As announced via the official PlayStation blog, the big headline game will be Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2. The game was last year’s critically-acclaimed action title that returned to the post-societal world of The Last of Us. Alongside it also comes Fallout 76, the online-focused spin-off of the popular series, as well as Desperados 3, the latest game in the strategy series. Topping things off will be Final Fantasy 8 Remastered, Yet Another Zombie Defense HD and Victor Vran: Overkill Edition.

All those games will go live on PlayStation Now starting October 5th. The Last of Us Part 2 will remain on the service until January 3, 2022 with none of the other titles giving a specific date to leave.

As announced earlier today, five classic Final Fantasy titles will be coming to PS Now starting this month with the remastered version of the original Final Fantasy 7. In October, Final Fantasy 8 Remastered will follow, and then in November will be Final Fantasy 9 to round out the original PS1 released trio of titles. Then for December, it will be a double whammy with HD remasters of Final Fantasy 10 and its sequel, 10-2. There will be a number skip here as 11 was a MMO title, but 2022 will begin with the release of Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age.

These titles will begin coming to the service starting on September 7th, which you can download or stream on all PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 as well as compatible PCs.

Whether or not Final Fantasy 8 – often considered the black sheep of the Final Fantasy series (or one of them, at least) – ever gets the grand remake treatment that its direct predecessor is getting remains to be seen, but until such that that happens (if it happens), it’s not like fans of the game have nothing to enjoy. Final Fantasy 8 Remastered was released for PC and consoles about a year and a half ago, and now, it’s been brought over to more platforms.

Final Fantasy 8 Remastered is out now for iOS and Android devices. The game is currently available on both for a discounted price, at $16.99. That price will go up on April 4 though, at which point you can buy the game for $20.99.

In our review of Final Fantasy 8 Remastered, we awarded it a score of 8/10, saying “Final Fantasy 8 Remastered still has many of the same design flaws as the original release, but new visuals and gameplay tweaks make this the best version of a beloved classic.” You can read our full review through here.

Final Fantasy 8 Remastered is also available on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

If your wallet is still recovering from the recent Steam Autumn Sale, then good news: As leaked and then confirmed by Valve in a tweet, the Steam Winter Sale is now available. Hundreds of games have been discounted with the sale ending on January 2nd 2020.

The best part about the sale is that several games that previously weren’t discounted – like the Final Fantasy series – are now on sale. With Final Fantasy 7 Remake out in the coming months, it wouldn’t be a bad time to pick up the original game for 50 percent off. Other titles like Final Fantasy 8, both the original and Remastered version, have also been discounted.

Of course, there are plenty of other franchises that have seen discounts from BioShock and Dark Souls to Doom and Darksiders. It might be best to wait over the next few hours for the store’s traffic to calm down before making any purchases. Stay tuned for more details on other Winter sales coming up.

At X019, Square Enix was on hand to announce that numerous Final Fantasy titles would be coming to Xbox Game Pass. This includes Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8 Remastered, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10 and 10-2, Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age, Final Fantasy 13/13-2/Lightning Returns and Final Fantasy 15. But wait, there’s more.

For the first time ever, Kingdom Hearts will be coming to Xbox One, with Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue coming to the platform. Even more amazing is that there will be a demo for Kingdom Hearts 3 available today.

The above Final Fantasy games will arrive on Game Pass, along with the Kingdom Hearts titles on Xbox One, some time in 2020. Kingdom Hearts 3 is currently available for Xbox One and PS4 and will receive some new DLC in December with ReMind. This adds new story content, new bosses and additional scenarios to play as other characters. Stay tuned for more details and updates from X019 in the meantime.

After many years of being somewhat neglected, the PlayStation classic of Final Fantasy 8 got a remaster that introduced the game to a new generation. It’s always been somewhat of a black sheep in the trio of PS1 titles. It wasn’t quite as groundbreaking as 7, and lacked the throwback nostalgia of 9. Now, we got a special video looking at some behind the scenes of the remaster.

The developer diary features the Director (Yoshinori Kitase), Producer (Shinji Hashimoto), and Art Director (Yusuke Naora) of Final Fantasy 8 as they reminisce about the development cycle of the title. They talk about several aspects of the story, themes, and anecdotes surrounding the game. It’s a good look for anyone curious about some of the thoughts behind the development. Meanwhile, you can also read about how Final Fantasy 7‘s success also had a major influence on the game’s development through here.

Final Fantasy 8 Remastered is available now for PS4, Xbox One, Switch, ad PC, and if you’re curious about how the game’s original director feels about a potential full remake of the game down the line, we have something you should take a look at.

https://youtu.be/-GXL_xcSnn0

When it comes to the Final Fantasy franchise, it goes without saying that the game most are talking about is Final Fantasy 7 Remake coming at the start of next year. But there’s always something to be said for revisiting the classics, and those playing on the Switch will get a chance to do that on a physical cartridge.

