Having briefly gotten back into Final Fantasy while investigating the modding scene, I was informed that the franchise actually had a mons entry, World of Final Fantasy. That sounded interesting to me, as Final Fantasy has a lot of iconic monster designs that would make for a good mons collector.

It is an offensively dull and soulless game that thoroughly killed any remaining hope I had for this franchise. I trudged through about two-thirds of it before giving up, and honestly I regret not cutting my losses sooner.

They clearly copied Pokemon’s notes for most of the aesthetics…

…including the friendship slavery, unfortunately. Final Fantasy’s more serious tone could have been an opportunity to be less ridiculous about this, but…

…that just results in making the aesthetics extra grimdark, which in turn just results in making the player look even worse. (And yes, the capture mechanic is literally a pun on “imprison”. But it’s okay when you do it!!!)

The tone in general is much more lighthearted than most FFs, with visibly tween-aged protagonists, a cute fluffy mascot, and lots of tongue-in-cheek fourth wall humor. According to Wikipedia, this was a deliberate attempt to court a new, younger generation of gamers to counteract the fact the main series was getting darker and more adult. As is so often the case when corporations try to do that, the result is mostly just cringe. I don’t mind a lighthearted story in theory (I like the Mario RPGs, after all), but the execution here was just very poor. In particular, the boyprotagonist’s personality consists almost entirely of “I’m really dumb and make stupid puns,” which I wouldn’t mind if they were one-off jokes, but instead they manifest as overly long skits where everyone else has to admonish him for being dumb and explaining why his stupid puns are stupid, which is the death of comedy. Learn to say more with less, writers.

Cutscenes feel weirdly padded in general, honestly — they insist on having in-universe tutorials in addition to the standard popup tutorials seen above, so the game ends up explaining everything twice. Or thrice, even, because for some reason characters keep reminding us of mechanics in cutscenes even after we’ve seen the tutorial. Like, what is the target audience here? It’s rated E¹⁰⁺, and I really don’t think 10-year-olds need this much handholding. When I was 10 games let me explore at my own pace and I liked it that way, gosh darn it. Video games only turn kids’ brains to mush when you make them this way!

The central mechanic is that mons don’t fight alongside you like normal party members; instead, they climb on top of you to combine powers. You can unstack to give everyone their own action, but this is risky because individual characters have low stats and can be taken out easily. The player characters can even switch to chibi forms that count as a smaller size, allowing them to ride on top of large monsters and create different configurations. I found this both really cute aesthetically and an interesting twist on mons gameplay, and the stack/unstack feature provides delicious risk/reward tradeoffs.

…Unfortunately the modelers didn’t get the memo, because it looks absolutely terrible, with monsters clearly standing on air without ever touching the player characters. This is Final Fantasy, I know you can give characters poofier hair! I can only assume the character and monster designers were different people who never spoke to one another, because this is such a glaring mistake I can’t imagine it surviving any QA whatsoever. This is the central mechanic! You’re staring at it all the time! How did no one notice this???

What’s even weirder is that they did seem to consider this for the chibi characters — the golem even seems to have a unique pose here to make it actually contact with the guy’s head. Quadrupeds still don’t look quite right on the chibis, but it’s a huge improvement. Why didn’t they show this amount of care to getting the big versions right? My theory they had different designers each locked in separate rooms gains credence.

Unfortunately, the commitment to the chibi aesthetic goes way too far for my liking. Literally everyone other than the main characters are chibis, but they still try to do a serious plot with realistic 3D animations, without seeing how ridiculous that is. Look at how they massacred my girl:

Big Kingdom Hearts 3 Let It Go energy there. They knew this was an iconic scene fans wanted to see, so they just mindlessly copied it in their own style without understanding that what people liked about it doesn’t translate to this style. There were a lot of reasons why the Sending dance was an iconic FFX scene, chief among them because it was done in a super-detailed FMV that showed us the beauty of a realistic dance. (The other reasons have to do with the fact it was an emotional point in the story, which are lost if you throw it in out of context like they did here.)

(And speaking of Kingdom Hearts, yes, as you can probably tell, Tetsuya Nomura was the character designer and the whole game oozes KH’s aesthetic as a result, for better or for worse. Mostly for worse.)

