes crossed that this doesn't turn out a steaming turd like tower of Babylon

@somnambulance same 🤣

@JB_Whiting

Supposed to be a lot easier than most soul type games. So would say Souls lite.

@Darthroseman Since Nioh, Team Ninja adopted a new workflow where they put out early demos to get feedback from the community, so they are intentionally putting out unfinished versions to give themselves some time to fix the issues that come up from the demos.

Hmmm- its definitely wait and see on this title. The earlier sights we've seen did not impress at all and I would have accepted that we were looking at PS3 gameplay.
I'm rooting for them - this team can do some great work so the state of this title was a bit baffling when we last saw it. I can only hope its been radically reformed!

Definitely interested in this game, Team Ninja knocked it out of the park with the Nioh games. Unfortunately it’ll be quite a while until I play it…

@lolwhatno oh yes- the days of playing demos of games before they were out, so that you could decide whether it was worth your £30 (or whatever was equivalent).
Today, you preorder for 3 x as much, and can't get a refund when it turns out to be a broken mess.

s-e decided it is not going to advertise this game because they are banking on it being a collossal failure. so instead, they will roll out 3 demos and hope to garner some interest and sales by... word of mouth? if the publisher has no confidence in this project, why should we?

i am in compelte disbelief as to how out of touch s-e has become. the likes of a quiet man, left alive, avengers, babylon's fall, final fantasy origin and forspoken all speak to just how misguided and mismanaged this company is. even when a game hits, it has to endure controversy and endless delays such as what we saw with the final fantasy 7 remake. heck, we still don't even know how many episodes it will be, nor when the next episode will release. 2 years? 4 years? your guess is as good as mine.

then you have games such as final fantasy xv that completely alienate the traditional community and exploit the dreams of tween girls who are more interested in boy bands than final fantasy. something is amiss here. the only franchise that has been left alone unscathed is dragon quest. say what you will about dragon quest and that it has failed to evolve in any meaningful ways, but at least the spirit and quality has been kept intact. why then did s-e decide to turn the final fantasy franchise upside down and tarnish its reputation in the process? right now it feels like they are throwing ideas to the wall to see what sticks. final fantasy deserves better!

is it out yet? can't seem to find it on the store

@Porco speak for yourself. I so far dig Forspoken and FF Origins. And we are still getting FFXVI.

I'll download the Demo, so far everything I've seen about this game has been interesting. The first trailer of SOP FF Origin was rough but you can't really judge the game based on that alone. It won me over with some of the recent announcements. Ready to kill Chaos, day one (or can I?)

But is it really out? It doesn't show up anywhere even after searching specifically for the game. Not that this is a huge deal in the end, but it was still one of the positive things out of yet another disappointing State of Play, and they Sony can't even get it up there even though they said it was available now.

I'll download it whenever they finally make it available though. If it turns out to be good, then I'll get it eventually. Nowhere near at launch though with having plenty of Horizon Forbidden West still left to play and then Cyberpunk 2077 after that, but I'd still like to try the game as I missed out on the first demo.

I still cant find the demo, is it out yet?

@CthulhuFhtagn oooh boy gonna have to disagree about Nier being lifeless. Boring is more subjective imo, so I'll let that go, but lifeless is not a way I'd describe either Nier game.

I will be fair and say that Nier: Replicant may feel lifeless if you're comparing it to recent games, but don't forget it was a PS3/Xbox 360 game released in 2010. For perspective, Infamous was a new game at the time.

@CthulhuFhtagn yea, i would say ff xii was their last truly good game. i did enjoy some aspects of ff xiii — the battle system was fierce and addictive — but can't say the story or characters were notable by any stretch. it feels like s-e is in a 15 year slump of which they have not truly recovered from. outside of a few exceptions, they are really struggling nowadays and it is painful to watch. even a remake of their legacy ps1 games would be better than the crap they are putting out now. i feel like the only way this company is going to be whipped into shape is if they get purchased by sony and undergo a major restructing which would allow them to be more focused and better managed.

