We have got a number of games in the acclaimed Final Fantasy series landing on the Nintendo Switch this year. One of those is Final Fantasy X HD Remaster which also includes Final Fantasy X-2 HD Remaster. However, the official Square Enix store has listed Final Fantasy X-2 HD Remaster as a digital download so presumably you’ll get a download code in the box if you opt for the physical package. Final Fantasy X / X-2 HD Remaster comes to the Nintendo Switch on the 16th of April.
God bless Europe!
No actual actual card? Well no buy from me then.
Am I understanding correctly? The physical package will be a download code in the box, and NOT a game card?
I think it’s the first one on the cart and then download the other.
So f***ing annoying
Games like this should def have a physical option.
Yeah it’s sooooo annoying starting up a digital game, swapping cartdriges is sooooo much easier ……. lul
Talk with a therapist because hoarding is a decease, war is over and you ain’t gonna take stuff in your grave.
Everything returns to the earth and stars later on, just stop fighting chance, be against chance is be against life itself.
Hoarding, collecting is a disease, brainwashed by parents of corps.
Have you ever read the story about the 3 billy goats and what lurks under the bridge!!
Well looks like another switch game I won’t be buying. Square Enix is a joke of a game company now, especially since majority of their greatest talent left over the years. Hell even Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the FF series, left that garbage company after realizing Square Enix is complete hot trash lol.
FFX was before they became a joke.
Lame excuse for not buying a game, it’s old port you can play digital just like on PS4.
You can only play the games because you have some plastic in your virgin cave ?
New games don’t even have booklet. It’ just some plastic for 1GB old game.
Just stop, people like you should buy 2 x the normal digital price because you leave bad toxic in the environment for
your stupid obsession and hoarding stuff that’s lose value everyday since every game will be ported in the future and
remade.
Thank God companies do this, otherwise it would cost us 70 dollars for Xenoblade 1 on Wii, but now we have digital for 10 dollars and a 3DS version, destroying hoarders like you who wanna get rich and wanna be important how lucky you are with you hoarding and thieving.
All games will be streamed and full digital library in the future like Steam and like Netflix. You pay for the service and EVERYONE can ENJOY all the games without getting hold back by these losers in eBay pumping up prices.
Love the future, glad they bypassed you and your hoarding and made us gamers have fun again with a affordable hobby.
Peace out
Seems like this page got itself a new troll account 🤔
I was gonna comment on another one of their posts, but after half reading that garbage obsessed dude I’m not gonna bother. I give this troll a month, two tops, before they get bored lol
“Lame excuse for not buying a game, it’s old port you can play digital just like on PS4.”
I have the X/X-2 HD remaster for PS4, and both games are on the disc. No digital version needed.
They do some good stuff, but mostly their published games. Their first party stuff has been bad ever since the Enix merge.
Not really surprised. The vita version was the same way. Also combats pre-owned purchases.
Hmm dont need mine money? Ok i buy another game with serious cartridge :)
Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet seems like a better choice, you could get that I know I will.
Switch fans: I’ll take the compromises the Switch has in order to have a home console and handheld in one package.
Also Switch fans: Third parties keep saying their games won’t sell on Nintendo consoles but how will they know that if they don’t release games on it?
*Square-Enix releases Final Fantasy X physically with a download code for X-2 because the two games together are over 20GB and cartridges over 16GB are way more expensive*
Switch fans: Fuck you! I’m not buying!
Problem with your logic. Developers have access to 32gb carts if they pay for it. 64gb carts are coming this year.
Square has money, they can pay for it. But they chose not to.
How did that, in any way, poke holes in my logic? It doesn’t matter what exists. it’s the price that matters. 64GB carts were supposed to be a thing last year but so few developers even used 32GB carts that they delayed them.
Yes, Square Enix could pay for them. Like I said, they did it for DragonQuest Heroes I+II. Most developers shipping large games have decided to stick with just 16GB carts and make the rest available for download though. That’s strictly because of the cost.
If Nintendo needed 32GB or larger carts, that’s a whole different story than if third parties did because Nintendo is platform holder and they don’t have to share revenue with anybody so they can afford to spend a little more on the cartridge and just pay themselves less. With third parties, there is less incentive to use larger cartridges because over 10% of the money from sales of their games on the Switch are given to Nintendo.
