It would be fair to say that Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has received a lot of attention but mostly for the wrong reasons.
Its announcement trailer from last year had the main character Jack Garland mentioning the word “Chaos” so many times that the internet immediately found a new meme to use. While any kind of marketing is good marketing, it appears that publisher Square Enix was not too happy with the reaction.
Speaking with PushSquare in a recent interview, producer Jin Fujiwara explained that the area in the Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin trailer was the Chaos Shrine where Jack arrives to defeat the malevolent Chaos responsible for bringing them into its world. Hence, the reason Jack was saying Chaos a lot.
“I didn’t imagine that it’d be picked up on as much as it has been,” said Fujiwara. “I have a few thoughts on it, but there’s no use on dwelling on things in the past. Since it’s caught everyone’s attention, why not try and count how many times the word ‘Chaos’ appears in the whole game?”
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has most fans of the franchise sitting on a fence due to how it blends different elements from different games. Fujiwara wants to remind everyone that the game “uses the first Final Fantasy as a motif” and that “we were not influenced by any particular pieces of media.”
That being said, director Daisuke Inoue mentioned some games which were taken as examples “to make it easier for the development team to share in the same vision.” Those games were Nioh and Ninja Gaiden, two games from Koei Tecmo Games and Team Ninja who are helming Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, as well as Dark Souls and Onimusha.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin retells the story of the original Final Fantasy but in an alternate way, as in telling how the antagonist in the Final Fantasy franchise Garland came about. The game comes out for both current- and previous-generation consoles and PC on March 18, 2022.
