Final Fantasy Pixel Remastered Review (PS4) – Much has been said about the mobile releases for the old Final Fantasy games, both good and bad. Consider the mobile scene a test run and the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster the finished product.
Square Enix has a pretty good track record with its remasters, and this one follows that pattern rather well.
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Review (PS4) – Bringing Wonderful Nostalgia With Mostly Thoughtful Enhancements
First and foremost, you cannot go wrong with a collection of classic games. There’s the obvious convenience of buying all six in one bundle, but there’s also the collector’s benefit of buying the physical version.
This saves space on the shelf. Together, these points bring the games back into relevance by releasing on modern hardware.
Regardless, this convenience also comes with caveats. Most of the mechanics age well enough, with a couple less so in a relative sense (here’s looking at you, 2 and 5). No matter how you slice it, these games are dated, and compared to modern games you’ll sometimes feel this in the worst way.
Still, there comes a time with truly curious gamers when they want to look back on how we got to modern games. This collection is absolutely perfect for that exploration.
Features I believe should have been included are at least some of the same features found in the releases of Final Fantasies 7, 8, and 9. I don’t think infinite damage would truly show what the game was like back then, but health boosts and gameplay speed increases would have been welcome options.
Adding Life to Retro Charm
What we do have however provides decent compromise. You can automatically run and speed up combat a little bit. The catch to speeding up combat is the game defaults to the previous commands you gave each unit and automatically uses those until you switch to manual.
This is not auto-combat because bosses won’t let you just attack and survive. Instead, this option makes the basic random encounters easy to gloss over, letting you focus on other parts of the game.
Another fine addition is being able to turn off random encounters. You need to fight in order to level up, so this can’t be active all the time. Equally so, if you’re deep in a cave and out of potions, you’re not out of options and can get to a safe place to heal without risk or restart.
Convenience Without Compromise
These games also autosave every time you leave or enter something. You still can save in the normal places and even use a Quick Save in emergencies. These don’t modernize the games, but these do smooth out the journeys nicely.
The best part is if you want something similar to the original experiences, turn these options off and just go nuts.
One other cool thing is the game lets you re-map your face buttons. That’s a welcome option for those who like using Circle as the select button.
In standard Square Enix fashion, you also have the option to choose between two modern or retro options. The first is text, letting you choose between the modern font work or return to the original aesthetic.
Then, you also choose between the original 8-bit and 16-bit soundtracks or use the brand new orchestrations of all those tracks. Personally, I went for the old look and the new sounds.
A Different Time
As mentioned earlier, seeing how the franchise progressed is part of the selling point of this collection. In that, you get to see just how basic things were, both visually and conceptually.
For many of the games, I enjoyed the fact that I was given hints of things to do and I could just go do them without any prompts or guidelines or markers. At the same time, the lack of narrative structure gets old pretty quickly.
Thankfully, the first few games only go about 15 hours or so. Then you have a game like Final Fantasy 5, which gives you much more freedom to explore over a cohesive path. Again, these things come down to preference, but the first three games walk that nice line between freedom to explore and story beats, even if they don’t always correlate to each other.
Then there’s Final Fantasy 2. No matter how you slice it, leveling up in this game is cumbersome. It’s neat in theory because you have to actually use certain skills to level up certain stats, like blocking to level defense.
At the same time, the new combat features don’t blend well with that formula, almost forcing you to play the game the original way. That’s not all bad, necessarily, but literally one-sixth of this package doesn’t offer as much of a flexible experience as the rest.
The Complete Package These Classics Deserve
All in all, the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection provides a great way to both preserve and experience these iconic games on modern hardware.
Not all games work as nicely with the new features as the others, but there’s still more than enough here to channel nostalgia or spark curiosity. There are so many reasons to label this remaster a must-own.
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster is available now on PS4!
Review code kindly provided by publisher.