And since Square & Enix, before they became one company, were some of the companies burned by Nintendo back in the day before Sega & Sony made their systems, I doubt they are too keen on giving Nintendo too much money. I’m surprised they are using Nintendo’s Switch carts at all considering Nintendo’s past mistakes with carts & cartridge based games in regards to 3rd parties.
Well a lot has changed in 22 years. Square-Enix is run by completely different people so I doubt any grudges stuck around. They’re also significantly worse developers lol
Cartridges aren’t as bulky, expensive, or limiting as they were in the past either but they do still cost way more per gigabyte than optical disks. I would have gone with cartridges too if I was in charge of the 3DS and Wii U successors but I never would have used them on a system that doesn’t have things put in place to help work around using larger cartridges. I would have stuck with 3DS game cards so that the card is still small but big enough to house a 16GB chip and maybe an 8GB chip on the other side with them wired in a series. That way devs with larger games wouldn’t have to rely on using denser, more expensive, less mass-produced chips and can instead use carts with two smaller chips.
And of course, since I’m kind of broken record on this lol I would have made sure that there was some form of hardware decompression in the system so that lossless compression codecs in the LZ77 family would be accelerated. Supposedly LZMA2 decompression was implemented on an FPGA and it was able to decompress things at roughly the same speed as a Core i7 but using only like 140mw of power. If this was implemented on actual silicon, I can totally imagine it being used liberally in games and at speeds that would effectively multiply the speed of the cartridge by the compression ratio.
They definitely should have stuck with the 3DS game cart size & just made some changes to the inside for Switch games.
They wouldn’t have to change much. The way they use the 3DS and Switch gamecard pins is mostly identical. They pretty much just got rid of the one pin that was never connected, reused one of the grounds as a removal detection pin, and repurposed the save chip select and dedicated removal detection pins as a 1.8v input and a return clock. Everything else is the same, they just changed the layout.
The combined removal detection/ground pin is literally just a difference in how the system works and would require no modification to the card. Then they could have just sent it 3.3v and if it’s enough to power the card then it’s a 3DS/DS card. If it isn’t, then it can send 1.8v through the previously unconnected pin, and use the previous removal detection pin as a return clock. That would still leave the Save select chip available to be used if somebody wanted to ship their game with save storage included.
Of course, Nintendo probably knew that and decided against it because using smaller chips means a slightly smaller card reader and if the cartridges looked the same, people would be kind of annoyed that they couldn’t play their 3DS and DS games on the Switch.
You are completely off, the size of each game is 3.4 GB on the Vita, Square is just acting bad. They could compress textures and audio more (why they did it with the Vita? Can you make it to a 8GB card? And a better version on a 16?) or just release it on a 32GB card. They have a lot of options, they know very well that some people will react badly with it as a digital download, far more than just more compressed audio/textures. I will not buy it.
And yes, I like to have the Switch as an handheld (in my children hands) to free up my TV, far more than a Final Fantasy with 4k textures and uncompressed audio.
The Vita version is so much smaller because it uses lower quality assets and cutscenes and runs at resolution less than standard def. The PS3 and PS4 version are 24 and 22GB respectively.
Wasn’t it you who previously claimed to have worked on games? Shouldn’t you know better? How are they supposed to compress the textures? They already use S3TC so most of the textures are 4bpp. If they have the pre-compressed assets then they can pretty safely use 3.56bpp ASTC but that wouldn’t get it down to below 16GB.
Or do you mean they should use lossless compression, in which case that’s not anywhere near free if you want to use a heavier compression algorithm than deflate or LZ4-HC. The only way they’re gonna chop off 6-8GBs is if they lucked out and the data just happens to be very compressible.
Also, like I said several times already, devs seem to be staying away from 32GB cards and we can only assume it’s because they cost way more. Larger cartridges do not come free either. You’re literally asking for card that can store twice as much data in the same physical amount of space. Why people seem to think that’s trivial is beyond me.
It’s fine if you don’t care about “4K textures” because that’s not what they’re giving you anyway. It was made to run at 1080p without AA on the PS3, not 4K.
Eventually you aren’t unable to read and understand people’s comments. Did I not said that they can do what they did with the Vita on the Nintendo Switch by lowering the assets (textures, audio, etc.)? Didn’t I said that they have even more space to use like 8 or 16 GB cards (let’s leave 32GB out because of cost)?
