Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has been officially released on PC but without any playable demo. Its initial impressions are highly negative at the time of writing, which publisher Square Enix might have been expecting since both the PlayStation and Xbox consoles were graced with a playable demo to allow players to try out the game before making any purchases.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is currently available on PC for those who pre-ordered, most of whom are requesting Final Fantasy fans to stay as far away as possible, at least until Square Enix has rolled out much-needed optimizations to make the game playable.
need to contact a square enix rep or something to switch out my key to PS5 because i cannot stream this, getting huge slowdown while OBS is open (not even while capturing the game) @SquareEnix pic.twitter.com/iCQNrxQd2X
— Stickman Sham (@StickmanSham) March 16, 2022
According to mounting criticisms on Reddit and ResetEra from earlier today, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin was released on PC in a broken state.
GPU and CPU usage can go up to 99 percent while playing on hardware which should otherwise be good enough. Even an Nvidia RTX 3080 barely reaches 90 frames per second at 1080p despite Square Enix promoting 120 frames per second to be possible ahead of the PC release.
To make matters worse, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is dropping frame rates to run in slow motion. Locking the frame rate to 60 frames per second will also run the game in slow motion. Disabling the cumbersome V-Sync and G-Sync features have no effect on the game either.
The stuttering frame rate not only makes battles difficult but also ruins in-game cutscenes. Furthermore, day-one players have also reported rendering issues during battles where characters suddenly become low-resolution textured models.
Square Enix has not issued a statement over its rocky PC release, but Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin looks to be another disappointing release from the publisher on the heels of Babylon’s Fall—dubbed the worst game to release on PC in recent years, and the worst console exclusive to release for PlayStation 5 in history.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is now available on PC exclusively through the Epic Games Store for those still interested.
