Cloud Monday - Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin - Part 2 - Decent Cloud Gaming Experience

This week's Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing Square Enix's Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PS4.

With Part 1, https://youtu.be/2O-V6qgzcrw, i began to understand the game's quirks so in this part, i was able to focus more on the experience of playing this game in the cloud. We had already seen in Part 1 that the game does a lot of auto saving in the background which is great. it means if we're going to be disconnected from the PlayStation Plus Cloud Game Streaming Service then we won't have lost too much progress in the game. With Part 2 it also became clear that the manual save points at this point in the game are also strategically placed before big, story moments or significant points in your progress through a section. this once more highlights that if you are kicked off the service, the amount of progress loss shouldn't be too significant.

Playing this on PlayStation 4 is both good and bad. the obvious bad part is the graphical quality. there were more than a few points where i could see how low resolution or how little detail elements of the levels were. from that point of view, it would be easy to recommend that Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin should be played on a PS5. but this helps with the game being streamed via the cloud because it means the impact to the game from things such as macro blocking isn't too significant. it'll be somewhat easy to see, but it shouldn't detract too much from the overall gameplay experience as there isn't always too much finer detail on PS4 anyway.

Ultimately, a game being decently well designed to be played via the cloud won't be enough for some players. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has it's fair share of quirks and frustrations as a game itself. thankfully, with streaming being an option, it can act as a decent demo of the game and what to expect. but i would recommend giving it a couple of hours like i did to play through what felt like a tutorial heavy introduction to the game.

Cloud Monday - Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin - Part 1 - Useful Frequent Auto-Saves

This week's Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing Square Enix's Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PS4.

Even tho this is a somewhat recent release, it has been in development for a long time, probably so long that it originally wasn't set for PS5. So i was wondering how this game's design would work if it was streamed from the cloud to me. For example, would it have a traditional save system like Scarlet Nexus did and thus be a poor choice because of how the save system works or would it have a more "casual" approach letting you save everywhere, like Disgaea D3 did. turns out it's both.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has fixed save points in the environment and this isn't great for a game being streamed via PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service as there's only a 20 second warning before you're kicked off it. However, the game does appear to have an Auto-Save system that is frequently saving in the background. The Auto-Saves appear to be the same as a manual save, but the whole system is shrouded in mystery as we, the player, get no choice as to what save slot is used. both the manual and auto saves just save. Ultimately, the positive is that we will probably loose some progress but in the end not too much.

The quest you have to ask yourself is are you willing to replay bits of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin again. Even after this first part, i'm not excited to go back because of how clunky the whole thing is. the tutorial is bad, the controls have issues, the story is nonsense so far, and graphically playing it in performance mode makes everything look so soft it might as well be PS3 graphics. 

One interesting issue the game has that is streaming related is that the in-game cutscenes are visually stunning and full of intricate small details that the bandwidth being used to stream this to me from PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service is having a hard time to keep up. A little early on there's a moment when the camera is spinning around the main character in a field of wheat and things stop being highly detailed and crisp and instead go a little blurry. i say in the video it's like the bandwidth needed is just a little short for sequences such as that, whereas for the rest of the game it's fine.