I love Final Fantasy games (in general, of course - XII was just terrible and is my most notable exception), and if pressed, Final Fantasy IX would be somewhere in my top three. It has bucket-loads of charm, a great story, compelling characters, a good sense of humour and is generally what I'm looking for in a JRPG.
The trailer for the remake looks brilliant, too. The art style and direction looks exactly right - faithful to the original while making the mass of pixels readable and playable in the 21st century. (A fun experiment for anyone with the original discs and a PS3 that can play PS1 games - try loading up Final Fantasy IX on a decently sized television. I'll wait. How badly do you need to blur your vision before you can't see the individual pixels? In my latest playthrough, I played it entirely without my glasses just to be able to read the text.)
So, on paper, I love the idea of remaking Final Fantasy IX. It'll bring a much-overlooked gem to a new audience and give people like me a chance and an excuse to revisit their nostalgia.
Except I won't be playing it. The remake will only be for Windows operating systems, iOS and Android, and I only have a Mac. Square Enix release exactly no Final Fantasy games on Mac (with the notable exception of the MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, which was briefly released on Mac before being withdrawn because it was, by all accounts, too buggy).
I could play Final Fantasy IX on my phone, provided that I wanted to: a) accept that my battery life would be non-existent, b) enjoy the game on the smallest screen I own and c) use all my available storage space for it. But, having played and enjoyed the iOS version of the World Ends With You, my main concern is that an iOS update will suddenly render the game unplayable, and I will have to wait upwards of six months for Square Enix to patch it. To me, it's simply not worth the risk and the multiple downsides.
I suppose the obvious answer is to simply buy a Windows computer (and if I lived in a world where I simply had that money, I would be tempted). But I shouldn't have to. I own and play many games on my Mac already, and more and more software developers are realising that Mac computers are viable gaming machines, too.
Independent game developers can somehow manage to find the resources and knowledge to code for both Mac and Windows; I find it somewhat absurd to think that this is inaccessible knowledge for a triple-A game developer. Right now, I could play Undertale, Don't Starve, Minecraft, Amnesia, Bastion, The Binding of Isaac, or Limbo, and that would only be scratching the surface of indie games. If I wanted to go for something a little more mainstream, I could choose virtually anything by Blizzard or Valve.
I know Square Enix aren't the only mainstream publisher doing this, either. Sega, Bethesda, Rockstar Games, Activision and many more also make their games near exclusively for Windows, cutting out a potential market for their games.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of Mac-users out there, and they are playing games on their machines. Just walk into any university campus and see. Or if that isn't enough quantitative data, analyse the steadily rising sales of Mac computers over the last ten years in comparison to Windows computers (which, of course, is flawed data anyway, as it includes the many office PCs running Windows used exclusively for work and not gaming).
In short, there is a sizeable and growing market that many developers are choosing to ignore, that I believe are costing them sales. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a princess to kidnap, yummies to eat and a world to save...in all its pixelated glory.
No comments:
Post a Comment