It’s painfully clear how much money this would rake in; the most popular entry in the most popular RPG franchise ported onto today’s most popular gaming platform. If Final Fantasy IV is any indication, there’s absolutely no reason why a straight conversion couldn’t happen. Just looks at the models:

Above: 1997 has aged horribly

Any image of Cloud released since 2005 has been of his vastly redone Advent Children visage – that’s what he actually looks like in-game (though a bit better in the battles). Compare that to Rosa from FFIV – she looks better. But what about all those precious cutscenes, how will they all fit on a DS card?

Hrm, FFIV had those too. True, not as many as the three-disc FFVII, but those DS cards can pack data in pretty tight and for the sake of gameplay, we’d be willing to sacrifice some of the lamer clips. We don’t necessarily need a remake (though that’s welcome as well), we just want a means for gamers who were born after 1997 to quickly and easily plow through a game vehemently defend on the net as The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened.

The Chrono Trigger conversion happened concurrently with FFIV development, so why couldn’t an FFVII conversion be in the works while Square-Enix tackles the SaGa 2 3D remake (or perhaps Final Fantasy V?) We want to play it again, but the combination of fidgety PS3 compatibility, digging up our PS2s, finding old PS1 memory cards and the way PSone games look on HDTVs make it not worth the effort. We’ll patiently wait for Square-Enix to announce the conversion… hopefully soon.

Jan 19, 2009

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