I think I quite like the new Final Fantasy that's the butt of the internet's jokes

We tend to remember E3s not for the moments of triumph but those more commonplace, faintly tragic and often very comic interludes we set our watches by the start of every summer: Kudo Tsunoda’s ‘Bam, there it is’ that killed off Kinect before it’d even properly launched; Mr Caffeine and his poop on your toothpaste; pretty much everything that unfurled in the theatre Konami booked out for its 2010 E3 presser.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy OrangesPublisher: Square EnixDeveloper: Team NinjaAvailability: Out on PC, Xbox and PlayStation in 2022

Add to that ever-growing list the reveal of Final Fantasy spin-off Stranger of Paradise during Square’s show on Sunday night. I’d assumed the move away from a live show would mean a move away from the awkward theatrics that once defined E3, but how gloriously wrong I was: in the announcement trailer that seemed to stumble forth from a different era entirely, we got an entire conference’s worth of cringe crammed into two and a half minutes. It was spectacular.

It didn’t stop there, either. The PS5 demo that was due to hit the PlayStation Store in the immediate aftermath of the show did turn up on time. The only problem was, it was corrupted – a problem that persisted for an entire 24 hours before finally being addressed earlier today. All of which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it?

STRANGER OF PARADISE FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN | Announcement Teaser Trailer Watch on YouTube

You’ve seen the memes online, I’m sure – chaos reigns indeed – and upon booting up the demo you can see why so much derision has been thrown Stranger of Paradise’s way as you slash your way through a tutorial set in a murky cornfield, some gruff bastard named Jack curb-stomping goblins in a smear of PS3-era visuals. Yes, Stranger of Paradise does look kind of appalling, and it’s not helped by its dreary aesthetic: this is Tetsuya Nomura through a ketamine hangover (you can tell it’s a Nomura joint soon enough too – after five minutes main character Jack was already wearing five different belts).

For all that, though? I kind of like what I played of Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise. In fact, I kind of liked it a fair amount.

Partly that’s because the fundamental idea behind – Team Ninja delivers Final Fantasy through the prism of its hard-edged action series Nioh – is a sound one, and playing through the short demo that’s apparent more often than not. The control set-up is the same – switch to the second configuration and it’s almost a direct lift – and while this isn’t quite as involved as Nioh with its intricate stance switches it has the same crunchiness to its combat that comes alive as you unlock more abilities.

After a mere thirty minutes you’ve become a fascinating clockwork of punishment, grabbing enemy’s magic projectiles and then flinging them back in their face, slamming others into walls or unleashing a delicious string of attacks. Like Nioh, there’s a breadth to its action, and a generosity too, only this time that breadth has been emboldened by a job system that’s enjoyably malleable.