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+--- Thread: FF6 to Steam (from mobile...) (/showthread.php?tid=6926)
FF6 to Steam (from mobile...) - Dark Jaguar - 8th December 2015
http://kotaku.com/the-ugliest-version-of-final-fantasy-vi-is-coming-to-st-1746894732
Well, the article points it out. There's a long discussion as to why they went with "that art style". The answer is, it isn't an art style. They put a filter over the old artwork. They did actually redo the art for monsters and the character portraits, though I don't really like the art style on those character portraits at all, and that menu layout and font... ugh, no attention to box placement or nuttin'.
The GBA version is "definitive", aside from the poor music quality and some slowdown. If OB1 was here, he'd kill me for saying that ANY GBA port had "worse music and graphics" than the SNES original, but the fact is, it's absolutely true. The GBA just could not handle everything the SNES could do, not least because the SNES had a distinct sound processor and the GBA did not. I'd say the translation is "more accurate", and it is in some ways, but in others it's become clear over the years that Square's translators care more about appeasing the weird japanophile fans they have than making a "truly" accurate translation. That's why you get stupid fan opinions like "you HAVE to leave the spoony bard line in, we value that more than an emotional line delivery in an important scene!".
The sad thing is, this is a very recent development. Squeenix has been phoning it in ever since they started making mobile ports of their legacy titles. It started semi-promising, when Secret of Mana got some nice graphical updates that actually fit the original art style and weren't just a lazy filter put over everything (they even added reflections of the sky to the water!). The touch controls were simply unworkable for an action game, but at least they were trying. With FFV, even there they made the attempt to update large parts of the graphics (such as battle backgrounds) without just using a filter, but they still got lazy when it came to updated tiles, so that they had obvious seams.
Before that, the PSP 2D remake of FF1, 2, and 4 went out of their way to fully update all the art in the whole game in a way that made sense and an eye for making everything seamless. Well, for the most part. The FF1 character sprites were too brightly colored for the backgrounds and enemies they were set next to, but they had fixed that issue by the time the FF4 update came along. With mobile, they've abandoned any attempt at the updates making sense. The good news is they're starting to take some of their Dragon Quest games and put them on 3DS. With those, at least, we can hope for some amount of actual effort to be put in.
In summary, Square-Enix, do one thing for me. If you're going to port a game, either put in the time and money to do a good job, or just do a straight port without trying to "improve" anything. A straight port of the GBA game with SNES quality sound would have been a far superior Steam release.