World of Final Fantasy certainly seems quite unusual based on what I know about it. If you recall, it’s the “other” Final Fantasy game that was announced alongside the long-anticipated Final Fantasy VII remake, and even though FFVII’s return is exciting news, I was still intrigued by WoFF. Final Fantasy has spun off in so many different directions that you’ll never know when you’ll get a rough gem (FFF: Chocobo Tales), a revered classic (FF Tactics Advance) or something that makes you wonder if there was ever a target audience planned in the first place (FFVII: Dirge of Cerberus.) In some ways, World of Final Fantasy doesn’t really make things that much easier – the World of Final Fantasy demo has a bunch of systems and mechanics and you might need the scope of a full game to fully understand how to get the most out of everything, but what’s been teased is still intriguing.
Nurturing Mirages in the World of Final Fantasy demo
The World of Final Fantasy demo is over within an hour but it shows you enough of everything to give you a general flavour of the game. World of Final Fantasy has a traditional turn-based battle format that’s given extra variety with Mirages and Stacks. Mirages are creatures you can encounter in battle and – if you’re lucky – capture for your own use. Like Pokémon and Persona, they act as summonable creatures with their own abilities; as you progress through battles and earn skill points you can unlock extra abilities on the skill trees for your mirages. For instance, in the World of Final Fantasy demo a Goblin mirage has a basic physical attack, but by spending skill points you can boost his stats or unlock extra moves, making them more effective in battle. You capture mirages by first encountering one in a battle (the game will happily announce the presence of mirages so that you know there’s a chance to capture one) and then fighting and ultimately “imprisming” it – that is, capturing it using the Prisms in your inventory. Once you have caught a number of Mirages, you can look into Stacks.
Building stacks in the World of Final Fantasy demo
Stacks are a feature in the World of Final Fantasy demo that allow you to put your character and its mirages in a stack of three. Each mirage and character has a size of (S)mall, (M)edium and (L)arge and you must stack the character and two mirages in S-M-L order. That said, why would you want to do this in the first place? Well, if you fight as a stack of three, your stack gets one turn, a combined HP/MP, and all the abilities of the mirages in that stack will be available to select from for that one turn. Meanwhile, if you unstack your three mirages, they all get separate turns; however, the individual HP and MP of each mirage is quite low. Essentially, you’re trading safety for turns, so you need to decide which is more beneficial based on the enemies on the field.
Knocking down stacks in the World of Final Fantasy demo
The general party status menu in the World of Final Fantasy demo is interesting in that you see stacks, rather than characters, so if you’re using a stack of three and select a potion from the inventory, the potion will heal the combined HP of the stack. Furthermore, if your stack of mirages is getting battered by attacks, it risks collapsing. At the end of the World of Final Fantasy demo you face off against an enemy stack, and the more you pummel it with attacks the less stable it becomes. Collapse the stack and you can target the individual foes, reducing the threat one enemy at a time.
The strategies that could emerge from obtaining more mirages and making different stacks make me think that this could be a really fun game. That said, the recent acquisition of a PSVR headset means that I might not be in a hurry to spend even more money on games just yet…
World of Final Fantasy will be released on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita at the end of October. For more information, visit http://worldoffinalfantasy.square-enix.com/ or why not try the World of Final Fantasy demo on the PlayStation Store today?
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