I was really excited going in to World of Final Fantasy. I love monster collection games, and I've played the majority of the mainline FF games, along with a fair helping of the side games. Unfortunately, World of Final Fantasy just didn't offer enough of what I'm looking for in video games these days and had some aspects that I found actively annoying. I made it 27 hours in before folding.

Characters: The game focuses on twins, Lann and Reynn, who have special abilities to capture and command monsters ('mirages'). Lann is your 'too dumb to be believable' shounen archetype and Reyn is the smarter, condescending older sister. I've always disliked these character tropes, and it was no exception here. It feels like almost half of the dialogue is Lann grossly misunderstanding something and Reynn mocking him. It was annoying early on, and only got worse as the game progressed. They're joined by a talking mascot mirage, Tama, who randomly injects the word 'the' in his sentences and is just kinda squeaky otherwise, which made the final member of the main cast also a bit grating. Otherwise, the characters are mainly homages to other Final Fantasy games, which is exactly what I was here for.

Story: I quit at Chapter 17/21, so I'm not entirely sure where it was going to go at the end. What's there is what I'd expect for a tribute game of this sort. The twins are somehow wrapped up with this Enna Kros lady, who is maybe a time goddess or maybe not, and they have to leave their weird out of time empty world to go fulfill one of two prophecies (maybe) in another world where everyone is a chibi. It gave plenty of opportunities to showcase chibi versions of FF favorites, which is what the game claimed on the tin. Without finishing it, I don't have particular strong positive or negative feelings.

Mirages: The collect 'em all highlight of the game. The variety and availability of mirages over the course of the game was well done. All of the classic FF monsters I wanted were present, along with a nice helping of (as far as I know) original monsters. I really enjoyed the flavor text for the monsters, which are generally full of groan worthy puns and pop culture references. Good stuff. I think the battle mechanics (as discussed below) led to a fairly large number of mirages being mostly useless, unfortunately.

You generally fight with two "stacks" of a main character and two monsters. Each stack has its stats, resistances, and abilities combined. This leads to some fun playing around with builds, such as the Mega Sharqual (a big ol' shark) and Baby Tonberry combo I was using with Lann. Mega Sharqual has several buffs to crit chance and damage, along with a unique ability that increases his attack stat every time he crits. Tonberry has similar buffs to crits, along with the ability to restore action points (which allow you to use abilities) when you crit.

Similar to many of the FF games in the double digits, each mirage has a 'board' to fill in as you level up. This basically amounts to choosing the order of passive and active abilities unlocked. Each mirage also has blank spots, which you can fill in with abilities from special items called seeds, along for further customization. The complexity and customization was nowhere on the level of Siriliam (what is though?), but I was pleased with this aspect of the game overall.

Battle: I was really hoping there would be some sort of interesting mechanics, but it's just your basic menu based JRPG. The only real standout feature here is that your stacks can be unbalanced by physical attacks, eventually falling over if not prevented. When a stack falls, all of your mirages and characters are left highly vulnerable due to no longer having combined defensive stats. It doesn't end up being an issue all that often, though. You can summon characters from previous games to set off large abilities in a limit-break like fashion, but there's nothing too special going on with that either. Just take some damage and beat some enemies to recharge the gauge. Otherwise, you're left with the same old "spam your most effective elemental attack or just auto attack" schlock. Furthermore, bosses are very frequently immune to every single status effect, nullifying the usefulness of a healthy portion of the bestiary. It wasn't terrible, but it was far from interesting or engaging.

The game relies on random encounters, which is my least favorite way of introducing battle. If I enjoy the battles in a game otherwise, I usually don't mind them too much, but here it just felt like a bit of a chore since the combat was boring. The spawn rate was reasonable, though, and there are items (though acquired a good ways in) to increase or decrease the spawn rates.

Graphics: The game looks great. My only minor complaint is that I'm not into the chibi-aesthetic, but it's not a huge turn off for me either.

Music: I had a lot of fun with the remixes of songs I grew up with. None of the remixes really stood out to me or lived up to the bangers they put out in the FF13 trilogy, but it was done well.

