➤ Final Fantasy 9 for Nintendo Switch, the review 🎮

Square Enix has a strange relationship with his past. The news that some of the most popular episodes of the Final Fantasy series would arrive on Nintendo Switch and Xbox One was predictably greeted with excitement and enthusiasm, especially by those who, at the turn of the 90s and early 2000s, never had the opportunity to face Sephiroth in Final Fantasy 7, escape with Princess Garnet in Final Fantasy 9 or be moved by the end of the tenth chapter. Yet when it comes to preserving the history of its most important games and bringing them back to the most modern platforms, Square Enix has rarely been able to do justice to the masterpieces of its past, accustoming fans to listless and imperfect ports and adaptations. So when Final Fantasy IX was released on Nintendo Switch, no one was surprised to discover that the edition that appeared on the Nintendo console is nothing more than the same contested and imperfect port that appeared a couple of years ago on PC and PlayStation 4, in turn based on the mobile edition dating back to 2016 For the good, but especially for the bad.

A port with a mobile soul

Just like previous porting iterations, Final Fantasy IX su Nintendo Switch it comes with a handful of noticeable graphical tweaks over the PlayStation original. The character models have been completely redesigned, showing off a much higher number of polygons and richer textures. However, if on the one hand this treatment helps to rejuvenate the aesthetics of a game that feels the full weight of the twenty years that have passed since its debut, on the other hand it ends up highlighting one of the main flaws of the port. The "new" character models screech on low-resolution backgrounds like a Chocobo's beak on the blackboard, and even if the graphic filters try to patch it up, the result ranges - depending on the situation - from inconsistent to annoying. Presenting backdrops in high resolution (and at 16: 9) would require a considerable commitment on the part of Square Enix, essentially having to redesign all the illustrations that form the background to the game and add completely new details to fill the vertical bands that now exist at the sides of the screen. However, through unofficial patches and mods for the PC version, the community of geek enthusiasts has shown that with better filters and more modern upscaling techniques it is possible to increase the resolution of the seabed with infinitely more effective and pleasant results than those seen in the porting arrived on eShop.

The gorgeous cutscenes have a higher resolution than the originals on PlayStation, as are the Tetra Master menus, various icons and card illustrations, but since the Switch edition is based on the 2016 mobile port, even the interface has remained the same, with clear fonts and balloons (after all they are designed to be readable on a smartphone) but at the same time cold and without any personality. Titles like Undertale demonstrate how a simple font can convey the imprint of a game, the temperament of a character or the pitch of a conversation. The only thing conveyed by the font of Final Fantasy IX on Switch is instead the sense of detachment and coldness with which Square Enix has re-proposed to today's players what is a piece of video game history.

If the graphics of the fonts, the style of the menus and the resolution of the backgrounds can still fall within the sphere of personal taste, the same cannot be said for the technical problems that this re-edition continues to bring with it despite the numerous criticisms of the fans. As on PC and PlayStation 4, in Final Fantasy IX on Switch it happens every now and then to find yourself in front of long uploads before entering the battle, drops in framerate during the fights and an annoying audio bug that makes the music track start all over again. time you finish a fight and return to the world map. Also imperfect are those optional options introduced to simplify the life of less patient users. An example is the possibility of increasing the speed of the game, a blessing to overcome the most banal fights in a moment, but which, outside of the battle, transforms the experience into a gag of the Benny Hill Show, also makes it impossible to follow the dialogues. The solution is therefore to pause the game before and after each battle to activate or deactivate the option, a tedious procedure that does not take into account the frequency with which you encounter enemies while exploring. And it is a shame to be faced with all these defects precisely because Final Fantasy IX remains a JRPG as stellar today as twenty years ago, with an exciting story set in a fantasy world full of unforgettable characters. There are those who speculate that Square Enix's difficulties in preserving its old masterpieces depend on the loss of original materials (we also discussed this in our retrospective dedicated to Final Fantasy 8), but regardless of the veracity of the argument, the Japanese company has in the past overcome obstacles of this type for market interests (with Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD) or to cool down the hot criticism of fans (with the controversial PC version of Chrono Trigger).

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Anyone who has played the adventure of Gidan and his gang on PlayStation Vita already knows how comfortable and pleasant it is to rediscover (or replay) Final Fantasy IX in portability, and for many this represents more than enough reason to buy (or repurchase) the game on Nintendo Switch. Yet we are convinced that the story of the Square Enix series, in one way or another, deserves at least half of the love and passion shown by its fans over the years by the Japanese company.