Announced via their official Facebook, Square Enix announced the double pack containing remastered versions of the PlayStation versions of 7 and 8. It’s odd for two reasons. The first is that, for whatever reason, 9 was left out of this collection despite the remastered version of it also being on the Switch. The second is that it will only be available in the Asia region, though it will contain both English and Japanese versions of each game. So far there’s been no word on other versions coming, or whether this will leave Asia.

Final Fantasy 7 and 8 Remastered are available across all major platforms digitally now. The physical Switch edition of the pair will hit Asian store shelves sometime in 2019.

With backwards compatibility on most consoles, PC being backwards compatible almost by definition, why do we even need remasters? That’s not the primary question we’re addressing in this feature, but it’s useful to keep it in mind anyways. What’s the point of rereleasing a 20 year-old Playstation 1 game on platforms that are three and a half generations ahead? Does the Final Fantasy VIII remaster live up to the high remaster bar that some games these days set?

In a word, no. But I wouldn’t term it a simple cash-grab, either. There’s a substantial amount of work that’s gone into enhancing the artwork–particularly model quality.  Would I recommend the remaster as the definitive way to play Final Fantasy VIII? No. That is a lot of back-and-forth waffling but you can see that I have complicated feelings about this particular remaster. Let’s take a look at how much has changed and how much has stayed the same since 1999.

Visual Enhancements 

The remaster enhancements make their way across to all platforms. On console, you’re talking about a fixed 1080p resolution. This is what the game renders at PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. There are no significant differences, so everything we talk about here applies equally to all platforms.

On PC, you get a bit more flexibility, with support for arbitrary resolutions. You get the option to select from FXAA and three different SMAA presets too, but the differences are subtle. While a simple resolution boost might not seem like much, it makes a world of difference when comparing the remaster to the original PS1 game.

In 1999, Final Fantasy 8 ran at an eye-watering (for the wrong reasons) 320×240. Models were blocky enough that they didn’t lose much in the way of high-frequency detail, but the pre-rendered backgrounds were clearly designed at a higher quality. Video sequences also took a hit to quality on PS1. Even though the CD format offered ample space for quality video, the 320-240 resolution output held art assets back from looking their best, even when not rendering in real-time.

Looking at the original in comparison to the remaster, it’s easy to see how much of an impact resolution has on pre-rendered aspects of the scene. Before we get into that, though, there is a caveat here, though. While the higher resolution allows more of the original artwork to come through, Square decided to implement a bicubic upscale on the background textures. While the base art assets are higher res than 320×240, they’re a far cry from the 1080p that the game renders to.

Bicubic interpolation makes the art a lot softer and takes away the jaggies plaguing the original release. But it also compromises the original game’s artistic vision. In-game artwork is often designed around the resolution limitations of the era. Modern games feature lots of high-frequency texture detail because 1080p is the lowest resolution developers assume the game will be run at. This is why eighth-gen titles tend to look a lot worse than seventh titles when running at 720p–a lot of the high-frequency information in the artwork doesn’t display properly, and the end result is unsightly shimmering.

20 years ago, art teams were working with games that outputted as low as 320×240. This had an impact on how artwork was designed. If you look at the pre-rendered backgrounds in Final Fantasy 8, you’ll see a lot of macro detailings. Incidental details like buttons, pillows, and cobblestone are all drawn with big, generous strokes.

When running at a low resolution, pixellation and color dithering actually create the illusion of additional detail. When you take artwork like that and upscale it through bicubic interpolation, it (ironically enough), loses detail. The backgrounds become so soft that some of the implied detail you’d see at low resolutions is lost, replaced by clean lines and color gradients. This isn’t to say interpolation is an entirely bad thing: there are places where addition detail nuances that were lost in the original PS1 artrwork. But overall, we see this as a slight downgrade, not an enhancement over the original.

Texture scaling issues aren’t limited to pre-rendered artwork. There’s a bigger problem at hand and that’s the game’s world map. The world map environment was rendered in full 3D in the original PS1 game. It wasn’t exactly a pretty site. But a poor draw distance, a lack of objects, and the terrible texture work were partially covered by the low resolution: when everything is such a muddy blur, pixelation actually adds some character to the output.

The Final Fantasy 8 remaster’s upscaled resolution and texture filtering make the world map look a lot cleaner. So clean, in fact, that it just looks, well empty and wrong. The higher resolution image reveals the low quality assets for what they are and the result is a horrible, blurry mess of flat-sided polygons. It looks truly awful. The original PS1 world map has a janky, pixelated charm and this is completely lost in the remaster.

Framerate is another problem area where the improvement isn’t really clear-cut. Before we proceed ahead we wanted to make a note. On the console front, we analyzed the game’s performance by taking some sample scenes from the game and running it through trdrop, an open source software. Note that this tool gives us a mere demonstration of the game’s performance, because an exact 1:1 representation of performance can only be provided by the developers themselves since they have access to vast of array of tools and profilers.  

Many older game engines have aspects of rendering tied to a fixed framerate. When you’re developing for console and expect to hit 30 FPS, no more, tying the framerate to rendering can help when optimizing. The problem arrives when you try to port the game code to platforms that could theoretically run the game at much higher framerates. Uncapping the framerate could break physics, animation, collision detection and much more. As a consequence, the Final Fantasy 8 remaster runs at a capped framerate on all platforms. We’re talking about a maximum of 30 FPS update during exploration.

