Final Fantasy VI, the crown jewel of classic RPGs, just got an embarrassing "HD" re-PC release. We discuss the various technical flaws and how to fix them.
All top rated views extremely negative, complaining about the sound as well. I didnât know they screwed up the sound as well. Thatâs hilarious if so, considering people were defending it with âB-B-But the sound will be better than the GBA version!â Any way to confirm that?
Only 3,000 people bought this steaming pile so far. 15,000 bought Final Fantasy V. Man, thatâs so satisfying to see. For a game as massively popular as FF6 is, hopefully it will send a message to Square that they screwed up royally.
Thereâs only a few situations where I take joy in a gameâs failure and actively wish for it to financially harm the company by not recouping costs. Square-Enix and Konami seem to be exclusively fitting that description these days. 
Hoooly crap, you canât even launch Final Fantasy 6 in Steam offline mode. Square-Enix is a joke. Everything they touch turns to garbage. What the hell happened to them?
Made an account because I need to thank you for writing this. Saw FF6 in Steam, and was devastated when I saw that it was a bad mobile port, but continually found I didnât have the right words to convey -why- it rubbed me the wrong way. Except the portraits. That one was easy to tell since theyâre static and draw attention away from the character sprites.
But here you broke everything down, showed the evidence, and explained it so perfectly. I lovelovelove the idea of being able to pick which way the game filters. I generally tweak filters when emulating anyways. I realize I prefer the blocky rendering much more than the smoothed out look (and good grief, yes, either are better than Squeenixâs terribad middle ground).
I remember when I picked up the iOS version for sake of wanting to actually own one of my childhood darlings, I hated the sprites on first sight. A day later I stepped back and realized that they really werenât bad sprites. Couldâve been better, for sure, but they werenât bad. And now I can say I know why they rubbed me the wrong way at the beginning - preference for an unfiltered look, and the matter of 3 competing art styles. By itself, that sprite sheet of Terraâs is downright adorable.
Speaking of sprites, (if you care about my opinion of someone who has no idea what game your personal remake project is, that is) I found the original, savage, toothy grin of that berserker character to be rather charming. I think some of it got lost in the redrawing, though⌠Referring to this picture: http://www.fortressofdoors.com/content/images/2015/09/xbr_pipeline.png
Maybe thatâs just me, but thereâs my two cents 
Thanks again, and good luck with your project!
Yeah, I really do feel like a better artist could have been chosen. By way of âthrow a dart blindfoldedâ. The quality of art is objectively better than Old DQâs basic-webcomic cutscene art, but so would the art of just about anyone. They werenât good at capturing the personalities of the characters at all, theyâre absolutely terrible at hands, they arenât good at conveying emotion through eyes, theyâve had trouble making the faces of characters seem like the same person from pose to pose, the characters still somewhat look like they belong in a higher quality webcomic. I just assumed there wasnât much of an art budget for the art remake. But thereâs so many artists on DeviantArt who draw better than that, for pretty cheap.
It may seem like Iâm raking them through the coals, but they make massive mistakes that commissionable artists on DeviantArt wouldnât be able to get away with. Lars has said that he can have âsome correctionsâ made, since thereâs some art budget left, but I always wondered what sort of artist requires further payment to correct their own mistakes. I do wonder how they were chosen, and I hope they wasnât overpaid for the result. Every artist Iâve ever commissioned allowed for minor changes from the commissioner to be changed once at no cost - if the commissioner left out some small details or something - while offering to fix any mistake that was their fault free of charge.
⌠maybe Iâm a bit too judgemental. 
On an unrelated note, I think you made someone mad, Lars. Iâve noticed someone has been consistently downvoting every single DQ review on Steam for weeks. What did you do?
Excellent article. Thereâs finally a mod to disable the filter, but I can only hope that eventually thereâs a mod to replace the sprites with PSP style ones like this:
Going through my discovery queue, I noticed Final Fantasy Type-0 HD. Mixed? Huh.
900 positive reviews, 600 negative. Yikes. Hell of a clash there. I wonder what happened?
The same thing thatâs been happening with Square-Enix ports from the beginning.
Lazy, shameful porting again and again and again. Just scroll through all the negative reviews. Why wonât Square-Enix just spend a dollar to ensure their ports are well made? I know they have an incentive not to do it right the first time, because then they can redo it and resell it again years down the line, but dang. At this point they could should have this on their business cards:
Square-Enix: Where âeh, good enoughâ is good enough!
Well, Final Fantasy 9 is coming. It, too, is a Mobile-To-PC port.
The characters donât look like theyâre a part of the world theyâre inhabiting. Like theyâre standing on top of a painted backdrop. Howâd that happenâŚ? Was it always like that?
Subbing in higher-resolution versions of that background art would help a great deal, but itâs unclear whether Square Enix still has it.
This thread is relevant:
This was a great article. But even though you present very good options to enhance the sprites, I think that FF VI art can be entirely remade by the community. If a team of modders were to create such a project I would certainly join them. And Iâm sure many more would as well. I know it sounds like a megalomaniac project, but if someone is able to evenly divide the work among the talented community, it could be possible.
Iâm cautiously optimisticâŚ
http://store.steampowered.com/app/359870/ How will they screw this up? Or do they have enough respect for their later entries that they wonât sloppily port them?
I played several hours of Final Fantasy X HD last night. It looks great, probably in part because so much of the world is polygons. Itâs harder to screw up upscaling textures than it is to screw up upscaling pixel art.
