Kupo Chronicle #8 - (Even) Stranger of Paradise

The One Where Bahamut Has A Rocket Launcher

Welcome to the Kupo Chronicle, the premium edition of the Wark Digest newsletter, where we explore the Final Fantasy universe in long-form and drill down into unique moments of the series’ history. I’m Chris, aka Hoogathy, and in this installment we dig deep into a forgotten piece of media and learn that Jack Garland wasn’t the first to bring a little CHAOS to the original Final Fantasy’s world.

This week’s newsletter is 2368 words, a 11-minute read.

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Bringing 8-Bit to Life

It seems like just yesterday when Square Enix announced Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins, a Soulslike take on the story of the original Final Fantasy. It boldly attempted to tell a villain’s origin story, but two years later it’s mostly remembered for the plethora of memes it spawned, from the trailer’s overuse of the word “Chaos” and protagonist Jack Garland’s love of nu-metal.

However, another spin on the original Final Fantasy’s story already existed—and in its own way, it was just as bizarre.

In the early 90s, it was pretty common to see the hottest games adapted into different mediums, like comics or Saturday morning cartoons. Mario led the way in this regard, with a couple different comic adaptations and an infamous/iconic show that mixed live-action actors and cartoons, but many other must-play games of the era were re-interpreted in magazines like Nintendo Power.

This was a pretty novel thing at the time. With graphics limited to 8-bit, gamers were required to use their own imagination to help fill in gaps in narrative and presentation, and read the manual for a quick scene-setting lore dump. Some of these adaptations also helped provide tips for playing the game, like the “Howard & Nestor” strip in early Nintendo Power issues—a valuable service when word-of-mouth on the playground was the main way gamers could get advice.

Final Fantasy got in on this phenomenon as well, though unlike other games, its comic adaptation has been more-or-less lost to the sands of time. It

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(Even) Stranger of Paradise