Final Thoughts: World of Final Fantasy was actually pretty close to being a game I liked, but the actively annoying dialogue for the main characters and uninspired battle system just wore me out. I wish I would have thrown in the towel and moved on a bit sooner, but I kept hoping the game would hook me. As I said at the beginning: I really was excited for this one, so I'm disappointed that I found myself feeling the need to quit. That said, if you don't mind the tropes the main characters fall into, and enjoy standard-fare-JRPG-menu-based-combat, I think you could get a lot out of this title.

Okay, so, I'm finally taking the time to review this now that it's been like a week.

Pros:

-FF franchise monsters (called Mirages here), on your team! There are a ton of Mirages to choose from, so you're bound to find several favorites to add to your stacks. At first, it was difficult to choose because I wanted to use so many but couldn't work them into my stacks. There are also a handful of field moves that only a few certain Mirages can use. Think of it like needing certain HMs in Pokemon. Not really a hindrance, but it was the only way to reach certain areas to find specific Mirages or treasure. Honestly, as the game went on, I became more flexible in swapping out some Mirages, though I stuck with my handful of favorites (Shivaaaa).

-MUSIC. Hot damn. So many familiar songs, revamped. I'd enter a new area and be like, "OH, IT'S --!!" There's also the ability to set a preferred song for battles, or have it cycle through them randomly. As you meet new Champions and buy their medals, their themes unlock as well. I always had it set to random to mix it up. Stellar soundtrack.

-Battle system. I'm SUPER picky about a battle system. It can totally ruin a game for me. [Last Remnant looked beautiful and seemed to have a promising story, but the battle system is such absolute garbage that I quit after 2 hours.] I found this particular system to be really flexible and pretty fun. Fighting is turn-based, with a turn meter to the left of the screen. There are two menu options, which you can easily swap between using L or set to the preferred one in the menu. I typically used the Classic but never actually changed to that in the menu. The preset one allows you to set moves for each member of your stack to specific buttons. I never bothered with it, though it's a nice function.

You can actually unstack and use each Mirage and character individually, but you're significantly weaker when you do so. There's a mechanic for toppling enemy stacks in order to capture singular Mirages, and your stacks can be toppled as well.

You can summon a number of FF main characters in battle like you would a classic one-move summon. These were pretty sick.

Classic FF spells and moves, strengths and weaknesses, etc. There wasn't a whole lot that I found frustrating when it came to the battles.

-IT'S BEAUTIFUL. Some of the locations are hellaaaa gorgeous. Paired with the fantastic music, I was just super impressed with the appearance of the majority of the locations. UNDERSEA TEMPLE, GUYS.

-Tidus' "HA HA HA HA HA" made it into the game. Lost my shit.

Cons:

-Story. So, to explain, this isn't technically a con because it didn't really detract from the game for me, for some reason, and I'm usually pretty harsh about a lack of story (FF12 is trasssshhhhhh). It's just not fleshed out enough or prevalent through the majority of gameplay. There's the introductory stuff, like meeting the main characters, finding out where they are and what they need to do (collect Mirages). Then you go along to classic FF towns and areas and help people, hear some stuff about a prophecy, collect Mirages, and learn that there's some army of Bahamut. There's not really any significant plot development until the "first" ending. A lot is revealed, but it also raises a lot of questions that sort of remain unanswered even as you play for several more hours. When you get to the second/true ending, more is revealed and answered, but I was still left with several questions, because all of the story was thrown into the endings. Spoilers: (Who is Wynn, actually--because, despite them calling her sister, she said she was "like" their sister? Reynn and Lann's parents--what exactly was the nature of their powers? Reynn suddenly uses the term Breaker in the postscript, and it wasn't ever mentioned before, or how she remembered that term.)

-Limited stack presets. So, you can set up a Jiant and Lilikin stack each for Reynn and Lann. In Lilikin stacks, they're the Medium, so you can add a Small and Large Mirage. In Jiant stacks, they're the Large, so you can add a Small and Medium Mirage. You can use any combination while walking around and in battle (though you can't change during battle), like using Lann's Jiant stack and Reynn's Lilikin. However, you only have the option to build those four in your menu. You have up to 10 Mirages with you at a time, but the max of DIFFERENT mirages you could have in your set stacks is only 8 (4 small, 2 medium, 2 large).

