World of Final Fantasy Maxima adds enough content, including mirages, and enough adorable personality to make it a possible purchase. Newcomers to the series might benefit off the Maxima upgrade in one package due to the overall body of work being new to them more than those that are merely upgrading.
It has been a few years removed since I reviewed World of Final Fantasy, and I still stand by my original statement that I believe it’s a fun Pokemon-esque type of FF game that runs on simple RPG elements to it, though contains a layer of complication underneath it. The game is built and intended for a younger audience, as the gameplay doesn’t require much of you in comparison to its older FF brethren. It also gives you a chance to ‘catch’ enemies/mirages in true Pokemon fashion, which really tugs at the heartstrings of a younger generation of gamers that have never experienced FF before in their life. Get those young folks in early, then they will become Eric Layman and never look back from being addicted to Final Fantasy as a whole. Of course, if they become Eric Layman, then they will also improve their internal dictionary exponentially.
Anyway, just because it is built with younger gamers in mind doesn’t mean that older gamers can’t enjoy it. World of Final Fantasy adds fun elements of complication, such as stacking mirages with characters on top of each other to create bigger, badder ways to fight off other enemies, bosses, and whatever. Stacking in its gameplay creates a sense of strategy that makes it more than just a turn-based RPG, which is what the series has been known for most of its life. Strategizing the mirage stack, which we’ll get into a bit later in this review, adds a thick layer of intrigue and fun, plus motivation to keep capturing mirages to see how powerful your stack can become.
In short, World of Final Fantasy has a bit of everything for everyone and, while it’s not perfect, delivers some entertainment to those looking to break away from intensely complicated role-playing games.
All of this said, World of Final Fantasy Maxima has been released by Square Enix this holiday season, and while it’s more of an upgrade than a sequel, thus the name ‘Maxima’ (a plural version of maximum — meaning as ‘intense as permitted’), it makes the game worth playing through again. It adds character avatar upgrades, more mirages, a mini-fishing game, a few other content upgrades.
One of the biggest features toted for this release is the ability to change your avatar and play as Final Fantasy characters from yesteryear. For example, you can play as Cloud in the game, which is probably the coolest thing, especially when you see tiny Cloud with his adorable big sword. Does it add much to the game? Not an incredible amount, but it’s cool to have the ability to be that classic FF character. It’s like your little avatars are cosplaying other characters in a world that you may or may not know yet. It’s a cool feature for us old people who have lived through these characters, the good times and bad times, and it makes the world in WFF seem a lot bigger, if not self-aware. It also reminds us, especially through Cloud, that there is more to come with his adventure. Especially as the world waits patiently for Final Fantasy VII’s remastering. Very patiently. PATIENTLY.
Anyway, while I think the character avatar additions add some charm to the overall process, especially as you can use and harken back to a sense of nostalgia, I believe the real addition that makes the game worth the price of admission is the inclusion of new mirages.
If you have never played the game before, the mirages are essentially the bread and butter to the action, meaning that you use them to drive strategy and gameplay. You capture mirages through a device called a prism, which varies depending on the land you’re residing in and the mirages that you’re trying to capture (you have a huge amount of prisms to choose from and/or acquire in the game). Anyway, once captured, the mirage can either be a small/medium/large creature, and this is one time that size matters when it comes to entertainment. Through these sized mirages, you create a stacked state with your main character. For example, your character is medium sized, so you’ll go in the middle, but you could have a large character below you that is super powerful, or ultra defensive, and a small character that resides on your head to help take care of other mirages in fights. Combined, the stack puts together everyone’s HP/MP and can deliver better damage depending on the mirage attributes. Now, the stack can be un-stacked to fight individually, if the player wants (and you don’t want this), or your stack can be unstacked by enemies if you’re hit too many times. It’s a simple concept that magnifies the importance of the right mirages, as well as the right way to stack the mirages.
All of this above gibberish said, this is why I’m most excited about the new mirages because they extend a sense of strategy to the entire process of the upgraded gameplay. It’s like adding new weapons inside of a great game. Sure you can add a few more pieces of content to an already fun game, add a fishing component that is cute, and kids will love it, but when it comes down to actually making the game a bit better, it’s always going to be about offering up more strategic elements for the player to use in order to do better within the game. For me, it’s comparable to that moment where you discover the super strong armor in Horizon Zero Dawn, where one thing, the armor, changes the entire aspect of gameplay, and offers up new/fun ways to play it. That one element that makes the game just more fun. That’s what mirages mean to me in this game, and the additional ones offer up enough variety to make it entertaining. Everything else is just, as the young kids put it today, ‘extra’. The fishing isn’t necessarily bad, neither are the avatars, nor the content, but mirages are the reason you want Maxima.
Now, the real question for you (the reader/gamer/whomever) is will a $15 upgrade for old owners of WFF or a $39.99 price tag for newcomers warrant a purchase? Honestly, I think that newcomers are probably going to get a better deal in this, as they get to experience a huge world at a solid price. Seeing all the content unfold with everything new intact is something to behold and enjoy. For those of us that have been through the game before, maybe it’s worth it, depending on how you felt about the game the first go around. Personally speaking, I think the size of the content (which is nice — I don’t want to spoil it for you), the inclusion of old FF avatars to play as, the added mirages, and the option to fish is quite the upgrade, but it feels like a $9.99 upgrade rather than a $15 upgrade. That’s probably just cheap me saying that as a parent of five. I know development isn’t cheap and Square Enix enjoys making profit (that’s what they are in the business for), so it’s not an unreasonable upgrade price. When compared to the full price, though, it’s nearly half of it, which bothers me somewhat. Regardless, I think newcomers should jump on this, and maybe fans of the original game might want to check their feelings at the door to see if there is enough here to warrant the upgrade.
Overall, World of Final Fantasy Maxima adds enough content, including mirages, and enough adorable personality to make it a possible purchase. Newcomers to the series might benefit off the Maxima upgrade in one package due to the overall body of work being new to them more than those that are merely upgrading.
