Earlier this month Square Enix held their E3 2021 press event, showcasing a couple of new IP’s along with some updates to existing ones. One of those titles is Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, which is a collection of the first six Final Fantasy games in the franchise with some visual pixel upgrades. The company has now followed up a little bit with this project in a 30 minute video, which for some reason has become private, and is more of a mini retrospective with some of the original developers including series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and original series composer Nobuo Uematsu. However, at the end of the video, it was revealed that the first titles will begin releasing sometime next month, as it was noted by well known video game aficionado Wario64.
The main highlight of the remaster are the pixels, the sprites that comprise the main characters, enemies, monsters, and other small aspects of each game. Through each Final Fantasy game, the pixels were improved upon, and the characters designs and even facial features became more and more defined. This video gave us a brief glimpse of how the Pixel Remastered sprites look, and it’s apparent that the team working on these new iterations are trying to keep the same aesthetics of the original NES and SNES style as opposed to the newer versions. All of the original art and character designs were created by legendary sketch artist Yoshitaka Amano.
This will not be the first time that the classic Final Fantasy games will be brought back in one form or another as Square Enix has re-released them a plethora of times, with the most recent versions being for iOS, Android, and PC. As of this writing, Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster is also launching for only these aforementioned platforms, as the company has not made any comment on whether they will ever some to home consoles. They also did not offer any specific release date for the first entries for Remaster, as each game is going to be released separately instead of all at once. Hopefully we’ll find out more before then.