World of Final Fantasy seems like little more than adorable, fluffy fan service at first.

In a fall filled to the brim with Final Fantasy media — A movie! An anime! A new mainline entry! — World of Final Fantasy is a cutesy, cameo-filled spinoff that tries to be greater than the sum of its troubled parts. It tries to live up to the Final Fantasy name, even as it gets bogged down in annoying throwbacks that the series has long since grown out of.

World of Final Fantasy’s long-winded, convoluted narrative follows the amnesiac, magically gifted twins Reynn and Lann. The duo wake up at the start of the game with minimal understanding of what's going on. With the help of Tama, their walking, talking fox sidekick, and denizens both familiar and foreign, Reynn and Lann's journey to save their mother — and the world — in accordance with a controversial prophecy eventually gets under way.

The plotline's a total bore, thanks to its sibling leads. Despite their ignorance, the pair are can’t go without commentary for even a moment. While I welcomed their flurry of often self-aware jokes at first, their incessant banter later had me thankful there was a fast-forward button.

Once the story is under way, though, World of Final Fantasy offers several distractions from Reynn and Lann's yapping. The biggest of these are the battles, which make up the core of the gameplay. Reynn and Lann have two special powers that set them apart from the average role-playing game hero: They can switch between their average-sized human forms and smaller, chibi-style ones, and they can catch and harness the power of monsters called Mirages. Depending on if they're tall or tiny, the siblings can stack up to two monsters on their heads to create an adorable, if unstable totem pole.

Collecting Mirages is fun and challenging, as each one has different elemental abilities and capture requirements. Beyond hunting them down, I spent many hours fine-tuning my monsters' skills and party combinations to nail down different resistances and expanded abilities. It’s easy to get lost in building and perfecting your monster collection, and World of Final Fantasy encourages the most detail-oriented player to try to catch 'em all.

The dungeons where these Mirages are found are also easy to get lost in, which is good news to anyone resentful of the recent trend of more linear maps in some Final Fantasy games. Each one of these diverse, enormous areas is littered with monsters to capture and puzzles to solve. I spent most of the game traversing them, but each one is unique and memorable enough to keep moving from place to place feeling fresh. Their sizes and layouts were dizzying, but some of my biggest personal victories were conquering the dungeons' inventive shortcuts and specific intricacies.