They skipped 2, 3, and 5. But yea, the whole FF2/4 and 3/6 business has been corrected for years now and should never be spoken of again IMO . I'm sick of dealing with all the confusion it creates..
I agree. It's getting annoying. But it would be sweet if it does come out. I was just having a conversation with someone who highly recommended Final Fantasy VI, but I don't have a Super Nintendo to play it on, so I was a sad llama. But if it came out on the iPhone, yay! But alas, only from the rumor mine...
I'm sure some of it is true, but it's hard to fill a regular column with things heard behind the scenes. That's probably why many items seem like pure speculation. My guess is, that's exactly what they are. Why? They were slow, I admit, but they were also feature-perfect recreations of the PSP versions, which are much more advanced compared to the GBA and PSOne ports than people give them credit for. For example, all the graphics are remade from scratch, not just upscaled from the 256-color iterations. There also extra dungeons otherwise available only in the PSP editions. Final Fantasy III is apparently a difficult game to port, since it was skipped on both WonderSwan Color and GBA, while the latter games were made available. It was remade only recently, as a fully 3d reimagining on the NDS. Skipping straight to VI on the iDevices seems unlikely to me, though. Final Fantasy IV already had its assets remade in higher resolution for a Wii version of its direct sequel, which would make it a perfect candidate for a port like I and II. V and VI however, are only available in their original SNES resolutions. I find it hard to believe that Square Enix would retouch the graphics of these games just for the iPhone.
FF5 & 6 were ported to the GBA awhile ago. Wouldn't be that hard. And again it's hands down my fav FF game.
Grim Fandango is not as easy since it was the first one to NOT use scummVM it used GrimE. They are trying to implement "Residual" to run it on the device but no luck yet. I agree that this would be a big seller on the device. Fingers crossed.
Graphics? Easily. Memory? Like a breeze. Porting effort? Hard to say. I'm betting FFI&II (etc) were running on a NES emulator, which makes porting them relatively easy, but I'm not sure using a PSX emulator ported to iDevices would be as easy. On the other hand, there were PC versions of FFVII and VIII, so probably the code-base is relatively portable. There would be some troubles, though, like converting all the music to MP3, as iOS lacks any MIDI features used in both PSX and PC versions of the game. But, a 2-3 gig download? That might cause some trouble. And the graphics in FFVII pale compared to current 3D games on the device (the characters, not the backgrounds, though). It would be great to see FFVII on iPhone, though. If they manage to get the controls right. GBA being pretty much SNES in a small box, it's a bit different than porting them to iDevices.
Dont forget FF Tactics guys which is comming on 15 september.This will show how those much more advance ports are doin on idevices in terms of sells and quality/performance and most importantly adoption of touch controls.If this goes well then FF 6 is very much likely.I doubt FF 7 because it was never re-released "outside" psone.Hope Im wrong because that game is great and I wouldnt mind playin it again.Chaos Rings shows that idevices can handle so who knows.
FFVII is 1.32 GB on PSN uncompressed -- very big, but a bit more reasonable than 2-3 GB. I could easily see that go down to 800 MB with enough compression, though my guess is that MP3 sound files would be weightier than MIDI code. As to the controls, well, they're awkward on the PSP, so my guess is that they would be awkward on the iPhone as well. Chaos Ring's floating d-pad and menu controls would fit the game well, however. One question, though, is if iPhone gamers would accept the same blurry, upscaled graphics -- including the backgrounds -- that PS3 and PSP gamers have grown accustomed to with PS1 Classics. I don't see Square Enix creating an updated version for iDevices (at least not for iDevices first).
Pocket Gamer is completely asinine. Who could ever take seriously a game review site that publishes opinions such as the following (excerpt from their recent review of Puzzle Cosmos): QUOTING POCKETGAMER: "If at first you dont succeed, try, try again. Its good advice for life. When it comes to games, though, I live by a slightly extended mantra: If at first you dont succeed, try, try again. If you still dont succeed after that, theres something wrong with the game. You wont succeed at Puzzle Cosmos the first, second, or third time, which points to something being wrong with this otherwise interesting puzzler." ENDQUOTE I'm sure that such an attitude factors into their not getting the advance previews in general.