This even extends to the monsters. I wanted to play with iconic FF monsters, not iconic FF monsters all squished down into the same chibi aesthetic. I get that they had to do that to make the stack mechanic work, but they did not have to do it to this degree.

I think the real killer here is that the “medium” and “small” categories look virtually identical, meaning that 2/3 of the lineup have to be chibi.

Just look at this picture. That’s not one small, one medium, and one large; it’s two smalls and one giant. They didn’t have to do it this way; there are plenty of FF monsters who are naturally medium-sized in their origin games. They’d have to do a bit of tweaking to fit them all to the same general size, but that general size could have been a legitimately different size category and not this absurdity.

Speaking of which, I was expecting this but it does also mean that even “large” monsters are much more compressed than their main series counterparts. Compare the Behemoth in FFX to this game:

The Behemoth in FFX is literally a behemoth. It dwarfs both your characters and most of the other monsters you’ve dealt with thus far, and that’s a big part of what makes it so iconic and terrifying. The game is able to convey through size alone how dangerous this thing is. Meanwhile, the Behemoth in this game is the size of, like, a pony, because we’ve defined “large” to be the size of the player characters so nothing can be significantly bigger than that. I don’t know how this would have worked mechanically, but I really wish they had an “extra large” size — I want to ride critters without having to be chibi.

(Oh and while we’re on the subject, they also changed the chocobo’s “kweh” sound to be spoken by a human voice actor instead of sounding like an actual bird cry. The chocobo ride theme has been similarly butchered. Why would anyone do this.)

The game overall feels very rough, lacking many polishes and QoL features the series seemed to have down pat over a decade earlier. There’s so much friction to everything. Just navigating menus (you know, the thing you spend most of the game doing in RPGs) is irritatingly slow and clunky by forcing you to sit through long animations any time you go through a submenu. Scrolling through mirages takes ages because they just had to render the mirage’s full 3D model whenever you hover over them, so there’s noticeable lag as the game loads and unloads entire models. The level up system is very similar to FFX’s sphere grid, but whereas in that game you could switch between characters from within the grid in a split-second with a single button press, here you need to sit through all of this:

I could flip through FFX’s entire roster in the time it takes to do this. Why. Why did they do it this way. YOU GOT IT RIGHT 15 YEARS AGO. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO MAKE IT WORSE.

Speaking of FFX, this game has many of the same cheat codes the FFX remaster has, which is cool and all… but the FFX remaster let you activate them through a single key press, whereas here you have to go into the config menu every time, which as I just stated is like wading through molasses. The PC FFX remaster was released at the same time as this game (they even advertise it in bit a fourth wall breakage), so they clearly knew how to implement keyboard toggles at this point. Again, they got it right once and then inexplicably chose to do it wrong.

At least they let you skip cutscenes, which is something they weren’t able to figure out for the FFX remaster.

Additionally, unlike in… I think every other mons game ever, you can’t switch your mons out in battle. This is really frustrating because mons tend to be very specialized and enemies often require specific counters to be dealt with efficiently. I ended up spending a ludicrously long time stalled in one fight because the enemy had SOS Regen and I couldn’t outdamage it; I ended up cheesing it with a limit break, but I could have beaten it legitimately if the game would just let me switch out for a skill that did more damage.

This extends to the capture mechanics — unlike in Pokemon, you have to perform a particular action (often inflicting a status ailment or using a specific element) before an enemy can be caught, so if you didn’t happen to bring the correct mirage from your stock of 12 into the battle, tough luck. To really rub salt in the wound, there is a recurring mechanic where you can get a one-time encounter with a powerful monster… that you can’t see in advance or run away from, so you’re unlikely to have the means to capture it but aren’t allowed to back out to reconfigure your party either. So much of this game is it throwing unpredictable challenges at you and then refusing to let you adapt. It’s not even polite enough to provide a soft reset function; you need to manually exit and restart the game every singe one of the many, many, many times you scan an enemy and realize your current party can’t do jack squat to it.

