Given that it’s going to be launching relatively soon in Japan, it wasn’t that odd that Square Enix would be showing off their new streaming service, Dive In, at the Tokyo Game Show. Nevertheless, I was still a bit surprised to have a chance to play a couple of the games from its launch lineup at Square Enix’s booth. Both Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 13 were available to try out, and since I was very curious as to how well they would work, I gave them both a play.
I tried Final Fantasy 13 first, since that had the bigger wow factor for me. You simply choose the game you want to play from the Dive In app, and away it goes, in theory. In practice, we had a little bit of a glitch getting the game to start up, but after a minute or two I was on my way. My first impression was that it was pretty weird to be playing a game as pretty as FF13 on a mobile device. Of course, the reality then sank in that since this is streaming the PS3 version, all those buttons have to go somewhere. When you touch the screen, it nearly fills with virtual buttons, and the method Square has chosen to represent the analog sticks just doesn’t work well at all. If you take your finger off the screen, the UI fades out, so at the very least you can enjoy the cut scenes without any clutter.
The controls didn’t work well at all, unfortunately. Final Fantasy 13 is a very fast game, the analog touch stick is awful, and the lag certainly didn’t help things. Moving Lightning around was really difficult, and I’m no novice with touch controls. On top of all that, the actual quality of the streaming was hit or miss. At times it was fine, but it would regularly become very grainy or lag a bit. Of course, it’s worth remembering that there’s all kind of interference at big shows like these that could be causing trouble, but it still wasn’t a great first impression. I ran down a couple of hallways/dungeon areas, fought a few battles, and got tired of fighting with Lightning’s movement.
Deflated, I switched over to Final Fantasy 7, expecting it to come up short as well. The big Eidos logo that came up when I started it fingers this as the PC version, which makes sense given it received a nice cleaning up for its Steam release a while back. The game fared a lot better visually than Final Fantasy 13, probably because the original Final Fantasy 7 used a lot of grainy-looking streamed video in its backgrounds anyway. The lag in the controls remained a bit of a problem, though less so here since the game has a slower pace. One problem that was exactly as bad as it was in Final Fantasy 13 was the horrible virtual stick for movement. Final Fantasy 7 uses some funky angles at time, so it’s not always clear which direction you need to be pushing, and while this is belaboring the point, adding lag into the mix doesn’t do it any favors at all. That said, Final Fantasy 7 worked a lot better overall through Dive In. That opening cut scene still stokes a fire somewhere in me.
This is mostly bad news so far, isn’t it? Well, I do have one little thing to cheer you up with. In the advertisement for Dive In in Square Enix’s TGS guide, the top and bottom of both pages have screenshots from games lining them, presumably hinting at future Dive In selections. Without being exhaustive, some of the games include the original versions of Final Fantasy 1 through 8, Secret of Mana and its sequel Seiken Densetsu 3, the Romancing SaGa games, Ogre Battle, and Bahamut Lagoon. Even King’s Knight is in there, and literally no one on Earth ever wants to play that again. My biggest hope for this service is for it to give access to games that Square Enix would never remake or re-release on mobile, and it looks like their intentions aren’t far from that.
That’s all for naught if it doesn’t work correctly, however. Right now I think it’s mostly fine for slower games, but anything with fast action is going to have some latency problems. The controls need a serious rethink as well, because I cannot even accurately express in words how poor they were. I’m sure things will only improve as they go along, and it’s not like this service is leaving Japan yet as far as anyone knows, so it might never be an issue for most English gamers. I really do hope Square Enix goes for it, though. I know a lot of our readers aren’t keen on renting games instead of owning them, but I’m willing to pay a small rental fee if it means I can play games that otherwise had zero chance of making it to mobile. It still feels like it has a long way to go at this stage, even with its Japanese launch looming.
