It is rare that I review a game that I didn't finish. For what it is worth, I sincerely tried with World of Final Fantasy, reaching a little past the mid-way point before I couldn't bear to put up with it any longer. This isn't to say that World of Final Fantasy is an outright awful game, just that it isn't remotely engaging. World of Final Fantasy is in the Pokemon vein of monster collecting RPGs, where you are set loose on a world full of colorful and powerful monsters to fight, collect, and train to use as the story progresses. Obvious from the title, the game utilizes Final Fantasy monsters and summons to fill out its collectible world, an honestly great idea for a game. The issue is . . . well, there are a lot of issues.
Firstly, and probably the least offensive, is that the story is bad. You follow two twins, Reynn and Lann, who are supposedly prophetic characters that can capture 'mirages', this game's name for the monsters, and use them to save the world. The plot itself is standard Final Fantasy fare, but its execution is decidedly not. Reynn and Lann aren't remotely likable, making cringe-worthy jokes about body odor or how Lann is the dumber twin. Phrases like "What the honk?" are a common occurrence. It's painful to get through, but the game is at least somewhat apologetic for this, allowing you to fast forward through the cutscenes at your leisure (and the battles, thankfully, but more on that later). There's a thesis point I'll get to that will forgive this plot later, for the most part, so for now mark that it is bad and grating.
More offensively, the game's mechanics are interesting, but hardly utilized. The game uses your basic type-weakness system you'd expect from any JRPG, let alone a monster collector game, but with a twist. Monsters you collect don't fight one-on-one, or even in a party, as you would in Dragon Quest. Instead, you create a 'stack', where you literally stack the monsters on top of one of the two twins. As ridiculous as this looks, it allows for some interesting mechanics. When monsters are in a stack, their stats are overlayed. Health is compounded, resistances will overlap weaknesses and weaknesses will overlap null modifiers on elements, allowing you to do some neat customization as far as party makeup is concerned. You get two stacks - one for each twin - but stacks aren't unrestricted. To stack creatures on top of one another, you have to pay attention to their size. Small stacks on top of Medium, Medium on top of Large, and XL acts as brief summon that will temporarily replace your two stacks as one, powerful creature in which to fight with. You can have up to two monsters per stack, as the twin of your choice takes up a place size. The twins have two sizes, called (ugg) Lilikin, where they are medium sized chibi-like design, or Jiant, where they are large and with a design even Kingdom Hearts would reject. You can always have a small monster in a stack, but large and medium are dependent on which size you want for either twin. You can pre-load stacks for each size, and switch between them with the press of a button so long as you are not in battle, allowing for two stacks per twin to better prepare for different situations. In theory, that is.
Monsters each have a skill tree associated with them. As they level up, they are granted skill points to be spent on the skill tree, and, if made far enough along the skill tree, can even transfigure, or evolve in Pokemon terms, into the next form, unlocking another skill tree. There are several variants for most of the monsters, each with their own skill tree, all of which can be overlapped to better tweak your monster the way you want. This mechanic is incredibly cool, and, when you consider that you can also devolve your monsters so as to retain certain sizes for certain stacks, you are given quite a bit of leeway for customization of your party. The skill trees trivialize some aspects of gameplay, however, making it easy to stick with only a few monsters for a bulk of what you will encounter, but it's still a unique mechanic and without multiplayer, I don't see this as much of a problem like it would if it were implemented in Pokemon.
The issue with these mechanics are in how little they are challenged, if you could call anything within the game a challenge anyway. Pokemon is easy, sure, but you still need to know type advantage in order to play. I was able to use two fire builds against a fire boss without so much as using a potion. There is nothing in this game to properly challenge your understanding of the mechanics, making the mechanics purely masturbatory to those who want to use them. The enemies and bosses are, essentially, in mock of progression, because otherwise this game is little more than a gimmick. This is furthered by the railroading of the game's progression.
While an open world is certainly not necessarily needed for a monster collecting game, the genre feels odd without it. You are hard-lined into narrow hallways throughout World of Final Fantasy, with minor detours for chests and optional bosses (of which are equally easy). Given the game's primary mechanic is in catching monsters, it seems odd that the game would feel so narrow, rather than wilds that would contextualize the monsters. It feels ultimately gamey in the worst way, even if that isn't an overtly bad criticism. You can go back to previous areas with little blocking your way, so in a sense the sentiment is there, but it is a thin sentiment at best. A minor criticism that feels ballooned due to the game it is contextualized within.
Your primary reason for playing, the monster collecting, is an arduous task at best. Collecting monsters has some neat mechanics involved, primarily having to meet certain conditions before a monster can be caught, such as lowering its HP or causing it a specific status ailment. The conditions are interesting, and add a level of skill and know-how in order to pull off, something I genuinely liked, but the catch rates are extremely low. Catch rates are modified by several factors. Certain monsters have a "Once Per Battle" condition, which, when met, has a high catch rate, which makes sense. Others will have their catch rate modified by the amount of health and how many times in a battle this particular monster has reached its catch condition. If the health isn't low and the catch condition hasn't been met more than once, you could be looking at a 10% catch rate, even for a lowly little monster. This makes catching most of the monsters in this game a trial of patience at best. Worse, the skill trees and stack system make a lot of monsters more or less a lateral change, not worth the effort unless you have a fetish for using type weakness, since the game is obviously not going to challenge you on that front. What all of this coalesces into is a lot of interesting ideas that don't work together and actively try your patience in its attempt.
I think laziness would be the easiest answer as to how this game came to be what it is, but I don't think that is the correct answer. The game had a lot of work put into parts of it. The models generally look good, the concepts underneath the hood are interesting, and the appreciation shown for different games in the Final Fantasy series is a nice touch (even if there may be ulterior motives). The port itself is bad (locked, ugly framerate and one of the worst keyboard configurations I've ever played - note: play with a controller), but that is a different category of laziness than the design. My theory is that the game was designed as a gateway for kids to get into Final Fantasy, as the series can be difficult to get into if you haven't been initiated. The humor of the game is decidedly 10-year-old vogue, the story played more for goofy hi-jinks than for drama or character, and it provides familiarity with the greater Final Fantasy franchise through monsters, summons, characters, and locations from just about every game. It is a marketing ploy, an investment in a new, less JRPG savvy market that won't be motivated by nostalgia of Final Fantasy's multiple golden ages in order to follow with the newer series' output. It's the anime or card game that is released along with a new game. It's a non-intimidating introduction for those wishing to dip their feet in and check what this dynastic franchise is all about.
Largely, I can forgive aspects of the game for this. The plot was aimed at a younger audience, fine. The design is cute, fine. Several of the characters look like they were drafts of Kingdom Hearts characters, fine (no offense to Kingdom Hearts, a good series in its own right). But to introduce newcomers to the franchise without also easing them into any sort of mechanical know-how makes this a failure. Interest in the series is not going to help newcomers wrap their head around the materia system, or the odd programmable thing going on in Final Fantasy XII. The mechanics don't have to introduce every system known to the Final Fantasy universe, but it should at least shoehorn newcomers into the basic principles of JRPG combat and stat management/gear. There is more than one way to skin this game, and no matter which approach you take, the game fails. It's a disappointment, not just because it wasn't particularly fun for me, but because there is little here to be fun for anyone. There's enough here to mess around with, but it will be a futile effort. If anything, the game made me, someone who is already into the series, want to play another Final Fantasy game just to wash this game's taste out of my mouth.
5.0
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