The mons mechanics in general are… weirdly half-baked? There’s a mechanic where you can “transfig” monsters in a similar manner to Pokemon’s evolution families (for instance, mainline summons like Ifrit have baby and intermediate forms you have to go through first), but also there is a similar but different mechanic that lets you transform monsters between related variants (such as regular vs. black vs. white chocobos, which all belong to separate transfiguration families and have different abilities). You get to keep access to all abilities learned across all forms of a transfiguration family but not abilities learned by palette swaps. Despite the fact that you can freely switch between forms in this way, you are encouraged to catch ’em all individually, even though in practice this just gets you redundant clutter. I genuinely can’t understand why they did it this way; it feels like there’s supposed to be some additional mechanic to make this make sense, and they never got around to finishing it.

Also: random encounters, which mainline Final Fantasy hasn’t used since 2001, because they suck.

This overall results in a game that’s just… very jRPG in the worst sense. There are some interesting mechanics but you’re rarely allowed to engage with them because it’s a crapshoot whether you’ll have the right mons on hand most of the time. (Oh and bosses are universally immune to all status effects, because disabling entire branches of your battle system for the hardest challenges is such a great idea.) I liked matching my lineup to the challenges ahead of me, except you rarely get any information with which to prepare and most fights are easy enough that you can win by just spamming regular attacks anyway. I think a hardtype mod like the FFX Masters Challenge would have a lot of potential, but as it is the game just doesn’t seem very interested in engaging with its own mechanics.

The story is not any better.

The most surprising thing about the story is that the protagonists aren’t summoners. The protagonists are instead called “Mirage Masters”, which are apparently a completely different thing. This is honestly bizarre. Summoning magic has been in every Final Fantasy since III, often as a major gameplay mechanic; it is absolutely one of the most iconic features of the series. Yet in an ultimate universe sendup of the franchise where you summon monsters as a central gameplay mechanic… it doesn’t brook mention. We even see Yuna perform a summoning (no doubt another iconic scene they thought they had to include for nostalgia points) and nobody reacts to this. It’s not until a whole arc later when we run into Rydia (in Midgar for some reason) that we’re finally told there’s a difference (summoners can only bond with one mirage, which isn’t true in any other FF but ok), and even that conversation is completely optional. I can only assume they were writing by the seat of their pants.

I overall get the impression that this was made by people who are only casual fans of Final Fantasy, if that. I mean, look at this. Anyone who’s played FF7 for any length of time can tell you that’s not Nibelheim, that’s Midgar. They knew the shot of Midgar from FF7’s cover was iconic enough they needed to recreate it, but not what the city was called. I honestly have to wonder if their only knowledge of FF7 came from a cliff notes summary — they read “Tifa’s hometown is Nibelheim” and assumed that meant the most prominently-featured city in the promotional materials must be Nibelheim.

This would explain a lot, frankly. The story reads like it’s just running down a checklist of FF tropes, with no deeper love or engagement. There’s little effort put into integrating the wildly disparate Final Fantasy worlds, nor do they do anything with the characters. Not even when they added DLC focused on subplots spotlighting the Final Fantasy characters — because why do character exploration when we can have a stupid plot about Refia bullying Shiva into making an ice bridge? I’d say this is what happens when curative fandom tries to write fanfic, but even curative fandom comes from a love of the source material. A curative fan wouldn’t be caught dead making a mistake as embarrassing as the above screenshot. This is… I don’t even know what this is. Even the most soulless design-by-committee product would be more competent than this.

Far from the loving sendup of the franchise this was advertised to be, it overall just soured me to see the games and elements I loved butchered and ground up into Extruded Corporate Product. You thought the Kilika Sending was a poignant depiction of the normalization of death in Spira, how people cling to faith as an antidote to grief, and how by being a Sender Yuna is forced to bear the unbearable weight of everyone’s grief? Nah, it’s just a cool dance now. You thought Midgar was a serious environmentalist allegory? Do you remember the shock and horror when you finally reached the world map and saw the area around Midgar was wasteland for miles? Nah, you can plunk Midgar down anywhere and the trees will be fine. There was original thought and artistic integrity here, but don’t worry, we fixed that for you.

They didn’t fix the sleaziness though; that’s an essential part of the franchise. And I dunno, there’s something extra sleazy about keeping this in a game targeted at kids. Don’t worry, girl players, he’s a pedophile but not to you, and that’s all that matters.