World Of Final Fantasy PC Review

Last year World Of Final Fantasy was released on the PS4 and Vita to praise from both critics and fans alike. Like a lot of entries in the series, the game is finally making its way to PC. For this review of the PC version, I'm going to focus on the overall quality of the port and less the actual content of the game. If you would like to hear more on the latter, be sure to check out our original review of the game here.

System Requirements and Performance

World Of Final Fantasy is not a very demanding game, as you can plainly tell by the modest system requirements below. Remember this is a game that was also released on the Playstation Vita, so this really shouldn't come as a surprise.

MINIMUM:

• OS: Windows 7 64bit
• Processor: Intel Core i3 2.0GHz or above
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1GB or higher, Radeon HD 5770 1GB or higher
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 15 GB available space
• Sound Card: Sound device that supports DirectX 11

RECOMMENDED:

• OS: Windows 8/8.1 64bit and Windows 10 64 bit
• Processor: Intel Core i3 2.4GHz or above
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB or higher, Radeon HD 7850 2GB or higher
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 15 GB available space
• Sound Card: Sound device that supports DirectX 11

The modest system requirements end up being a bit of a blessing in disguise, as there is very little in the way of graphics options for the game. World Of Final Fantasy on PC is a very bare bones port, it appears to be a direct conversion of the PS4 version with little to no differences. The game has a configuration tool you should launch before actually playing the game to set what few options it has.

1. Display Mode: This lets you choose between either Full Screen or Windowed display. (Note: Some users appear to be having issues getting the game to display in Full Screen but it wasn't an issue for us)
2. Resolution
3. Shadow Resolution
4. Post-Processing

And that's it! Yup, that's all the graphics options for World Of Final Fantasy. No options for even anti aliasing or anisotropic filtering even, very basic graphics options have been omitted from this port. You can of course force options like anti aliasing naively on your graphics card control panel, but regardless the absence of these graphics options in-game is a disappointment.

Another big hit to this port is the game is capped at 30 frames per second with no options to adjust the framerate. Now being a turn-based RPG, 60 frames per second and beyond isn't as important to the experience as it would be in say an action RPG like Nioh where tight fluid controls are a must. All the same, it's disappointing that Square Enix decided to not even bother including the option to go beyond 30 FPS. 

Even though it's missing some very basic graphics options, World Of Final Fantasy on PC is still perfectly playable and looks pretty to boot. For my playthrough, I was using a system with a Nivdia GTX 1080, 16GB of memory, and an Intel Core i7-4790 processor. All stuff well above the recommended settings and it performed quite well. I didn't encounter any sort of glitches, crashes, or bugs of any kind in my time playing. You can get the game running in 4k, but it requires some tweaking around in your GPU's control panel to enable it. 

If you would like to see what it looks like in motion, I captured the below gameplay footage at 1080p and 30FPS.

The strength of the game's visuals is more due to the strong art direction less than its technical achievements. It uses a lot of bloom lighting and depth of field effects to give it a very sharp and distinct visual style. So despite the lack of higher graphical settings, it looks great. 

Control Options

Here's another area where the port stumbles a bit. There is no mouse support in World Of final Fantasy of any kind. You can use the keyboard or a gamepad, but that's it. The game uses a static camera and you can't really move it at all, so a lack of mouse support isn't going to hinder the experience too much but all the same it's kind of inexcusable. The default input method on a desktop PC is with a mouse, it's not the sort of thing developers should be ignoring regardless of how the game itself plays.

Playing with a gamepad is recommended for this one, but you will actually need to change the on-screen button prompts in the main menu settings to accommodate this. By default, it assumes you are playing with a keyboard, and the on-screen prompts won't automatically change if you use a controller unlike a lot of other PC games with gamepad support.

PC Specific Content and Bonuses 

Like many other Final Fantasy titles ported to PC, World Of Final Fantasy comes with a suite of boosters and cheats. They are as follows:

• Disable Encounters
• Free AP
• Free Champions
• Max Gil
• Max Battle Items

All of these are here to enable at your leisure and you can ignore them if you want. One potentially irksome quirk is you actually have to back out into the main menu to adjust these settings, whereas in say Final Fantasy IX on PC you could enable them when you just paused the game. It's not a huge deal but the step backward in convenience is a bit of a shame.

There's also the option to play the game with Japanese voices if that's what you'd prefer. This isn't a feature exclusive to the PC version, but it's a nice addition all the same.

Much of this review probably sounds negative, and that's a shame because World Of Final Fantasy is a fantastic throwback to earlier entries in the series and a damn good RPG in its own right. If you are ok with a 30 FPS cap and an experience that's the same as the PS4 version, then this PC port is perfectly playable. I've yet to encounter any technical bugs in my time with it and the art style makes up for the lack of graphical options in my opinion, just know going in that the port is lacking in several ways. If you are a fan of the franchise and didn't play it when it came out last year on other platforms, you probably won't be disappointed jumping in with this version.