Today at the Tokyo Game Show 2013, I got some hands-on time with the HD remasters of Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2. As expected, the games of Final Fantasy X | X-2 HD Remaster play identically to their PS2 counterparts and the visuals are the sole area of improvement.
In Final Fantasy X, I played the beginning of the game following Tidus’ life in Zanarkand. While short on gameplay — as I was almost always in a cutscene of some sort — it did give a nice little showcase of the game’s character models. Whether in-game cutscene or in battle, the character’s looked great — Auron and Tidus especially.
[Sorry for the lack of game sound in the gameplay videos. The audio at the booth was headphones only.]
Even the pre-rendered FMVs are a step up in HD thanks to their new wide screen format. I also really liked how detailed and alive the background of Zanarkand looked as I was playing — it was especially amazing.
In the end, Final Fantasy X only had two blemishes that I noticed. On items that were supposed to be sharp metal, the edges were rendered as jagged, pixelated lines instead of the smooth lines found on everything else. The second visual oddity was the occasional motion blur that is common in PS2 games. While present in the original version, it was slightly jarring to see everything “crystal clear HD” one moment and “after-image blurry” the next.
From what I saw in the other demo, Final Fantasy X-2 isn’t looking quite as great. While it shares the visual improvements found in the FFX remaster, there was one extra visual blemish I noticed: The clashing character models. Rikku, Paine, and Yuna are excellently detailed — their bodies and clothes have real shape. The NPCs — even reoccurring enemies like Leblanc — are clearly less detailed with textures painted on. The Gullwings also have actual jaw movement when they talk, while the other characters are lucky to have mouth flaps that are either open or closed. When the two types of models interact, the game loses it’s sense of visual uniformity — which is a little annoying. Still, this difference in character model quality was present in the original PS2 version of the game — even if it was far less noticeable on an old CRT TV.
In the end, Final Fantasy X | X-2 HD Remaster is looking pretty nice and as it has a tentative release date of “winter” in Japan, there is plenty of time left to put the final layer of polish on both games.
Check out the screenshots and newest trailer below.
Comments
16 responses to “Final Fantasy X Looks Beautiful In HD, X-2 Looks… Good”
I wish it was cross-buy 🙁
🙁
Still copping.
I wish I could pay for this game more… I never got to pay for the original. 🙁
I won’t buy it unless it is.
Needs more HD zombie resist imho. #justsayin
Sometimes you have to remember you’re only playing a PS2 game with a texture pack.
Sometimes you have to remember that not everyone got a chance to play it when it first came out. You also sometimes have to remember that old games look like crap on bigger screens at times. To top that off, you also have to remember that people are still excited for a game that is almost two generations old. Kind of says something about quality of gameplay over graphics no?
The important thing to remember in all of this though is not to be a troll.
It’s good to see FF10 getting a HD rerelease. It was the last game Sakaguchi had a part of before leaving Square-Enix.
Which, incidentally, is also when the series tanked and became nothing more than interactive movies.
10 was the last standout good one, yeah. For me it was 7, 8 and 10 that made the biggest impact.
So we’re ignoring FFXI, FFXII and FFXIV:ARR and just focusing on FFXIII, are we?
No, FF13 is among the train wreak since FF10.
No, what I mean is: FFXI, FFXII and FFXIV:ARR are not train wrecks. They were/are pretty damn good games. They have their flaws, sure, but… they’re far above the train wreck FFXIII is.
Masayoshi Soken (FFXIV:1.xx and ARR) and Naoshi Mizuta (most of FFXI) are also great replacements for Nobuo Uematsu… Masashi Hamauzu is okay, but his music has sounded the same in a lot of games for awhile now.
No, like FF13, FF11 was an interactive movie and the player an optional extra.
Granted, half the reason I disliked those games is because my mind is not fast enough to work with the battle system. But even if you take the battle system out of the equation FF11 onwards was basically following one corridor after another.
How exactly does an MMO manage to be an interactive movie as well as a corridor?
Sorry for missing those. While an MMO does have exploration, the MMO installments have had more server issues than launch day for Windows Vista.
Most MMO’s have server issues on launch. Now that it has almost been a month since FFXIV:ARR came out, the game has been pretty stable.
FFXI also had a pretty smooth launch in America (unsure about Japan, as they had the game a year or so before America), so…