Square Enix has been a major supporter of the Nintendo Switch since the console launched. It’s both ported major titles and brought exclusive ones to the Switch, and 2019 won’t be any different. In April, Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy X-2 will arrive for the first time on Nintendo systems, and fans will get to enjoy them. But the team behind the port, Virtuos, noted that there were some difficulties in making the ports.
First, in an interview, the team revealed when they were finding out about the ports they would be making:
This project got on our radar in the second half of 2017, so the team was up and running in December. For big franchises like Final Fantasy, it usually takes some time to get release dates aligned with the rest of the SKUs and other projects, so we usually put some flexibility into the schedule.
The biggest challenge for the port though was making sure that the game could not just run on Switch, but perform to expectations:
I would say it was quite technically challenging because to make Final Fantasy work on Switch, we needed to convert it to 64GB. So, the Switch version needed to be shrunk without impacting the performance. As this requires a fair amount of skill, we have a small team specifically to target these parts of the remaster. For such a great franchise, the main goal is to bring the exact same experience as the original version to the player. So, we haven’t touched the core content of these games in order to keep the same flavour as before.
If the ports of Final Fantasy XII, X, and X-2 are done well, this could lead to even more Square Enix games on Nintendo Switch. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
