When Square Enix’s range of Final Fantasy remasters for PC and mobile were first unveiled a couple of years back, fans were quick to notice something: not only had the game’s traditional pixel font been replaced, but they’d been replaced by new, tiny little letters that were an assault on the senses.
To recap, here’s how bad the fonts were:
Purchased individually, the games’ prices total out to $95.94. Fortunately, Steam offers a bundle option, but it only brings them down to $74.82, 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.”
With those same games coming to PS4 and Switch later this month, Square Enix decided to mark the occasion by fixing those fonts. Or, trying to fix them.
Among other new features like the ability to switch between original and rearranged soundtracks, and turning off random encounters, there’s also a menu option to “Change Fonts”, which “gives you the option to switch between two different fonts: the default font and a new pixel-based font that recreates the feel of the original games”. Which it does, in a way, but it’s still too small and condensed, so while its not as bad to look at, it’s in many cases very hard to read.
That sucks, but on the bright side, some of these other changes are welcome, including the fact that Square Enix have, very quietly, restored Final Fantasy VI’s intro credits, which had previously been removed and resulted in an eerily hollow opening sequence.
The PS4 and Switch versions of the remasters will be out on April 19.