This drops to 15 FPS during battle scenes. In the original Final Fantasy 8 on PS1, while battle scenes ran at a lower framerate, menu overlays ran at a full 60 FPS update. This made combat viable, even if it played out at a lower framerate. Here, both the rendering and menu selection run at 15 FPS, making combat option selections a real drag. I can see how an unlocked framerate wouldn’t have been viable but combat menus are an area where top-end PC performance is worse than PS1. That is troubling.

There’s been a lot of negativity so far. Let’s get into what the Final Fantasy 8 Remaster does right, then: the models. The Remasters re-created character models have been built from the ground up to look great on higher resolution displays. They are leaps and bounds better than the original blocky PS1 characters. Consdering that Final Fantasy 8 is a game that places great emphasis on character interactions, the boost to model quality is a big deal and it has a tangible (and positive) impact to the game’s visuals.

You just need one look at Squall’s model to see the change: individual hair strands are visible and geometry work is much more complex. We can’t emphasize enough just how much the enhanced models change up the moment-to-moment conversation experience: if you squint real hard, you can pretend you’re not playing a fifth-gen remaster, at least during certain in-game conversation sections.

The models are arguably a bit too high quality, though. This is especially true in relation to the background textures. The texture work is clearly upscaled from somewhere in the vicinity of 640×480, while model geometry renders at native resolution. Model textures are also of a significantly higher quality than the background. This creates a situation where the models don’t seem to sit well in the scene. It’s almost as if someone took Final Fantasy XII models and photoshopped them onto PS1 backgrounds. It just doesn’t feel right. We did find an interesting way to counteract this, at least partially.

Our test platform features an RTX 2070 Super paired with a Ryzen 1600. Just a few weeks ago, Nvidia released a major driver updated that introduced a new feature called Turing Integer Scaling. This allows you to use nearest-neighbor upscaling instead of interpolation. In retro games, this helps preserve pixelation where it’s part of the artistic design. I found that running Final Fantasy 8 at 640×480, with anti-aliasing off and integer scaling turned on, produced interesting results. The model poly counts are still high, but geometry’s being rendered at 640×480, much closer to the original resolution of the background textures. This allows the models to within the pre-rendered background much better. Check out how that looks.

Conclusion:

All in all, the Final Fantasy 8 remaster is a mixed bag. Pre-rendered backgrounds and cutscenes are a notch above the PS1 originals but the source artwork just isn’t high-res enough to scale well to modern display resolutions. Interpolation makes things smoother but takes away some of the original artistic intent. Framerates are a match for the PS1 original, but combat actually performs worse, with the menu overlay now pegged to the on-screen framerate.

On the flip side, this is one of the few titles where there is true platform parity when it comes to performance: Everyone gets 30 FPS in the main sections and 15 FPS during combat: no more, no less. Model quality is a tremendous improvement over the original, with models a full console generation or more improved. If the remaster’s visuals were judged on the basis of the character models alone, we’d have said its excellent. That’s not the case, unfortunately. As it stands, we see the remaster as an alternative to the 2013 re-release of the game on PC. For now, pick the remaster if you don’t have access to a PC.

Square Enix’s long-awaited remaster of Final Fantasy 8 is finally available for PS4, PC, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. It brings the PS One classic to the contemporary generation with new visual enhancements and gameplay features. The improved visuals can be seen in the launch trailer below.

Final Fantasy 8 Remastered offers some much needed quality of life features like a speed boost to play the game at three times the normal speed, which is good for getting through easy encounters. You can also turn off random encounters entirely if you want to focus on the story. Battle Assist also offers a hand to struggling players with max HP and ATB along with Limit Breaks available whenever.

For more information on the remaster, check out GamingBolt’s official review here. In other Final Fantasy news, Sony has confirmed that Final Fantasy 7 Remake will be present at Tokyo Game Show 2019. That title is scheduled to launch on March 3rd 2020, exclusively for PS4.

Gamescom week is over, but that doesn’t mean the excitement ends too. Soon, PAX West will be upon us, and already, we’ve got some exciting stuff lined up to look forward to, such as a gameplay stream for CD Prokekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077. Meanwhile, Square Enix have also confirmed their own presence at the show, while also detailing the games they’ll be bringing with them.

Leading the pack, as you’d expect, is Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which will be the centre of attraction at Square Enix’s booth, which will display a recreation of Midgar and the Mako reactor we all know and remember. Gameplay demos for the remake will, of course, also be available. Meanwhile, other Final Fantasy titles will be represented as well, such as the recently released MMO expansion, Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers, and the upcoming Final Fantasy 8 Remastered.

Meanwhile, Square Enix will also hold two panels for Life is Strange, and one for Shadowbringers. Other games being brought to PAX West by the publisher include Oninaki, Trials of Mana, Opera Omnia, Kingdom Hearts Union X(Cross), and Brave Exvius.

PAX West runs from August 30th to September 2nd. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for all the latest coverage.