Doing an HD Remake the Right Way : FFVI Edition

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.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.fortressofdoors.com/doing-an-hd-remake-the-right-way-ffvi-edition/
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All top rated views extremely negative, complaining about the sound as well. I didn’t know they screwed up the sound as well. That’s hilarious if so, considering people were defending it with “B-B-But the sound will be better than the GBA version!” Any way to confirm that?

Only 3,000 people bought this steaming pile so far. 15,000 bought Final Fantasy V. Man, that’s 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.

There’s only a few situations where I take joy in a game’s 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. :smile:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/382900/discussions/search/?q=online&gidforum=485624149170285871&include_deleted=1

Hoooly crap, you can’t 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 didn’t have the right words to convey -why- it rubbed me the wrong way. Except the portraits. That one was easy to tell since they’re 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 Squeenix’s 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 weren’t bad sprites. Could’ve been better, for sure, but they weren’t 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 Terra’s 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 that’s just me, but there’s my two cents :wink:

Thanks again, and good luck with your project!

Yeah, I really do feel like a better artist could have been chosen. By way of ‘throw a dart blindfolded’. The quality of art is objectively better than Old DQ’s basic-webcomic cutscene art, but so would the art of just about anyone. They weren’t good at capturing the personalities of the characters at all, they’re absolutely terrible at hands, they aren’t good at conveying emotion through eyes, they’ve 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 wasn’t much of an art budget for the art remake. But there’s so many artists on DeviantArt who draw better than that, for pretty cheap.

It may seem like I’m raking them through the coals, but they make massive mistakes that commissionable artists on DeviantArt wouldn’t be able to get away with. Lars has said that he can have ‘some corrections’ made, since there’s 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 wasn’t overpaid for the result. Every artist I’ve 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 I’m a bit too judgemental. :stuck_out_tongue:

On an unrelated note, I think you made someone mad, Lars. I’ve noticed someone has been consistently downvoting every single DQ review on Steam for weeks. What did you do? :stuck_out_tongue:

Excellent article. There’s finally a mod to disable the filter, but I can only hope that eventually there’s a mod to replace the sprites with PSP style ones like this:

Terra PSP Style

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 that’s 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 won’t 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 ‘eh, good enough’ is good enough!

Well, Final Fantasy 9 is coming. It, too, is a Mobile-To-PC port.

The characters don’t look like they’re a part of the world they’re inhabiting. Like they’re standing on top of a painted backdrop. How’d that happen…? Was it always like that?

Subbing in higher-resolution versions of that background art would help a great deal, but it’s 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 I’m 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.

I’m cautiously optimistic…

http://store.steampowered.com/app/359870/ How will they screw this up? Or do they have enough respect for their later entries that they won’t 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. It’s harder to screw up upscaling textures than it is to screw up upscaling pixel art.