World of Final Fantasy is a game I’ve had a passing interest in for the last couple of years, even though I knew nothing about it, except for the vague notion that it featured Final Fantasy characters from across the franchise.  It wasn’t until quite recently, however, that I decided to check out the “Dungeon Demo”, which enlightened me to the fact that this game seems to be a mix of Final Fantasy and Pokemon.

While the general concept seems simple enough, I actually found myself rather confused with this game.  You have two characters, and you can swap between their regular form and their cutesy chibi form.  Each form can have a different Mirage creature paired with it, called a “stack” when said Mirage is standing on your character’s head, giving you four unique stacks to use in battle.  You can capture various enemies in battle by meeting specific criteria (like attacking it with a certain element or healing it), after which you can try to capture it (using the Imprism ability).  You can also have the Mirage fight separately from you, though I have no idea why Tama the fox seemed to attack my characters when she was on her own.

To be honest, I found this demo both perplexing and, well, rather boring.  When you’re walking around on the map, there’s really not much to see or do except occasionally open a treasure chest or talk to a cutesy version of some random Final Fantasy character, who seem to have absolutely nothing of interest to say, though they did give me items, so that’s nice, I guess.

But let’s talk more about the battles, shall we?  You have the option to switch between two different battle menus, Classic and Basic, and unless I’m mistaken, Classic seems to be missing some of the options that Basic had.  Also, these battles are far too slow-paced for my liking, which was actually my biggest source of annoyance.  Some quick research online showed me that there are indeed settings that let you change the battle speed and which battle menu is your default, but the ability to change settings in the demo is either absent or I just couldn’t find it.  (And believe me, I looked.)

It’s possible the demo was a poor representation of the full game.  I mean, what kind of story does the game have?  Do the Final Fantasy characters ever have any greater role, or are they just kind of…there?  Do the locations ever get any more interesting?  Heck, what even are the personalities of our main characters?  In theory, this seems like a good game for those who enjoy both Final Fantasy and Pokemon.  But from the demo alone, I don’t have any desire to play the full game, even though I’m now fully aware that some of the demo’s biggest issues could have been solved with a quick visit to the settings menu.  While demos are usually a good idea, I feel that this one did more harm than good when it comes to giving me a proper first impression of what World of Final Fantasy is truly like.

This post was originally published on The Duck of Indeed on November 17, 2021.