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Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin This is a pretty chaotic game. No, really. It looks (and kinda plays) like a PS360 gen game and is one of the most impressively dogshit ports I've seen in a very long time. The writing is meme-worthy trash and the plot is borderline nonsensical. I think the original Final Fantasy is retroactively a sci-fi game now? But seriously, what an absolutely garbage port. I actually had to turn off the e-cores on my CPU but I can't even say with 100% certainty whether it really helped or not. This game made me feel like i was going crazy. When I set the framerate to 120fps the game could barely stay above 100 and often dipped into the 70s. Not a big deal, that's what g-sync is for. Problem is when set to 120, the game slows down when it drops below 90fps. At least, that's what I read online. I'm pretty sure it slowed down even above 100. Fine, I though. I'll lock it to 60 and have it be rock solid. Lol, nope. When set to 60, it could barely stay above 50fps. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most mindbogglingly awful port I've seen in a long time. It's a complete fucking technical mess. I just cannot wrap my head around why the game works the way it does. It felt better after I went into the BIOS and disabled my CPU'S e-cores. Maybe I just got used to it but I never really noticed any slowdown after that. At least nothing as bad as the first time I played. I feel like this game was either rushed or made on a shoestring budget. I can't help but get the feeling that someone, somewhere, just did not give a shit about this project and I'm really curious to know whether that was Square-Enix or Team Ninja. All that being said, I still kinda loved it. There's something deeply satisfying about the combat. When I wasn't stuck on a boss, I could've kept grinding missions for hours. I don't think it would be accurate to call it a Soulslike. I guess it's more of a Niohlike, if we wanna go there? It feels much simpler while still offering plenty of variety Then again, I ended up going for the same strategy with every single job I levelled up: find a hard-hitting move I'm comfortable with and just hit enemies with that combo as quickly as I can to open them up for a Soul Burst. I did rage at a few bosses but tbh that was just me playing like an idiot. Once I slowed down and started learning their patterns, I always got them. The final boss, though. Goddamn, that one was fucking hard. I played carefully from the start and it still took me a shit ton of attempts before I got him. Ironically enough, that particular fight never frustrated me. I mean, I was feeling pretty exhausted after so many failed attempts but I never got angry about the fight itself. Oh but one mission in particular was complete fucking bullshit. Maybe it's cause I was playing on hard and it's not as bad on normal but jfc. You don't have your party members for that particular section and the game likes to put large groups of enemies together in small areas. You literally can't even finish your attrack string on one before another one throws some bullshit at you. It's insanely infuriating and I just cannot fucking grasp what the hell they were thinking. Once I realized this bullshit was impossible, I just ran past the enemies but there's a section at the end where you have no choice but to take a similar crowd on. I don't even feel like I figured out a strategy or played well, I just got fucking lucky. I'll gladly admit it was my own fault when I raged at boss fights but this mission in particular was complete fucking garbage. Anyway, I still have the DLC to play as well as Chaos difficulty but I think I'll put that off for now and come back to it later. This seems like the kind of game I could easily sink over a hundred hours into like Nioh, but right now I'm really feeling the itch to play some Trails. It's been way too long.