P.S.: About development… yes I worked in the industry, and 4k textures are 4k textures, not the resolution of the card output. Look here to get an idea of what I’m talking of: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/318/
You literally used the word “compress”. If you said compress and meant “use lower quality assets” then you explained yourself badly, not me misunderstanding you.
And how is it that you honestly think that most Switch owners wouldn’t care if you stripped down a REMASTER of PS2 game to look worse than the PS3 version on a system that is capable of more? Have you seen some of the comments on this site? Pretty much every time that a developer makes some compromise to their game so they can put it on the Switch, there’s some idiot on here saying the dev is shit and refuses to buy the game.
You can’t assume that just because the devs have more space than they did on the PS Vita that what they can do with it scales up linearly. We don’t know how liberally they used 2bpp Power VR Texture Compression to keep the texture size down on the PS Vita. That alone would have reduced the file size of the textures by half and any degradation in quality wouldn’t have been very noticeable at the resolution and screen size it was being displayed at. Swtching to S3TC textures and upgrading those 960×540 pre-rendered cutscenes to 1080p could already use up most of 8GB.
Just because fan modders are releasing 4K textures packs that actually try to make ever texture 4096x4096px doesn’t mean that that’s what developers are doing. 4K textures are textures that are made to be used in games that render at 4K. In a lot of cases using textures smaller than that is completely fine and in others cases they use even larger textures. That’s just how that works. You would sometimes see 1024×1024 textures being used in Gamecube games and those only rendered at 640×480 just like some PS360 games used 2048×2048 or even 4096×4096 textures even though they rendered at 1280×720 or below.
Ok, ‘cut down on assets’, I’m italian so sometimes I italianize terms. ‘Compress’ = make it smaller.
Have you seen it running on the Vita? It isn’t half bad. Is it superior on PS4? A bit, but who do care? Definitely not who want to run it on an ‘hybrid’ (portable too) console.
Look here: http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2014/01/how_does_the_vita_version_of_final_fantasy_x_hd_remaster_compare_to_ps3
It’s a remaster, not a remake, and so not a ‘revolution’. And with the Switch you can do better than with a Vita because of better technology (texture compression, etc.) and bigger sized cards (16GB is more than double the size of all the two games on the Vita). Ergo, they could have done better for Switch owners, if rumors are true (X-2 download only).
You are wrong on your assumption. 4K textures aren’t meant for 4K render output at all, the two things aren’t linked.
At the point in which they’re using a 16GB card, they’d be most of the way towards to 22 or 24GB that the remaster uses on other systems. I don’t doubt that you don’t care about graphics but especially in the context of a port of a game that came out on PS3, I’m pretty sure most people here would be pissed if the Switch version was inferior.
And I just explained that you can’t really compress the textures much more short of heavy lossless texture compression which will require CPU time and memory. The only other option is using ASTC which requires going through all of the textures in the game and determining which textures can work at what block size without reducing texture quality much. Current ASTC encoders are really slow though so even on my i7 5820K, which is kind of old but still pretty capable, compressing one 2048v2048 textures can take several minutes and you can’t tell where the compression fails until after that. In which case they have to do it again. Now obviously even if you put one person on that, they can probably have it done in a month, but I don’t think they’re doing that and it’s probably a very small team of just programmers porting the game.
And no, 4K texture packs don’t describe the size of the texture. When fans do 4K texture packs, they might be referring to the resolution of the textures. When developers do them for the Xbox One X, they’re simply providing higher resolution textures that they feel better stand up to a 4K resolution. In most cases, if a texture holds up really well at 1080p then it probably will at 4K, too. Because of that, terms like “4K texture pack” is pretty meaningless as it really just means “higher resolution textures”.
That’s not the case, in fact no one got pissed off about Dragon Quest Heroes, so no one will be with Final Fantasy. Everyone know the limits and advantages of the Switch and, I repeat, even the Vita version is good looking. The Switch wuld be just better, and enough, with the great advantage of portable playing. Now many will not buy it because of the digital download that’s it. They have bet on the wrong horse by trusting the HD crowd (like you) that’s nonexistent here (in fact you all play with the PS4, while we play with the Switch, that’s it).
You are (still) wrong on textures.