I really wanted the ability to build reserve/alternate stacks that I could just select in the menu. Sometimes I wanted to change out certain Mirages for a bit, and I'd have to go in and change my stacks, and then change them back after. This isn't detrimental to gameplay, but it would have saved me some time and frustration from having to edit my stacks so often. I found myself wishing that it were a feature quite often.

Overall, I enjoyed this enough that I even started the EX Dungeons after the true ending, which is the only way to get "dark" versions of some Mirages. I never do EX dungeons in games, even Tales. The story wasn't too impressive, but the game is visually stunning, and the music is great.

EDIT TO ADD: The fast-forward button for dialogue and battles was SO useful. Battles went so much faster.

In my new quest to platinum all mainline FF games, and a select few spinoff games, i started off with Woff. What initially started as a new playthrough to cool down a bit from the superhard rebirth platinum, ended in me pushing through and 100%ing this game in one go.

First off, the game is a pokemonesque game where they made an absolute brilliant take on the pokemon (mirages) by allowing you to stack different sized ones on top of eachother, allowing you to create endless different combinations that can compliment eachother if done well. Each mirage (pokemon) has their own full talent tree, that you gradually fill in by leveling each one. Then you can also slot in some extra skills by adding seeds into the talent tree, the possibilities are absolutely limitless.

The game heavily builds on other FF titles, and every game from FF1 to FF13, even some spinoffs are present. From locations (f.e. Nibelheim, Mako reactor 0, sunken temple, babil region, etc, etc.), to heroes (nearly all main characters from the other games are present) and summons (same here, they are all in there). As an avid FF fan, this obviously adds to the enjoyment greatly.

Storywise, it's a simple, but enjoyable experience throughout. The multiple endings are a bit questionable and feel slightly out of place in an otherwise coherent story, not helped by the fact that the game contradicts itself in the 'true' ending.

Not everything is great though, the game is plagued by a myriad of very questionable design decisions. Some of the main ones:

When you travel around from location to location, you always have to go back to the central hub location first, and then to the actual location you want. This doesn't sound too bad, but over the span of the game this becomes greatly annoying, and it's very unneccesary as the game does have a portal system in place. Each portal just ports to the central hub only.

Another point of frustration is the filtering of the mirages. Some filters are in place, but the ones you actually want, for example filtering by mirage type, ability or even spell affinity, are absent. This is a very questionable decision in a game that heavily relies on using said abilites in the landscape and in combat.

The enjoyment gets sadly dunked down a bit too by the presences of some absolutely horrendous minigames. They are bad on a level unseen in any other FF game, and i doubt any other game at all has minigames this terrible. Two of them are fully rng based, the first of those is a battleship-like game, where you need to win within 10 turns, without losing any of your pieces. One of the pieces had only 1 hp and can just get randomly oneshot by the AI. To win in 10 turns you also need dumb luck in clicking on the correct squares. The other rng game is a whack-a-mole style game where you need to score 5000 points, but the game is fully rng based in how many and what type of minions it spawns within the alloted time, 9 out of 10 games leaving you physically unable to score those points, even with perfect hits. The other 3 games are skill-based, but have such horrendous controls and hit registration that you are just left fuming at the screen trying to hit the very tight timers or score breakpoints.

Then there is the grind. it took me 80 hours to platinum the game, and a good 20 hours of those where spend just doing mindless grinding to level up a 100 mirages (meaning you need to fully master their talent boards, some of them have 2 talent boards but you end up leveling up almost every mirage in the game). Normally i don't mind a grind, but in this game it's literally running little circles around a savepoint (your AP restores when you run over one) fighting the exact same few monsters over and over, for hours on end. It's really mindnumbing.

The biggest point of frustration, however, is the absolutely horrendous voice acing on most of the characters in the game. It's almost as if they deliberately tried to make it as bad as possible. some of the characters have totally unmatching voices, others constantly and way too often nag at you in childlike voices that give a whole new meaning to doing your head in.

