Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin seems like a Dark Souls-inspired action-RPG with classic Final Fantasy creatures in. It might even look like a Souls game, but this is really a looter shooter. You’ll be grinding missions for gear if you want to handle the big boss fights, and skill really isn’t the most important factor. You can’t “get good” without gathering up with as much high tier equipment as possible. Gear Level is everything, and inventory management is a must.
Essentially, if you approach this game like a Dark Souls, you’re doing it all wrong. If you’re familiar with the Nioh series, you’re a lot closer — but the jobs and party members throw the tight sword-fighting action of those games completely out of wack. You need to play this game differently, and after finishing the story, we’ve got 5 harsh tips you’ll need to make this game a lot more fun. Don’t get bogged down in grinding. Here’s how to speed through and get to the good stuff.
#1. Your Party Can Beat Bosses For You
Your party members are ridiculously resilient in Stranger of Paradise. You’ll rarely need to heal them, and they’ll keep fighting long after you’re dead. You really don’t need to worry about managing them — in most cases, they can keep the boss busy for you, and they deal pretty good damage. If you take a particularly big hit, you’re always free to pull back and let your party finish off the boss’s last sliver of health. This also makes magic jobs viable. You can charge your spells while your buddies do all the tanking.
This doesn’t really change. Your main character is ridiculously squishy. Most bosses have AOEs and abilities that can practically kill your MC in a single hit. Dodging isn’t that good. One of your best defensive abilities is distraction. Your party can distract the boss and give you time to swoop in with a skill.
#2. Optimizing Equipment Is A Life Saver
The most important tool for equipping your party in Stranger of Paradise is the Optimize Equipment button. In the Battle Settings menu, which is just your inventory management / equipment screen, press the Optimize Equipment button to automatically equip the highest-level gear possible to everyone in your party. This applies equipment to all your current characters, even the ones that aren’t in your party.
This feature makes inventory management possible. If you have to sort through all the trash that gets dumped into your inventory while playing through missions, it would be a nightmare. You’ll only have to do that every few missions — you’re limited to 500 pieces of gear, so you’ll have to disassemble worthless low-level junk to clear up space through the Smithy menu.
#3. Avoid Enemies, Grab Chests To Rapidly Increase Your Gear Level
The missions in Stranger of Paradise do nothing to gate you — you rarely have to solve puzzles, and enemies won’t chase you for long. You can simply sprint through levels and collect the chests to rapidly increase your gear level mid-mission. Normally, you’d want to play through side-quests to increase your gear level, but that’s really not necessary if you skip straight to the main missions. Just start them up, play through them, and loot every chest you can to gear up.
After collecting enough loot, hop into the Battle Settings menu and press the optimize equipment button to instantly equip your entire party with the best possible gear. It won’t take job affinity into account, so you might want to do some quick equipment management after optimization.
#4. Unlocking Better Jobs
The Job System is what makes Stranger of Paradise special and gives your character a little flavor as you fight through classic Final Fantasy critters. The further you work your way up the Job ranks, you’ll find higher tier jobs harder to unlock — to unlock a new job, you need to reach the bottom of the job tree. Scroll down to the bottom of the job tree to see what next job you can unlock.
Some of the advanced / expert jobs require unlocking the “New Job” skill on multiple different jobs. For example, you need to unlock “New Job: Dark Knight” on Black Mage, Berserker and Warrior. You don’t actually have to use these jobs that much — you can equip it to your secondary or equip it to a party member. Your party members can only take specific jobs, but they will level up those jobs for you. You can use your skill points to only unlock the “New Job” path and skip everything else.
#5. Lowering The Difficulty To Reach End-Game Faster
Grinding really isn’t a thing you can do in Stranger of Paradise. To progress, you’ll need to play every single side-quest just to keep up your gear level, and even then, there are bosses that can kill your character in one hit if you’re playing on normal. If you’re sick of the most annoying part of this game — the boss fights — you can make them easier on yourself. After fighting through your main story mission, just drop the difficulty down to Story or even Casual from any save cube. You can’t increase the difficulty during a mission, but you can after the mission is complete in the main menu.
There’s no reason to beat your head against a difficult enemy. This isn’t Elden Ring — your skill really doesn’t matter. Your gear level is all that matters, and if that’s too low, you’ll just die during the tougher boss fights. When you reach the endgame, then you can have a lot more fun making your perfect builds. Until then, you gain gear level so fast, deep customization is a waste of time. Reach the end, enjoy the story (if that’s possible) and get in-depth with the gameplay after the credits roll.
Those are my 5 top tips for having fun in Final Fantasy Origin. My initial playthrough took about 12 hours to complete — I just had to take down Chaos. Now you can too.