@lolwhatno I remember the "shareware" version of games for $5+/-, in the early nineties. Then later the demo discs from magazines. Im old😆

Seems like they've polished up the visuals a bit

Well I can't see it in the store, not another case of push square putting America first even though it's a UK site.

@Porco I hear what you are saying, but regarding the demos for this game, it is not just a marketing ploy, it is how Team Ninja develop their games like these that need a lot of balancing. It's a huge part of their development process. They take on the feedback and use it as a real-world test.
Square have been a total mess in the past. FFVII remake had a fairly smooth development compared to some of their other games!
They clearly don't know what they are doing with their Western studios. Why would they let IO interactive and Hitman go?! They have weird expectations on the Western studios for sales and push games as service on them, yet the Japanese studios do their thing.
Clearly the Western studios are treated like the poor relatives and they are not part of a wider whole.
Why did we get hitman, tomb raider, and Deus Ex Go games, but no Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest Go?
You see companies like Nintendo with Smash Brothers and Koei Tecmo with Warrior Allstars, and even PlayStation with Playstation Allstars and you can see that all these companies see their characters and IP as a shared whole.
Square Enix has a franchise that is just begging to get a sequel and it would be very suited to gaas, that game is Sleeping Dogs.
Square Enix seem to be getting there, they had to learn how to make games on time using a decent engine.
I love that they make games like the more niche JRPGs and I enjoyed Quiet Man. I thought it was a great concept mostly poorly realized, but I enjoyed it way more than many safe 7 or 8 games I've played.

@Porco I have to disagree. Dragon Quest XI was incredible!

@suikoden it's absolutely there. Try looking thoroughly before slandering Push Square for no reason!

Go to the main game in the PS Store and then hit the 3 dots

@Corc11

Found it was a lot easier doing it from the app, came up straight away.

Will try 3 dot thing when back home. I thought it would be case of just searching for it or would be listed on its store page.

Well apologies too push square

@PhhhCough demo discs from magazines bruh I miss those days, or the 2 weekly walk-through guide for whatever the popular game was, I remember Resident Evil 1 taken me about 2 months to finish cause the magazine I bought split the walk-through into 3 parts. Non Google days 😱😱

No fan of Final Fantasy series in general but I did enjoy FF7 Remake. I’ll give this a spin! No expectation at all.

Tried it this morning, combat feels good as expected. Definitely seems like it could’ve used a tad more polish, but could be a winner! Excited to dig in more tonight.

Edit: cutscenes = terrible; combat = fun
Stranger of Paradise = sale purchase

Ugh... all these "chaos" jokes have gotten old really fast. It's okay to have releases that aren't super polished trippleA experiences. Looking forward to this.

Anyone know if the demo is for PS only?

@FatalBubbles No, it’s available on Xbox as well. Should be on PC too, I guess.

@lolwhatno for example 3drealms' duke nukem 3d came out(early 90s), it was 3 or 4 parts. The "shareware version" would be a trial of sorts, but it would include the entire first part. So for $5, give or take, you'd get a 5hr game or so, with nothing locked behind a paywall, except the rest of the game.

@Uromastryx man, I remember figuring out the button combinations to a an xbm demo disc, to unlock the demo for metal wolf chaos. Only for the actual game to never come, stateside, til recently.

@CthulhuFhtagn I would have rather seen just FF7R with upgraded graphics and complete at launch i dont want to wait 3 generations before i can play the complete game.

