final fantasy tactics is the only good final fantasy

well, this isn’t quite right. I instead adapted someone else’s widescreen hack, because their hack was not actually a widescreen patch but instead widescreen and a patch to add noses to all the portrait sprites. it’s literally called Final Fantasy Tactics – Nose Edition.

truly wild. anyway the widescreen part appealed to me, so I spent some painstaking time re-inserting the original portraits into the patch because I don’t really understand how to make a ROM patch but the still-extant FFT PSX hacking community has enough relatively user-friendly tools that I could muster that much.

the problem ended up being that the end result was still kind of shit:

the reason this looks a little off is interesting, though. first of all, it doesn’t bother touching the interface—so things like character portraits and menus are still stretched horizontally in widescreen. what the patch does do is compress the battlefield image horizontally, because it still has to initially output at the PSX’s intended aspect ratio. what this means is that the image is “correct” when you re-stretch to 16:9, but in the process you lose chunks of pixels off of the intricate sprite work. everyone’s eyes get crunched into the sides of their heads.

this was an interesting object lesson in the limitations of emulation in enhancing the experience of old games. basically the one advantage the PSP’s war of the lions has over the original, in my mind, is its native 16:9 resolution, which makes it much lovelier when played on a modern computer, TV, or Steam Deck.

all this to say: all I want from a FFT remaster is that it is exactly the same game as the playstation 1 original but with resolution options. that’s it. don’t do anything else to it, square. (okay maybe add online multiplayer battles, that’d be a fun feature I’d never use)