StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Has anyone picked this up? What's your opinion on the port?

When I played the game on the original playstation, I loved it. Never beat it, but I loved. Sadly, I lent it to a friend years ago, and it was never returned.

I was thinking of picking it up, but I don't want to waste 15 bucks on it when I don't even know if the game translated that well to the iPhone. I looked for reviews, but most of what I found were from FF Fanboys.

So what are the opinions?

It apparently suffers pretty badly from graphical slowdown to the point where it's almost unplayable.

I've read a lot of reviews saying that the game has that graphical slowdown problem, but I've been playing it for a while on my iPhone 4 and it's run perfectly smoothly. It sounds like it might be a hit or miss issue, but I can't imagine what would cause it for some and not others. It might be best to hold off on the game until Square comes out with a patch to fix the problems that some are having, or at least until they announce that they're planning on it.

Other than that issue, it's a great port. The touch controls fit the game really well.

If it's a port of the PSP version, then it most likely does have that bug. A while back some guys actually checked the code, and apparently it is actually hardcoded into the game for some reason. I'm not really technical enough to go into detail, but basically, every time a character takes an action that isn't as basic as "Attack" or "Item," the frame rate gets cut in half. You can tell if you pay attention, because the sound doesn't slow down, just the animation, so the sound effects will often clearly end before the animation is completed.

This is not like the graphical slowdown that used to be present in old 16 and 8 bit games when too much was going on on-screen; like I said, this seems to be hardcoded into the game. When it first came to the US, people immediately tried using hacked PSPs to overclock the processor or dump the game and run it straight from a memory stick, and it was still there. I also doubt SE will do much to fix this; it was in the Japanese release, American release, Greatest Hits release, and now PSN release, with no fixes. I believe when it first came over, SE made a statement along the lines of "[the slowdown] is out of our hands." I'm not sure how that could be the case when they own the code, but that's what I remember them saying.

There are, however, a lot of people who claim to never notice the effect until someone points it out to them. I have no idea how this is possible (like I said, it was pretty much proven that the framerate gets cut in half during animations, and the sound clearly goes out of sync when this happens), but apparently it is, so there's a chance you might not even notice. It's also possible that maybe certain phones can run it properly, although I would honestly be surprised.

I personally hated the effect and sold the game after finishing it. The new translation is nice, but this is a long, combat heavy game, and getting hit with that "glitch" on nearly every single command (and this applies for all units, in case you were wondering, so bad guys slow the game down too) really bogs it down and feels tedious, and it's not like FFT was ever a very speedy game in the first place. Plus, there's really no excuse for a port of a Playstation 1 game to run worse on a far more powerful system.