Yeah I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say anything positive about the DLC 
It’s hilarious because you have to grind at the original hardest difficulty CHAOS to unlock the DLC difficulty BAHAMUT and then you have to enter an infinite dungeon of hell to unlock NEW DLC difficulty GILGAMESH and I have to grind here until I unlock 21 floors of bullshit, where every floor requires I gain XX experience to unlock, which can only be gained from entering little remixed slices of existing levels that have various challenges and remixed boss fights.
Like it could be fun? Except it forces me to play at the highest difficulty to progress, but also let’s me play in EXTRA MODE, which is their conceit for bad players that give them unlimited MP but for reduced rewards. That means I can grind through these levels abusing all sorts of skills and spells but I’ll still die super easily. The trick is that the Liberator class or whatever has a skill where when activated, the player can’t die. So I have to make sure that skill is on always when fighting or else I get 1-shoted. Also that skill is on the same button as every other skill that activates contextually, so I turn it off accidentally all the time and die, wasting progress.
Truly an unbelievable waste of time
I do like Gilgamesh in here though. He brings up experiences he has in Disidia and confuses Jack for Garland from that universe which is like lol how do they act or loook the same in any way at all but ok Gilgamesh thank u
His VO is funny, he sounds like the Pooh/Darkwing Duck VA doing an old man impersonation
5 Likes
Also there’s a new “monster raising” minigame except all they do is sit in a ducking hallway and you can talk to them and feed them stuff you pick up, which unlocks new conversations and temporary stat buffs. Some of the conversations tell some new backstory to characters like revealing that one of the characters is actually also an isekai character instead of their previously thought background story. But like, it’s all slapped together in the most obvious “okay we only have five people left to make the DLC, here is what we CAN do with the limited tools we have. What new content can we make from this???” And the solution is NPCs recycled from monsters with menus menus menus and dialogue bubbles (dialogue bubbles are never used anywhere else in the game)
Oh wait, you can also summon monsters to do like a quick attack if you use a consumable bell. I have no idea how to switch which monster it summons. There is literally no explanation for it. None of the new mechanics in the DLC have proper explanation outside of one super short pop up that appears when it first unlocks. Looking it up I can’t find an answer either. It sucks.
2 Likes
Oh wait, listening to it now, it’s more like a bumbling Optimus Prime voice, like if he had less brains and more brawn
3 Likes
FUCK IT IM DONE WITH THIS DLC
I died on a mission bc some random enemy had an ability that debuffs me so I lost my crutch Extra Mode invincibility and got one shot. Then I lost experience for that floor, so I played another easier mission and like fifteen min in I got debuffed by another fucking random enemy and died. Then I lost even more experience etc repeat four more fucking times and I deleveled. Once you delevel, you get fucking kicked off the dungeon and have to restart with none of your items, money, or monsters. It’s such a fucking waste of time holy shit
Like the dungeon has perma-health that goes down permanently from damage and can only be recovered by traditional FF items that can only be bought with traditional FF gil that’s occasionally dropped by monsters or chests. It’s a fucking sub game in a game. So I was in a downward spiral where I lost a mission, had like five health and no money for items, then failed another mission and kept failing and then I looked back and realized I spent 2 hours on this shit and I wasn’t having fun why did I ducking waste my money on this garbage holy shit fuck offffffffdd I’m so mad who the duck wanted this
Just watch the cutscenes on YouTube and fuck this dlc holy shit I wish I could leave a review for this sack of shit
8 Likes
Deleted the fucking game just now, goodbye forever strangers of paradise
I’ve never played a DLC that ducking ruined the original game for me so hard
13 Likes
I understand all the reasons people dislike Stranger of Paradise on paper but then I play it again and it feels like a game that was laser focused to my particular brainworms
what a masterpiece
6 Likes
Finished the game just yesterday myself, the addition of DLSS and stability updates finally improved the PC port performance to acceptable levels (no more absurd stutter every time Jack explodes his enemy).
