Square Enix has released Final Fantasy 7 for PlayStation, PC, iPhone, Android, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. But for most of the last decade, if you wanted the ideal Final Fantasy 7 experience, you did not play any of these ports for newer platforms. You played Final Fantasy 7 on PlayStation Vita.
FF7’s modern ports added enticing features such as the ability to fast-forward through random battles, but they also required games on large HD screens with blurred upscale backgrounds. Without mods, all of Square’s beloved PlayStation RPGs were best played on a CRT TV – or far more conveniently, as “PSOne classics” for download on Vita, Sony’s 2012 handheld. The Vita made dozens of amazing (and very, very long) gaming laptops for the first time, and its 5-inch OLED screen was small enough to still look good. If you loved JRPGs more than any other game, the Vita was the best gaming device ever made.
That was it at least until this year. Now it’s Steam Deck.
Travel and paint
PC gaming’s relationship with Japan has flourished in the last decade. These days, Steam is flooded with gates and remasters of classic JRPGs beyond Final Fantasy, from Grandia to Tales of Vesperia to Shin Megami Tensei 3. Before the Steam deck was launched, the Proton software that makes Windows games to work on the deck, problems with the video codecs used in a variety of Japanese games. But that problem was solved, and now people like Trails in the Sky and Persona 4 are working well on deck, even though Valve still has them marked as “Unsupported.”
Valve’s goal with the Steam deck is to ultimately play every game on Steam, even if it’s far from that goal – only about half of Steam’s top 100 games can be played on deck so far. And even though games work on deck, not everything is an ideal fit (I gave up squinting to the user interface and trying to use a trackpad as an accurate mouse cursor within 10 minutes).
JRPGs is however, an ideal fit. They are built for controllers, often turn-based and thus comfortably played at 30 fps, and light up the system requirements, which means hours of battery life. Being able to put the system to sleep and pick it up again later is a gift from god to these long games. And grinding out random matches is long more tasty when I can throw a movie on the TV and pay minimal attention to the handheld in my lap. I really wish I had had Steam Deck when I put 93 hours into Dragon Quest 11.
Because of the Steam library alone, Steam Deck would be a great device for JRPG lovers: Nihon Falcom, Bandai Namco, and of course Square Enix all publish games there. But like the Vita, Steam Deck’s real ace card is its versatility, and how many games it can play that are not explicitly designed for it.
PlayStation Vita was 2012’s do-it-all-gaming handheld. Just as Valve packed Steam Deck with features and controls for every game imaginable, the Sony Vita provided a pair of analog sticks, cameras, Bluetooth, motion controls, a touch screen and touchpad on the back, input for every conceivable situation. Vita owners could not only download lots of classic PlayStation games, they could also stream games from PS4 to Vita with Remote Play, making new, advanced console games portable as well. Vita was even backwards compatible with PSP games, which further enriched its catalog.
Sony infamously referred to the Vita as a “legacy platform” in 2015, just three years after its release, and it appeared that the Vita spent most of its life dying slowly (relative). It was more or less abandoned by Sony, but indies and Japanese niche games continued to support it for years, with Vita RPGs still being released in Japan as late as 2020. Vita also had an active hacking and emulation scene, though it was not. powerful enough to emulate many systems past Super Nintendo without any hassle.
Yet the Vita was such a versatile device for its time, it was the kind of system that inspired people to see what they could play on it. The hardware was just as much a draw as the games themselves.
PC Portable
Part of me wished the Steam tire was as slim as the Vita: I would love to be able to put it in my pocket instead of carrying it around in a thick carrying case in my backpack. But Deck has many other strengths besides being more powerful: cloud storage, Steam’s controller configurator, and community tools like EmuDeck, which come from being an open platform. As Vitas around the world gradually wears out, and Sony eventually stops selling its old games, I hope Vita fans see Steam Deck as a replacement.
Where Vita was the best way to play PS1 games for many years, these games can now be beautifully imitated on deck with DuckStation running at higher resolutions than they originally did. It can also handle PS2 games, and the emulator hack opens the door to get older games running flawlessly in widescreen and by using HD texture replacement mods.
Meanwhile, the final versions of JRPGs like Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 9 are now undoubtedly the PCs, thanks to AI upscale mods like Satsuki Yatoshi’s and Moguri. I installed the Moguri mod on Steam Deck, and Final Fantasy 9 looks great; I also loaded Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and changed their fonts, something you will not be able to do when they are inevitably released on the Nintendo Switch. Can you imagine getting stuck with this? The recently remastered port of Chrono Cross has mixed reviews on Steam thanks to bizarre performance issues and poor upscaling, but modders are already working hard to improve it.
Through Retroarch, it is even possible to install emulators for Japanese PCs, such as the NEC PC-88 and PC-98, which opens the door to explore the origins of Japanese RPGs on the same handheld that holds everything from a new version of Final Fantasy 1 for its bizarre remake of Stranger of Paradise. Ironically, some of the only JRPGs that Steam Deck is currently unable to play are those released exclusively for Vita. Vita emulation is still in its infancy, with only about 10% of the games being playable so far. But it certainly gives us something to look forward to.