Random Roar: Square May Have A Point About the Pixel Remasters

 

Starting one week from now, new remasters of Square-Enix’s classic Final Fantasy games are coming to Steam and to mobile devices.  These are distinctly different from the previous versions of the games they tried to sell on Steam and mobile and which looked like garbage and had glaringly large, mobile-style interfaces instead of the original interface that players know and love.  Unlike when THQ rebuilt Titan Quest from the ground up a decade after it first released, then gave it away for free to people like me who already owned the original, it looks like fans of Final Fantasy are being asked to pony up more money for the Pixel Remasters, no matter how many versions they might already own.

At first glance, it doesn’t sound like fans will be getting their money’s worth either, since the bonus dungeons from the Finest Fantasy For Advance releases aren’t going to be present.  The lack of the Soul of Rebirth story from Final Fantasy II can only be a blessing, and to be fair, there wasn’t a lot that could be done to add more jobs to the already job-packed Final Fantasy V or summons to Final Fantasy VI, so these extras being missing from the Pixel Remasters doesn’t feel bad at all.  Your mileage may vary regarding the ability to choose your own party for the final battle of Final Fantasy IV, but even Edge improves enough by the time you reach the final dungeon that you might as well follow Square’s intended story right to the very end.

So technically speaking, these aren’t the “finest fantasies” and don’t come with many of the bonus features that were introduced over the years.  This does beg the question, why buy these at all if you already own them several times over?

Maybe the Pixel Remasters are meant for new players to get into the series, but Square has already been selling versions of these games for years, and on the very platforms that these new versions are being released on.  By now, if you don’t already own a version of the first six Final Fantasy games, you likely weren’t ever going to buy them.  If they’re meant for veterans of the series to relive their memories, what’s stopping these veterans from plugging their PlayStation disc into anything that can read one, or their Game Boy Advance cartridge into one of their handheld Nintendo devices?

This is probably why Square is so reluctant to port these games to consoles again.  These games have been released so many times that most of their fans already have a copy and so the company is waiting to see if they can keep banking on nostalgia to sell the same game to the same people all over again.  Prices aren’t being advertised yet for the SNES half of the remasters, but the first three games are worth, in Canada, $16, $16 and $24, and the bundle price is $128 before the 22% discount.  This would suggest to me that the fourth through sixth games are also going to be $24.

So if you’re curious what prices the rest of the games are going to be in countries other than Canada, they’ll likely match the price of Final Fantasy III.

Square has said that they’re going to put these remasters on consoles “if there’s enough demand”, and as someone who has been waiting for Dragon Quest X to show up in English for years, this is a promise I’m all too familiar with.  It’s a way for Square to pass the buck on to us if our desired version never shows up.  You didn’t want it hard enough, so we had no choice but to not give it to you.

They could have a point, though.  These Pixel Remasters look like they actually had a lot of work put into them.  They would have to have created the engine from scratch unless they used existing software, like Unreal Engine 4 or Unity for example.  They also remade the graphics from scratch, made new arrangements of the original music from the games, came up with a sound player that looks leagues better than the ones from the Game Boy Advance versions, and even put in a new kind of bestiary that shows where the enemies can be found.  The best new feature is the Final Fantasy VI style mini-map that can be seen on games that never had one, like Final Fantasy III.  This is going to be very important in that game once players get off of the floating continent and are looking for the one point of land left in a world full of water.  In fact, none of the original releases on the NES had a particularly good world map, electing instead to show small portions of the world when you checked it.  This made it very hard to know exactly where you were if you didn’t have access to the full map elsewhere.

The point is, these are more than just lazy ports.  The story wouldn’t have required any development time, and the games were pretty well balanced already, especially Final Fantasy IV, where you basically were powerful enough to defeat the final boss without grinding if you went out of your way to find every treasure chest and occasionally backtracked if you thought you missed one.  However, everything else has been redone, so of course Square is reluctant to just port these everywhere and hope for the best.  They also knew they had to actually put effort into these releases since their Steam release for Chrono Trigger was so poorly received that they basically had to fix it for months after release.  They have to recoup their investment here and if there isn’t enough demand, there’s no financial incentive to put in the work to make these operate on consoles, too.  Square needs to know if players feel their nostalgia is worth another $128 or if they’re going to be content to play the versions of these games that they’ve already released on older systems.