Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has been suffering from performance issues across all supported platforms since its release. The PC version, in particular, can suddenly tank frame rates to slow the game down to a crawl for brief periods. It turns out that the depressing performance woes are being caused by highly unoptimized in-game character models and assets.
Taking to Twitter on the weekend, modder DeathChaos pointed out that Stranger of Paradise is using a lot of models with a high count of polygons. Such high-poly models are usually optimized for in-game usage according to platform needs but were surprisingly ignored by developer Team Ninja.
Stranger of Paradise for example has common enemies that are using high-poly models for no reason at all. Lich, one of the endgame bosses in the game, is using a model with nearly 2 million triangular polygons, and that does not even cover the textures and materials slapped on top.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is hence struggling to maintain stable frame rates because its character models need to be optimized across the board.
FF Origins Strangers of Paradise seemingly has a lot of framerate (and resolution/visual) issues (especially on consoles), it's because their models are genuinely the worst optimized thing I've ever seen, including stuff like 30mb geometry for (some) common enemies. pic.twitter.com/IeZTg5QSMs
— DeathChaos (@DeathChaos25) March 19, 2022
There's a boss model in SoP that's 90mb (the geometry alone, no textures or anything) and it has like 1.8 million tris and im just like, who let this go through? pic.twitter.com/CCjzFVeQIL
— DeathChaos (@DeathChaos25) March 19, 2022
In another example; Minister Lagone, one of the main non-playable characters, is known to tank frame rates as soon as he appears on the screen. Even a GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card is only good enough to maintain 25 frames per second, while older graphics cards can go down as low as 15 frames per second.
The problem, as it turns out, is the fur coat of Minister Lagone. As confirmed below, disabling the fur coat model helps keep the frame rate alive.
The Minister drops a RTX 3090 to 25 FPS because of a fucking FUR COAT
uncompressed videos above 💀thanks Twitter pic.twitter.com/9I8uTlXn2N
— AkiraJkr (@AkiraJkr1) March 20, 2022
Stranger of Paradise has so many issues that a modder has even come forward with a mod to disable a number of performance-deteriorating models and assets. Unfortunately, though, that mod is only workable on PC.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin follows Babylon’s Fall as two highly disappointing releases by publisher Square Enix.