Final Fantasy 1-6 Pixel Remasters might finally give us good versions
After all these ugly mobile ports
After spending several years making vintage Final Fantasy games look worse with remastered re-releases toting blurry graphics and ugly menus, Square Enix might give people what they actually wanted in the first place. During their E3 showcase today, Squeenix announced a "Pixel Remaster" series of Final Fantasies I through VI. Information is vague right now but they sure do look like ye olde FF games with ye olde pixel art.
Squeenix started making ugly versions of classic Final Fantasy games for mobile, then brought those ugly versions to PC too. But people didn't really want ugly versions of classic Final Fantasy games. As Katharine said of FF6's PC port when she and Brendy ranked the best Final Fantasy games on PC, the "ickily prettified sprites and nasty fonts [. . .] really spoil what's otherwise considered a very good game indeed." People just wanted classic Final Fantasy games.
Now the company are doing the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series, which they say "perfectly captures the spirit of those original game" and will be "the best way to play them yet". I don't know about that but the fleeting frames in the trailer do indeed appear to have pixels, and that's a start. I would also go for a decent (optional) CRT filter to preserve the appearance of the game as they were originally played.
No word yet on when the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters will arrive, other than "soon". They'll be released individually on Steam, Android, and iOS.
E3 2021 may be over but our memories live on - see everything on our E3 hub. Many more big game showcases and streams are still to come this summer, leading up to Gamescom, so see our summer games stream schedule to stay up to date.