author: Zuzanna Domeradzka
Square Enix Knows How to Tuck at Heartstrings; Pixelart Final Fantasy Puts AAA Games to Shame
Many gamers have been tempted by refreshed installments of the iconic Final Fantasy series. Square Enix has reported sales figures for pixelart remasters of the first six installments of the series.
Games from the Final Fantasy series have been released for several decades, something that few series can boast. Although the first installments, released in the last century, have gained iconic status, archaic graphics and gameplay solutions may make it difficult for modern gamers to enjoy them. However, as it turns out, many fans still have nothing against pixel-art FF games.
We are talking not about the originals, but remasters of the first six installments of Final Fantasy. Five of them were released on Steam and Android and iOS mobile devices in 2021, while the sixth in 2022. The console ports premiered fairly recently, on April 19, 2023. The originals, meanwhile, came out for the NES between 1987 and 1994 (in Japan).
Square Enix, which is the publisher of the series boasted today that to date more than 2 million copies of the remasters have been sold. The figure includes copies purchased by players on Steam, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch consoles and mobile devices.
Twitter, @FinalFantasy
This is quite a success, considering the fact that the data refers to refreshed versions of games originally released decades ago. Some modern AAA games fail to achieve such results, and others need a longer period of time to do so, which - given the marketing invenstments - is quite an embarrassment in terms of the success of old Final Fantasy games.
The case of these remasters doesn't look too bad also compared with other representatives of the jRPG sub-genre. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age sold 2 million copies within a few days of its release, and in a similar period of time 5 million copies of FF XV were sold. The remake of the seventh installment, meanwhile, reached 3.5 million copies in just three days.
Refreshed versions of Final Fantasy I-VI primarily improved the pixel-art 2D graphics and slightly tweaked the gameplay to make it more accessible to modern gamers - among other things, an auto-combat option was added and the user interface was improved. The soundtrack also underwent changes. It's worth noting that the work on it was overseen by the now legendary music composer of the originals, Nobuo Uematsu.
