Square Enix is no stranger to bafflingly ill-considered remakes of classics, and it’s starting to look like the “pixel remasters” of Final Fantasy I-VI might suffer the same fate. In short: price big, text tiny.
Today, Square Enix set the Steam page for the new remasters of Final Fantasy I-VI live, giving players an idea of what to expect from what was previously a curiosity announced during E3. Some new features — like rearranged soundtracks “overseen” by original composer Nobuo Uematsu — sound interesting, and the graphics don’t look anywhere near as godawful as the mobile/PC versions of Final Fantasy V and VI. However, two things stand out: the price and the absolutely horrific font choice.
Purchased individually, the games’ prices total out to $US95.94 ($123). Fortunately, Steam offers a bundle option, but it only brings them down to $US74.82 ($96), which feels a bit steep for a collection of decades-old games. It doesn’t help that Square Enix has saddled all the games with a text font that’s both overly clean and claustrophobically compact, making it impossible to look away from due to how out of place it feels. Many, many people have remarked on the tiny, tiny font.
“My god this font is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in a video game,” writer and podcaster Heather Anne Campbell said on Twitter. “It is the worst of all time.”
“[Seriously] guys I have typography dot com open in a tab literally right now,” wrote current YouTube guy and former Kotaku video guy Tim Rogers. “They got a lotta good ones on there, guys.”
Nonetheless, this looks like what Square Enix is going with. If nothing else, PC players will presumably be able to mod in something that makes their eyes hurt less, like they did with the soon-to-be-replaced PC versions of Final Fantasy V and VI. As for when all of this will happen, the pixel remasters of Final Fantasy I, II, and III will be out on July 28. The remaining games, on the other hand, do not have specific dates beyond “2021.”
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