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+--- Thread: FF Pixel Remasters (/showthread.php?tid=7443)
FF Pixel Remasters - Dark Jaguar - 21st March 2023
So, there's the "pixel remasters" now, which are finally confirmed as heading to the Switch. These ones are... interesting. They really did take complaints about the "smoothed out" and rather... ugly sprites of the Android version to heart and instead kept a "blocky" SNES style look across all six games. However, they still redid a large chunk of the spritework. This makes a sort of sense, because by redoing all the sprites with a fixed pixel display in mind (meaning square pixels) there's no worries about any "shimmering" effects when the screen is scrolled horizontally. That said, the game engines aren't 2D any more. The games are all now rendered internally in 3D but with a unique zooming solution that makes everything "look" the same size no matter the distance from the camera (keeping an oblique perspective like the original games). This has a few consequences in gameplay, in that pillars that formerly blocked access can now be walked "behind" in almost all instances. While more realistic, it breaks the intended pathing. The sound design is interesting. The sound effects have been touched up so that while they still sound "old school", they're synced. Every effect is the same across all games if it's for something in all games. Personally, I'm not a fan of that. I like that each game gets its own take on things and prefer that to enforced uniformity. The music is completely recomposed, but having learned their lesson from how badly received the new OST in their Secret of Mana remake was, they made sure to maintain the full "spirit and tone" of the original tracks. I'd say these are, almost universally, the best versions of these songs. They really went the extra mile with the famous Opera scene in FF6 though. That one used voice synth that sounded bad on the SNES and bad on the GBA, but in these versions they hired actual performers, so for the opera there's voice acting not present in the rest of the games. I think that's the perfect "light touch" approach. In case you're curious, they're singing in multiple localizations depending on your version, including Italian, the "language of the opera" and the version they sang in the original CD OST release way back when, which I think is perfect. They even go the extra mile just for this scene and dramatically rotate the camera around and zoom in, since you can't directly control your character during this moment anyway. They even had the characters sing off-key if you forget your lines. (These voice actors would return for the final boss fight for that choral chanting.) And yes, they bug fixed an issue where the phantom train wasn't flipping it's sprite when Sabin suplexed it. They FIXED the issue of Sabin not properly suplexing the train when it was caught by fans in the trailer!
In terms of gameplay, the forced uniformity is in full effect. Just about every single spell and ability shared across each game now has identical effects across them too. The ATB also functions identically, as do things like how experience works. They also fixed a large number of glitches and unintended play across each game. Some of this is for the better (Final Fantasy 1) while some of it I think is for the worse (goodbye to vanish-doom tricks, all item duping, and numerous actual intended effects that were simply broken and ignored like how undead react to healing magic). I would call the overall changes to gameplay, on balance, a wash except for one detail:
All bonus content from later remasters has been scrapped. ALL of it. No special super dungeons with hidden super bosses any more. While I won't pretend all of the bonus content was well done, none of it was galling or bad, and most of it provided additional challenges that really press veteran players who are used to their min-maxed kits and aren't challenged by these games any more. Some even added additional storyline details worth exploring, and others were just silly fun. In some cases, the bonus content was literally just giving players additional options, like new summons in FF6 to find in tiny little bonus events, or being able to swap in every party member that's still alive for a custom party in FF4. All those moments gone, like tears in the rain. I'm saying this as someone who doesn't even care for The After Years. Well, since FF3 (the real one) never did get a 2D remaster, nothing's lost there. They added a few extra classes from the reimagining on DS in fact, and altered how the existing ones perform to make them closer to how they behave in later entries. FF4 for it's part didn't get any additions from it's DS reimagining.
All in all, I'd say these are very well done and interesting takes, but it's a shame they took content out from the GBA versions. It makes it very hard to recommend these as the "definitive versions", but they are an alternate take and FAR better than what we got with those abysmal "mobile editions".