Final Fantasy 16’s PC Port Is A Rough Version Of One Of 2023’s Best Games

Final Fantasy 16 is probably one of my favorite games released last year. If Baldur’s Gate 3 hadn’t also come out in the same year, then it would have probably been my game of the year. The title has definite narrative problems, but the sheer scale of the Eikon battles is absolutely staggering and makes for one of the best experiences you can have on the PS5. 

The problem is that the performance mode on the PS5 was rough. The title would often dip underneath 60FPS, with the resolution suffering in a similar way, and it made the spectacle of some of the moments feel like they were falling flat. Sure, it all looks really nice, but at the cost of the ability to actually play the game at a stable framerate. Now, Final Fantasy 16 has finally been released on PC, promising that it’ll bring with it more stability, but with Square Enix’s track record of poor Final Fantasy ports (Final Fantasy VII Remake sticks in mind as one of the worst ports in recent memory), can they actually pull this off?

Specs:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 
• Intel R Core i5-10400F 
• 16GB RAM

In short, no. In long, sort of. The port is a very mixed bag and not one that I can recommend purchasing at full price until a few patches are released, but if you’re extremely desperate to play the game then it does at the very least work, something that couldn’t be said about FF7 Rebirth.

Every single cutscene is capped at a fixed 30FPS framerate. This wouldn’t be a problem if this wasn’t a title primarily focused on narrative, but it is. Every five minutes, you’re thrust into a new cutscene that reveals some important information, which means that every five minutes you can expect your framerate to constantly drop. It’s disorientating, above all else.

There’s also some really weird frame drops in the game. While playing the Eikon battles, everything runs fairly well, with some notable drops. During the battle between Ifrit and Garuda, I was averaging 71FPS, though at one point I hit a low of 9FPS, something that just isn’t acceptable in a modern AAA PC Port. But while running through the open world, not engaging in any combat whatsoever? Well, that’s a completely different story.

Traveling to Martha’s Rest saw the game flicker between highs of 50FPS to lows of 25FPS, and it was changing extremely often. It’s an odd thing to happen, especially since not once during this entire period did I ever enter combat. In fact, combat was a lot more stable in this area, with combat not seeing any drops at all. It’s the exploration that’s really taxing the GPU for some reason, and even messing around with the settings doesn’t fix this.

There’s also a considerable amount of pop-in. While combat tends not to suffer from this problem (which is a given, especially seeing as combat in this game has the player fighting up close and personal with enemies), traversal can see enemies and NPCs in the distance popping in at an alarming regularity, and when they do the game tends to stutter and falter for a brief period of time. It’s something that can be mitigated by messing around in the settings, but not something that can be completely eliminated. 

Speaking of the settings, there’s everything you’d expect here, with a few weird oversights. The game automatically defaults to DLSS 3 on any card, which is fine for anybody with a 40 series graphics card, but for anybody below that? It simply won’t work. For those without a 40 series, make sure that you switch the setting from DLSS 3 to AMD FSR 3.1 if you intend on using frame-gen. Another thing that I noticed in the pause menu for the game is that the menu has a ‘Purchase on Steam’ option, which is small but odd. It’s clear this is a holdover from the demo that was released, but the fact that it’s in the base game speaks to a general lack of care on the port.

It’s also really important to note that since more and more people have started to adopt the system, this game doesn’t run on Steam Deck. While games that are listed as unsupported often actually work fine on the system, this isn’t one of them. Not only will you get sub-30 running at the lowest settings, but it essentially absorbs the battery life and turns it into a black hole. 

So overall, Final Fantasy 16 is a really mixed bag. It’s definitely possible to play in its current state, and it also absolutely depends on your PC specs. But even on higher-end PCs you’ll see drops throughout the game, and pop-in issues persist. Maybe wait a few months on this one, if you want to experience Fantasy in its Final form.