Likewise, you enjoy a damage and defense bonus as well. When stacked, two or three characters share a single hit point pool that amounts to the individual values of each character in the stack tallied together. This is every bit as ridiculous-looking as it sounds, but it adds up to create some engrossing combat strategy. Each character has its own size designation - small, medium, or large - and you can create little towers of party members by stacking a small character atop a medium character atop a large one. It revolves around stacking your chubby little characters one on top of the other, and attempting to cause your opponent's own stacks to topple (bad guys can do it just as easily as your own party). It features a fascinating strategic combat system unlike anything I've ever seen in an RPG, and it's as unique as it is utterly adorable. World of Final Fantasy takes the RPG-for-beginners concept of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, wraps it up in kid-friendly visuals, and then slowly begins to reveal its hidden depths.Īt no point does World cease to be basically the cutest thing ever, though. It doesn't simply adopt the look of the thing while wallowing in modern conventions like Bravely Default, and its design and pacing (at least so far as I've played to this point) are better than the shoddy monument that was Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. well, since the Final Fantasy Advance remakes of the original 16-bit games. It gives a real 'Final Fantasy for babies' visual vibe, and it might have behooved the publisher to counter that with a slightly more taxing demo.Īlas, they didn't, and that's a shame, because underneath that double-your-insulin surface, World of Final Fantasy is basically the closest thing to a classic 16-bit Final Fantasy game we've seen since. It more or less takes the saccharine plush figurine designs of the Theatrhythm Final Fantasy games and makes a proper RPG of them World's central conceit sees its protagonists diving into a storybook and changing at will between their 'big' forms (standard Tetsuya Nomura teenage character designs with lanky limbs and angular hair think Kingdom Hearts) and 'little' versions (cutesy miniature versions that basically read like Square Enix's attempt to set up its own collectibles line to compete with Nendroids and the dire Funko Pops). See, unlike most RPGs, World of Final Fantasy actually looks like a preschool take on role-playing games. In this case, though, it probably wouldn't have been a bad idea for Square Enix to pull back the curtain just a bit more and reveal the fact that after a few hours, World begins to demonstrate some real substance. And I don't think anyone expects any RPG demo to go all-in on systems and mechanics. Make no mistake, World of Final Fantasy presents a comparatively friendly RPG experience compared to, say, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse. As a tutorial or primer it does its job as a sampler of the game's underlying depth, however, it fails to communicate the fact that this has more to offer than some preschool take on role-playing games.

However, it offers only a cursory look into World's systems. It's not that the demo doesn't accurately reflect the game's content.

World of final fantasy