Thoughts on Final Fantasy VI for PC & Final Fantasy VII Remake

This month, December in the year 2015, Square Enix have announced the release and/or development of Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII Remake.  FF VI will be a port to the PC, which a lot of people, myself included have eagerly awaited (despite the fact that I still have my Final Fantasy III SNES cartridge) while FF VII Remake will be a re-imagining of the story in the game, and will not simply be an HD remake.

So first, Final Fantasy VI.  What makes me somewhat sad about the version of Final Fantasy VI is not the fact that the game is being released on Steam for the PC, which is one of the few good things about this release, but what is being released is the Android/iOS port of the game as opposed to a port of the SNES game.  The fact that the planned Steam release is a mobile phone port probably would not bother me too much if it was not for the fact that I do not like how the graphics have been "updated" with less pixelated images with smoothed out everything.  Take a look at the trailer to get what I mean.  

The information with the FF VI trailer says that "Veteran character designer Kazuko Shibuya has painstakingly recreated the graphics," which is probably in fact true, but that does not necessarily mean that the result is an amazing one.  Bill Stiernberg of Zeboyd Games, in a tweet listed the issues that he had with the Final Fantasy V Android/iOS port to Steam/PC, which I find to still hold true as both FF V and FF VI ports are in a near identical style.  The point that stuck out the most to me was that the backgrounds seem to have a lot more detail than the character sprites, which are overly saturated from the rest of the frame.  I also think that the character sprites look a lot like Playmobil representations of Final Fantasy characters.  This is not particularly what I want.

I realize that I could simply acquire an SNES emulator and pick up a rom of Final Fantasy III (VI) if I want to play Final Fantasy VI on my computer and not be annoyed or bothered by graphics that have been updated in a way to possibly attempt to look more current and less like a 21 year old game.

On the other side is the Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is a completely different game than the 1997 game.  Check out the trailer (or not, but I will be referencing what I can deduce from it, so y'all've been warned).

There are a couple of things about this remake that make it stand out from the original game.  The first being that Square Enix is adapting the game to be episodic.  How many episodes, and how much time will each episode take?  I could not tell you.  There is a translated and highlighted interview by Silocnera, originally conducted by Famitsu which contains a lot of answers, some of which I will be covering here, but the article is worth a read.  The other possible point of contention is that, from the video, the battle system looks to be closer to that of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII as opposed to a turn based system; although developer Tetsuya Nomura in the interview says that "it’s completely different from Crisis Core. It might not be as much of an action title as say Dissidia Final Fantasy on arcade or the Kingdom Hearts series, but it leans more towards there."  Not having played anything in the Kingdom Hearts series, I cannot speculate how that battle system functions.

The last thing about FF VII Remake is that it is currently only slated for release on the Playstation 4, although it may eventually receive a Steam/PC release as previous games in the Final Fantasy series have been receiving over the years; currently only III - VIII, XI, XIII - XIV are available, leaving out I, II, IX, X, and XII.

So these are my somewhat disjointed thoughts about these two games.    And maybe if the remake comes to Steam, I might finally get around to finishing Final Fantasy VII (I'm currently on my forth restart since I first played the game back in 1999).

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

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