All in all, while the game is largely enjoyable because of the good, it gets dragged down just a bit too much by the bad and the frustrations at some of the content to leave a lasting good impression. I ended up giving 3 stars, but if i wasn't an avid FF fan and wouldn't appreciate all the references so much, this could have easily been 2 stars in the end.

This took me a long time to finish, not only because I've been super busy for the last few months, but also because I just didn't care about anything going on in this game.

I really have no idea who the target audience for this game was. It's basically an homage to all the Final Fantasies over the years. In that regard, you'd think it would be geared towards adults who have a decent amount of experience with RPGs. It's also got this cutesy art style, characters that fell out of a children's show, and dialogue written by a five-year old. Geared towards children or newcomers to the genre, perhaps? Then there's actually a decent amount of strategy, what with the depth of customization and amount of time you need to spend building your characters. Once again, targeted to skilled players, perhaps? But then to cap it off, the game is dreadfully easy, And I never really felt threatened in a battle unless it was an encounter I clearly wasn't supposed to be facing yet.

My conclusion is that they tried to make it appeal to all types of gamers, but in doing so, I feel like they made a game that would actually frustrate all types of gamers.

There were a lot of things I disliked about it, but I don't want to go on. I think the biggest thing gameplay-wise was the stack stat. The whole battle system is built around the fact that you can stack three characters on top of each other. But the stack can be toppled over, so you need to make sure the stack is "good" not "weak". But this single stat severely limited the combinations you could use. There were Mirages I wanted to use the ENTIRE game but I never once found a combination I could fit them into that didn't create a weak stack.

The other big thing was the dialogue and the characters. Reynn isn't too bad, but Lann is the worst character ever created. Everything he says is dumb, and not in a funny way. Just a straight-up annoying way. They had a good idea in making a lot of the dialogue happen while you're walking around, but they even screwed that up, because half the time when you interact with something (which is all the time) it will either skip the line that was happening or reset it to the beginning, meaning you either skipped entire conversations or had to listen to them over and over again.

Finally, the ending is sooooo freaking long. It's just an extra two hours of walking in a largely straight line and fighting the same Mirages over and over again until you finally get to the final bosses.

BUT. It is kind of fun catching Mirages and leveling them up. So I will give it two stars instead of the dreaded one-star review. If you DO happen to like this game, there is a TON of post-game content. I didn't dive into it at all because I was happy to just move on with my life, but I looked it up, and it looks like you just keep unlocking more and more stuff, so there's potentially 100+ hours of content packed into the game.

Definitely the worst Final Fantasy entry I've ever played, if you can count it as one.

PS can't be bothered to edit this review so forgive me if there are typos. I just want to put this game behind me.

this game isn't quite perfect but it gets surprisingly close for me:

• i can have turn-based combat instead of ATB (i hate ATB)
• generally really fun combat mechanics
• the 3d shaders are so gorgeous it's ridiculous i wish every game looked this good
• tiny cute final fantasy monsters

the art style for the characters is a bit more miss than hit for me unfortunately (the normal-ish-proportioned ones have really weirdly big heads and the chibi ones are just... a bit blocky for me), but i really enjoy the monster stylization, and the colors in this game are gorgeous.

this game in general is gorgeous really, it uses very realistic shaders and stylization for the environment, paired with stylized characters such that it almost feels like you're wiggling some amiibos around as your party members, but with good animations. and, you know, not actually real.

the story is... without spoiling, i'd describe it as a weird but mostly successful mix between kingdom hearts and bravely default. well-written enough that i was interested to see how things would end, but not enough that i was hungry for more after finishing the game.

of note, there's a bunch of cheat options built-in, which, even if i didn't use myself, i really appreciate, because it means that no matter how bad you are at it, or how little time you have to play it, you can still enjoy all the parts of it you'd like. or just turn off encounters because you're max level and don't feel like it, that's always a nice plus.

i'd give it 10/10 anyway, but 11/10 for letting you set "one-winged angel" as the battle theme to every battle in the game no matter how weak the monsters. it's great.