Why would they have gotten pissed off at Dragon Quest Heroes. That was superior to the PS3 version but not to PS4. That’s exactly has expected. You’re asking for them to make a remake of a PS2 look intentionally worse than it did on a system that came out in 2006 just to fit on a physical cartridge. Instead they figured that the assets are already made and the Switch can handle them so why not give Switch owners those full quality assets. After all, one of the biggest selling points of the game is that its a graphical overhaul of a game many already played in 2001..
And no, I’m not wrong about the textures. I’ve seen enough game textures to know this. When people refer to “4K textures” it can mean a 4096×4096 textures or higher resolution textures that hold up better in 4K. It all depends on the context they’re used in. Devs don’t just blindly assign all textures a set resolution, they use what is needed for the resolution the game is being rendered at. That’s why even Fast Racing Neo for the Wii U, used 4096×4096 textures and that game rendered at sub 720p resolutions. Also in God of War 3, several of the textures used on Kratos exceed the screen resolution. So don’t act like 4096×4096 or even any other larger texture sizes are overkill or like devs use them all over the place. These textures sizes have been used for 10 years now and it’s not because devs are wasteful or anything like that. “4k textures” has become a vague term and complaining about them is pointless.
And whose to say that the bet on the wrong crowd? It didn’t even come out yet. And I love how you think the “HD crowd” is some small group of people. I dare you suggest that a developer release a non-HD game in 2018. I dare you. And when was HD ever an issue with this game? It’s already gonna render FFX at 1080p so that was never the issue.
You know what I’m betting? I’m betting people won’t buy it on the system because 1. The may have already played it on PS3 or PS4 or 2. because only Nintendo games sell more than a million units on the Switch.
These people in the comments are exactly the reason why devs don’t port more games on the Switch. They DON’T know the Switch’s limitations, they always blame the developer, and Nintendo’s never wrong. That’s why you still see people wondering why games like Battlefield or Call of Duty won’t come to the Switch. They actually think that the Switch has all that matters for any gamer or gaming demographic to play on Switch.
Meeeeeehhh…
I want FF IV
Don’t think that’s all that likely. They discontinued the PS3 version because it couldn’t handle drawing all the characters and spell effects in large raids. The Switch wouldn’t be able to handle that either.
I think this can be solved with the SNES app for the Switch
Oops! Sorry I read that as FF XIV. My bad lol
No worries
You do realize the Switch is a fair bit more capable than the PS3 is right?
Only in some ways. What a mentioned before was raids with spell effects. Spell effects are all overlapping transparency effects that require blending and a lot of fill rate and bandwidth. The PS3 and Switch have practically the same amount of memory bandwidth so in that respect is not all that much better than the PS3. Pure GPU performance, it has it beat though. It’s CPU is better at general purpose computing but not as good when it comes to floating point performance.
When I got FFX/X-2 on my PS4 digitally, both games came together as one package so I assumed the same was true if you bought it physically. So why wasn’t it done with Switch? Let me guess. Not enough room for both games on the same basic Switch card?
You got it :-)
Again, a lack of research before commenting. Switch carts come in 1, 2, 4 ,8, 16 and 32gb variants with the 64gb variant coming this year…. Like use your head. If Square used the 32gb cart, they could get away with it….
With how much money they are making on Switch & with the supposed belief that Nintendo has money to survive multiple failed systems, I’m sure Nintendo could handle selling some of their Switch carts to 3rd parties at a little loss.
Honestly, I don’t blame 3rd parties for not wanting to spend extra on Switch carts that hold more data. Some of them still have this fear that their games will sell horribly on Nintendo systems so they go with the cheaper carts (or just do pure digital releases.) So far, the only games that have sold better on Nintendo Switch have all mostly been indie games. Of course the irony there is most of those indie games are digital only. If they were guaranteed that their games would sell very well on Switch, they might be more willing to pay extra for better carts.
So sure, you could blame 3rd parties for being cheap but so could the other side say the same about Nintendo being cheap. They are BOTH to blame if you ask me. If they’d talk to each other & make compromises, everyone would win.
I am glad you have this knowledge. Proud of you. Larger games will be coming out this year, or next.
Again, another shallow assessment of the situation. Did you not notice that those sizes actually increase exponentially? Did you think the price would increase linearly? While the prices don’t necessarily increase exponentially, you can just use the limited figures on DRam eXchange and see that you do start seeing larger increases in price as you start looking at denser flash memory.