@Corc11 that's fair. i'm actually playing it as we speak — getting near the end. i have been enjoying it, but i would say that some of the story beats were padded out or poorly executed and could have used some trimming. my concern with dragon quest is the complete lack of new ideas. the music has gotten quite stale as well since the loops are so short and repetitive. Plus various tracks have been recycled in numerous games at this point. it is just lazy. so.... on the whole i have enjoyed my time with dq xi, but i enjoyed part viii more

@Apfelschteiner i agree with your point on their mishandling of western studios. no question. it would be best if sony purchased crystal dynamics and eidos montreal outright.

but i would argue that the development of ff7r was in fact a disaster as well. let's not forget that the game was initially announced in 2015 and was to be developed primarily by cyberconnect. then, in 2017, it was announced that s-e was taking cyberconnect off the project and had to scrap a lot of the work completed due to not meeting the high bar of quality and expections. the game would undergo another 3 and a half years of development before it was released. somewhere along the way we were told the game would be cut into episodes because the project would be too large otherwise. to top it all off, the game was rumoured to be in pre-producion for years, dating all the way back to the ps3 era. ff7r had no business being broken up into episodes but s-e took this as an opportunity to exploit the audience. ultimately, it sounds like s-e wasn't capable of making it a complete experience even if they wanted to due to their poor project management skills.

I played the demo yesterday and it was better than I thought. The title has a nice combat system, really fun, and this turns the game very appealing to
me. I do not like the character design, nor the voice acting nor the facial amimations though. It is based in the same world (same world map an locations at least) and it have some resamblance with the original FF story. It is not a soulslike for me, it is way easier than dark souls and combat is more similar to Dragon's dogma in my opinion. Not bad really.

Is the cringy dialogue deliberate? Don't people like get paid to write this for a living? Why are so many game writers terrible? I know kids that could write better dialogue than this and they don't do it for a living but as a hobby! Happy if they end up accomplishing a great story and dialogue but so far looks terrible and I will be avoiding for now even if the combat looks decent.

@Porco I stand by what I said when I said "FFVII remake had a fairly smooth development compared to some of their other games", without contradicting what you said. It was kind of a joke, because the development of FFVII remake was a mess, but still better than FFXV and probably some other Square games like the Avengers. At least the development of FFVII remake resulted in a great game. I think the decision to split up the games definitely left Square with a lot on their plate, and really feels like anpther example of mismanagement. I'd argue that it's too soon to judge if it was a cynical move to split the game into two or three parts.
I think there is clear proof that Square are getting better at managing development. Clearly, they have a handle on their engine now and can get some games out in a reasonable time frame. They don't seem to know what they are doing with their Western studios, although they have published some great games.
I think there is a general problem when a developer like Square, who do not have a solid handle on production, acquire other developers (especially when those developers are in foreign countries with a whole different culture).
It should be a cause for concern with Microsoft, who don't have much of a proven track record with delivering quality software and now they are acquiring dozens of teams, mostly opportunistically because those companies were mismanaged.
Sony on the other hand, has a much more measured approach. It would be interesting to see Sony acquire Square because maybe they could organize production better and bring back Sleeping Dogs!

@CynicalGamer I don't know, I like bad writing as long as it is entertaining. There are plenty of examples of TV and movies with ridiculous plot holes and dialogue, but are still entertaining.

@Blackmagehobbit I'm going to give the demo ago when I have the time, I doubt I'll play the main game for a very long time though, just because I haven't even got round to Nioh 2, which has a much more appealing setting for me.

@Apfelschteiner fair enough. I also enjoy some of those. Usually movies though (which are shorter) or games with very strong gameplay. I guess I will see whether it has any redeeming qualities from my perspective when this game releases.

@CynicalGamer I haven't played it yet, so I can't say for sure if it good cringe, but the best way to find out is to try the demo!

@Apfelschteiner played the demo and I cringed more than usual. But I guess that may not be the case for everyone lol. I've cringed for final fantasy games before but those were more tolerable. Might just be a case that I got older. I don't know really.

Edit: meant that maybe my tastes have changed in recent years since final fantasy 12. For Final fantasy 15 I didn't cringe much aside from just disliking the general story.

@Apfelschteiner NioH 2 is better in some ways but the SoP is still very good. I played the demo in the hardest mode for about 20 hours (doing sidequests and evolving the main jobs that interest me untill the max level). Really liked it, just ignore the weird characters (or have some laughs some a few times). The combat, exploration and enemy designs turn the experience worth.