Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Call me disenchanted, but Square ports to iOS have been little more than bald, lazy attempts to cash in on years-old, sometimes decade-old properties. And I'm not talking about the original games, I'm talking about the ports (usually for PS1/2/X and Nintendo handhelds) being 10+ years old. Virtually every Square iOS port so far has dismal controls and little thought given to adapting to touch-based conventions...Making Retina-optimized text is about the biggest adaptation they've managed.

For these properties, they charge premium-based prices. For iOS, they don't make them universal...which as a business decision is fine, if unpopular. But they delay the iPad versions for months for inexplicable reasons, but I guess there will be fans who'll pay another $10+ for the new version.

So I don't think the porting of FF3, widely considered one of the worst of the early Final Fantasies, to be much more than another cash-in by Square.

* as cdr noted, the language to market this Ouya port is a bit hyped and misleading: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317397

The remake on the DS was interesting for the fact that they actually put quite a bit of work into it. I was happy to buy it because it looked and felt like a native DS game (full 3D graphics, new audio, etc). The Final Fantasy on my phone however, doesn't feel native. And they want $10 for it. No thanks.

The Final Fantasy III remake for DS felt lazy and suffered from lots of poor design choices. As an example, the remake changed the availability of certain classes, but did not change vendors' inventory, so you would run into situations where the equipment available from vendors didn't match what classes were available to you. Also, the class system lacked any semblance of balance with regards to level-ups; the only stat that was permanently raised when leveling up was HP, meaning that it was always best to level-up as whatever class had the best HP growths. Furthermore, HP growths at level-up were based on a percentage of your existing HP, so if a character spent the first half of the game leveling as a low-HP class, their HP penalty would haunt them for the entire game.

I can't directly disagree with your statement that they "actually put quite a bit of work into it," because they did produce new 3D assets, which is a non-trivial task, and the localization had to be done from scratch since it was the first time Final Fantasy III had ever been released outside Japan. However, it certainly didn't feel like a game that that got a lot of tender loving care; it felt like a cash grab predicated on the assumption that people would buy anything tied to the Final Fantasy brand.

Final Fantasy III for Android has been completely rethought for touch controls and it shows. Pinch to zoom for secrets, clicking on enemies to select, swiping across screens for changing characters in equipment/magic/status view. Well worth the $16.

You can do all that in the iOS version, the Android version is a pretty direct port of the iOS version. The changes you list are basically necessity when converting to a touch based interface.

There are no L/R buttons, so you need to be able to swipe between characters. It's a mobile game and the screen is smaller so zooming into secrets is needed, and you need to be able to tap on enemies to select or else you'll just automatically attack the first person in the field.

I don't exactly agree with GP but I do understand where he's coming from. I enjoyed FFIII for iOS and got quite far into it, but it's hardly a touch based game. 99% of the time you're manipulating a virtual joystick.

More than decade-old. The prime properties are FF3 - FF7, which are 15-20 years old.

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