The desire to play the beginning of the Final Fantasy franchise has proven to be a cursed endeavor. So far we have had some kind of issue or less than stellar gameplay for some reason or another. So while we are making the transition to the 3D generation of games, enjoy a compilation of the issues we have had to struggle with!
Final Fantasy I
Shockingly, the playthrough of Final Fantasy I was pretty clean and straight forward. This is what led to a false sense of security in what was going to happen to me next.
Final Fantasy II
I’ve one into extraordinary detail of this one.
Final Fantasy III
There were some graphical issues with the default UI in the PC version of Final Fantasy III. This was remedied by a simple self-applied patch. However, a week or two after I began playing, Square soft decided to update a game it hadn’t touched since July 2014. Six years later, and they opted to release a patch that, among many things, messed with the UI. This completely broke my game. We could no longer read dialogue boxes. This was promptly acknowledged and a followed-up patch released. This was a frustrating couple of days as I was unsure if we were going to be able to keep playing.
I ended up removing my UI patch, applying the second official patch and picking up with a less than optimal UI.
Final Fantasy IV
Whoo boy. Moving into the GBA games as an adventure. We were plagued by sudden resets and crashes of completely inconsistent frequency. I started having Final Fantasy II flashbacks. This was solved by frequent saving and backing up. The kicker came when we triggered the Giant of Babil cutscene. For some reason or another, the entire cutscene was a black screen. We couldn’t do anything. This was—like in Final Fantasy III—a point at which I worried we wouldn’t be able to finish the game like this.
I had applied a sound restoration patch to the game, so I attempted to port over my save file to a clean copy of the game. This half worked. The cutscene was extremely glitched but visible enough to get through. Doing some screen transition shenanigans cleared up some of the issues. So I saved my game, went back to my patched copy, and loaded from there. The rest of the game went by pretty smoothly in a technical sense.
Final Fantasy V
So, much like Final Fantasy IV, we were plagues by sudden resets and crashes. About a week into the playthrough, we changed the Retroarch core we were using. That was the magic key! All the reset issues were gone. And so Final Fantasy V was one of our better experiences despite a rocky start.
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy VI required a sound patch, a color palette patch, and a patch to avoid FPS issues. Gone were the sudden crashes and instead we got stuttering audio! Whenever there was a dialogue box on screen or when flying an airship in Mode 7, the music would stutter. I tested an unpatched copy of the game and it still did the same. We just dealt with it and moved on.
So what wonders will Final Fantasy VII bring in terms of the curse of Final Fantasy (in)Complete? Stay tuned to find out.