It would probably make sense for Nintendo to see if their chip suppliers can supply them with 24GB and 48GB options to give devs more options on the high end.
And I can’t help repeat something that I’ve been saying since the Switch was announced, Nintendo should have known this was gonna be problem. I knew it was gonna be a problem before the Switch was even announced. They really should have taken steps to make this less of an issue and the lack of any hardware decompression and physically smaller cartridges don’t help.
32 GB for a remaster is just a too expensive solution, I suppose, for a game that will unlikely sells in the millions. It’s also a 49.99$ game, I suppose they would not have high margins. Still they could have compressed more the game, I find it less problematic than a download only game.
I remember the Vita version was the same way. FFX was on the cart with X-2 being a Digital code.
Switch fans: I’ll take the compromises the Switch has in order to have a home console and handheld in one package.
Also Switch fans: Third parties keep saying their games won’t sell on Nintendo consoles but how will they know that if they don’t release games on it?
*Square-Enix releases Final Fantasy X physically with a download code for X-2 because the two games together are over 20GB and cartridges over 16GB are way more expensive*
Switch fans: Fuck you! I’m not buying!
This is very good for the environment and everyone who wants TOXIC plastic produced from factory because they are greedy and wanna sit on games instead of just enjoying digital future.
People who want extra plastic should pay twice in taxes on the game for the bad environment footprint you leave.
Safe my friends in the woods and go full digital dear people, you don’t swap a cartridge for every app you start up on your phone and don’t give me this excuse it’s because the games are 50 Dollars. It’s 50 because the software is greater, putting it on plastic doesn’t increase the software value and if you only care about reselling than you need to get a job or maybe buy less games.
Happy day everybody
Uhh no. Appreciate your green intentions but people like physical copies of games because they’re irrevocable licenses to the game and the use of it’s data. In a future where all games are distributed digitally, games become at risk of being lost in time do to either server-side licensing issues or games being pulled or whatnot. The prime example is something like PT which is now no longer downloadable and if someone who has it decided to uninstall it, they can’t reinstall it anymore. Physical copies are extremely useful for historical preservation.
Another reason why physical copies are nice is because there are countries where the internet access isn’t all that fast and people have monthly download limits and overages. Downloading 20+GB games could easily exceed those caps and take forever to download.
There are also non-toxic plastics. There is an entire group of plastics called bioplastics. For example, one of the cheapest and most common 3D printing filaments is polylactic acid which is made of corn starch and sugar cane. It even kind of smells like corn when it gets heated up for printing.
The only issue I have with digital games is having enough storage on the Switch. I do have a large micro SD card, so that’s not really an issue for me.
Not sure about your logic on just game cartridges though. You likely bought a game console made of the same “TOXIC plastic produced from a factory” like the rest of us.
I recommend you just stream your games. Lord help us if anything we own is made out of it, let alone a small game cartridge.
Well that’s disappointing and yet unsurprising
Wow! Good ol Square-Anus sure knows its fanbase real good! For a company that focuses mostly on releasing RPGs, a genre long associated with diehard fans that enjoy physical versions and collector editions by its fans, this is exactly what people wanted!
What if they just charged more just so that they can use a 32GB cartridge or would you complain about that, too? To my knowledge, SE is one of the only companies to have used one before on the Switch when they released DragonQuest Heroes I+II.
I’m pretty sure most of squares fanbase doesn’t give a crud whether a game is physical or not.
No Physical copies = None of my Money,
Day one for sure.
Its the same as bayonetta 1+2 why people complain here?
Oh we complained. I imported from Japan.
the question was “why” though.
Just get a microSD card and be done with it.
128GB cards go for pretty cheap now.
Yeah, I had a 64GB sometime last year and now I’ve seen 128GB ones around the same price.
I only buy these half physical/half digital games if they go half price. It’s worked out ok so far. Maybe Japan will get a cartridge like Megaman X Legacy 2 or Bayonetta did.
Cool, I was getting digital anyways. Coming up on 50 games for my switch, and only 1 of them is physical. Sucks for those physical only people though. No idea why they obsess so much about boxes and gamecards but…. eh… to each their own.
Selling a boxed game without the actual game inside? Now I’ve heard everything
Hard pass.