They’re so bad.
Like do a straight emulator port! Or, probably better and easier, just dump the version used in the PS1 era Final Fantasy Anthology collections. The art style on the PC sprites is so damn ugly. I love FF6, and I just can not with that.
I even recently replayed it courtesy of the SNES Classic console release. What a fun piece of hardware, and straight replaying the original still has the old magic.
Bundle is up for preorder at $75. Regular price is $12 for 1-2 and $18 for 3-6.
This dropped today (well, the first three titles).
Why is Square so bad at everything?
All the resources are taken up by creating bespoke facial animations for every story cuttscene and an endless stream of mobile gacha bullshit, I suppose.
I think the look and idea behind these pixel remasters is great, myself, but that font was terrible and I’m glad there is a way to make it look a lot more pleasing. I haven’t had a chance to play so I can’t speak for the final product, but the videos I watched looked really good, imo.
Crazy, so the only thing you’re doing is to replace the English font with the Japanese font from the same folder. What? They had this other font in there, and still chose the tiny hard to read one for the english version anyway?
That font was the only reason I didn’t buy these.
20% off sale is still on for a couple weeks.
I’m going to wait for reviews now, but I hope they changed the level up system for FF2.
Yeah, it’s very strange but at least it does exist and is easy to get changed manually. I’m hoping they see this and patch it shortly.
FF2 is the only FF game I’ve never played at all, so I’m excited to try it out finally (after I play FF1 - I bought the bundle this morning, fuck it). What was wrong with the leveling in FF2?
Nothing wrong, per se. It had a use based leveling per attribute, but it was also highly exploitable. A degenrate strategy for it involved going into a battle with weak enemies and repeatedly having your party members attack each other!
But the first three games were wildly inventive with their battle systems, before the ATB system most familiar became standard starting with FF4. FF3 had a unique class based system, with my favorite class of all time, the onion knight.
Anyhow FF2 isn’t a bad system, it is just probably least similar to the rest of the series, and unpolished.
Ah, gotcha. Neat sounding though, at least.
While I do hope that they patch the font, I must admit I’m glad how easy it is to fix. You don’t even have to download any extra files!
Anyway, I got these, and I’m quite impressed. There was a lot of skepticism about these remasters leading up to their release, but it looks like someone put a lot of thought and care into them.
Also - until these came out, I never realized just how difficult it was to play the first six Final Fantasy games.
- Steam (I think?) was missing FF 1 & 2, and only had the 3d remakes of 3 &4, and those really crummy versions of 5&6.
- I don’t think they’re on Xbox at all
- They’re not on Switch either
- They’re really only available in their entirety on Playstation (though that will change once the Pixel Remasters of 4-6 hit Steam), and maybe mobile phones.
Anyway, I know that Final Fantasy had a long period of listlessness and irrelevance, but I still find it nuts that in an era where seemingly every single retro franchise with even a whiff of past success has been remastered and re-released, Final Fantasy was just sitting there until now. It was by far one of the most culturally dominant franchises on the planet for a long stretch of time - was there really not that much demand for these games, or was the demand simply not being tended to?
PS - I started feeling a bit crazy reading some of pre-release negative reactions to these remasters on some of the more … troll-y corners of the internet. Apparently there are a lot of people who think the PSP ports of FF1 & 2 are the best ones, but I remember them getting absolutely panned back in the day. Maybe they are secretly great, but my gut tells me this is a case of trolls trying to be contrarian for the sake of it.
I looked through the reviews from back in the day, and most of the complaints boiled down to “this is old and therefore bad,” “this is too hard and therefore bad,” or “they previously released these as a single $30 GBA cartridge but are now selling them as separate games on PSP, so even though they run at a much higher resolution and are much prettier than the GBA versions, they’re bad because they cost more.” I’d be far more inclined to believe the people saying they’re good in the present than any of the reviews from back then. (As for Final Fantasy IV, the other one that got a PSP remake, I can say from my own experience with the PSP version that there’s no way the new remaster is better.)
I have played through the first two games - having never touched II before that was quite the treat, I really enjoyed that one a lot - and now I’m nearing the final days of Final Fantasy III and that’s been quite the experience - and like II, one I’ve never had before. The first three games are so good in an old school way while having a lot of mechanical depth I miss in modern FF titles. Look at this equipment screen from III for example!
But everything (except the font - fixable with amazing mods and/or renaming some files) has been just perfect and super engaging and enjoyable so far. Here are some more shots from III just for fun.
With the font fixed (seriously, wtf Square) that does actually look pretty great.
Those screenshots do look pretty good. III is the only old-school Final Fantasy (excluding those Gameboy ones) I’ve never played before. I understand it to be a precursor to V, but I’m a little concerned that it’ll be a bit long in the tooth for my tastes.
Anyway, next week IV comes out (perfect timing for some, sounds like), kicking off what’s generally considered to be the series’ golden age. It’s the first one of these that I’m really interested in revisiting and hope it turns out well. It’s probably the one with the best story as I recall, though I always preferred the customization of V and the characters of VI (and the second half, and also the customization options but to a lesser degree than what’s in V) to it.
I appreciate the linear nature of especially earlier FF games these days. Sometimes I just want a villager to point me at a dungeon without having to worry about fifteen side quests and cascading crafting timers, ya know?
Oof, when I complain about something being a bit too old fashioned it’s definitely not the lack of crafting that I have in mind. It’s probably my least favorite feature of contemporary game design.
I’d click a big like button to that post.
I listened to the new soundtracks earlier. 3’s was pretty darn good.
Glad they did a great job with these. Very optimistic about Final Fantasy 5 & 6 now.