The DLCs really were tuned in silly and unfortunate ways - the whole campaign uses gear levels solely to gate your mission progress, and the moment you hit postgame, the numbers go absolutely crazy. I think initially, Team Ninja expected people to grind the same enemies in the same environments for hours (you pay crystals to increase a given mission’s level cap to get better gear and more crystals which you use to increase chosen mission’s level cap, a very funny thing to include in a game about breaking out of vicious cycles) until their builds are decent enough to execute a 10 minutes long string of parries and dodges - they demand absolutely ruthless efficiency.
Then, it’s like they realized a lot of people who paid for season pass and casual FF fans will get mad, so they added an optional endless poise/MP mode which can easily be exploited for near immortality. The initial drawbacks were that you couldn’t collect a special currency that pushes the story forward or use the mode in certain fights, but in a true Team Ninja fashion, they were bullied into dropping the idea so now you can use the Extra Mode pretty much anywhere (except the post-story content in the post-game roguelite dungeon). Which everyone does. Pump up all the optional difficulty modifiers, start up immortal mode, drown in Bahamut money.
So the choice is yours: banal cheat mode nonsense or investing hours into copying meta builds so that you can have fun with like six interesting boss fights (that would be far more interesting if the numbers were balanced the same way they were in the original game). The DLC addition of firearms is also a double-edged sword - the image of Jack shooting a Cactuar in the face is funny, but the boss AI absolutely wasn’t balanced around these, so Hastega + Gun shreds through everything. It fits into how the postgame is all about coming up with a build that maximizes DPS and relies and not being damaged even once, but it’s a shame since if the idea of a Big Number next to your character doesn’t excite you, the game might absolutely come across as being in a worse place than when it was originally released.
And yeah, the level design is total garbage (it’s incredible that you can realize PS2-tier austere environments in a way that absolutely demands constant waypoints), the Nioh loot is still pure busywork (just read a few Wo Long reviews and apparently they STILL haven’t sorted that out), most of the story solutions reek of low budget and silliest Square Enix cliches. But yeah, it’s actually kind of hard for me to go back to Elden Ring after I got good at this combat! Pre-postgame job system is so fun to experiment with, their parry solution is so approachable and makes the combat so aggressive (love capturing endgame bosses’ moves and immediately returning them to sender), the stun/stagger mechanics are tuned so well that I never feel like I’m whacking a sandbag, the movesets are expressive in a kind way that never demands you to learn more complicated combos by heart but promotes coming up with new solutions to each problem, the pace is so swift.
It almost doesn’t matter the rest of the game barely works: you delight in killing Chaos, you don’t think about anything but killing Chaos, you’re frustrated anytime you’re not killing Chaos, and thus you achieve perfect sync with Jack. The story feels purposefully vague in its anti-authority attitude and Kingdom Hearts-adjacent light and darkness symbolism (not to mention quintessentially Nojimaesque in how it approaches lost/repressed memories), its realization is too barebones to impress, but it sort of works on emotional level? Sometimes, you just gotta drop the simplistic dualist perception of the world, erase your programming and do it your way.
Would love to see Jack return and explain his love for Sinatra beyond his penchant for fedoras (kind of crazy they licensed My Way and then used it just twice, very briefly).
12 Likes
I laughed so hard when the ending song played. I mean, it… it makes sense in the context of the original ending, but it’s still so shocking and takes me out of the moment for a second before I listen to the lyrics and realize, no this is actually perfect, it’s incredible. I wish it was a cover and Jack’s perfect Eng VA was singing it, but at the same time, it’s so tonally dissonant/incredible to see Frank Sinatra’s name show up in the credits like a minute in next to all the other creators of the game, as if Frank had a big stake in the game and wanted to be creatively involved lol
I was disappointed they don’t play it when you beat the DLC (or maybe they do and the Youtubers I watched turned it off and replaced it with the original theme music instead).
Do you suppose that’s what’s actually playing on Jack’s phone? Just packed to the brim with different versions and covers of My Way???
It’s so good
Still love Jack and his dumbass friends. Wish his game was better. The DLC doesn’t need to exist in any way, it doesn’t do anything but tie his game to the Dissidia universe for no reason. The only good thing it adds is letting you play as the Warrior of Light at the end to battle Jack, but that could’ve just been in the original game and would’ve worked fine as a true end. 
2 Likes
they could have done more with this… make enemies eyes’ flash blue when they’re ready for a finisher, etc
6 Likes