Steam Deck is now the ultimate JRPG handheld
Square Enix has released Final Fantasy VII on PlayStation, PC, iPhone, Android, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. But for most of the past decade, you haven’t ported any of these ports to newer platforms if you want the ideal Final Fantasy VII experience. You played Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation Vita.
The modern port of FF7 adds some enticing features, such as the ability to fast-forward through random battles, but they also need to be played on a large HD screen with a blurry magnified background. Without mods, all of Square’s most popular PlayStation RPGs are best played on CRT TVs — or, more conveniently, on Sony’s 2012 handheld Vita as downloadable “PSOne classics.” The Vita has made dozens of amazing (very, very long) gaming portables for the first time, and its 5-inch OLED screen is small enough to still look great. If you like JRPGs more than any other, the Vita is the best gaming device ever.
At least until this year. Now for the Steam deck.
rise and grind
The relationship between PC gaming and Japan has flourished over the past decade.Today, Steam is flooded with ports and remakes of classic JRPGs beyond Final Fantasy, from Grandia arrive Vesperia’s story arrive Shin Megami Tensei 3. Before the launch of Steam Deck, there was a problem with the video codec used in a large number of Japanese games by the Proton software that makes Windows games run on the Deck.But this problem has been solved, now something like trail in the sky and Persona 4 Works just fine on deck, although Valve still marks them as “unsupported”.
Valve’s goal with Steam Deck is for it to eventually play all games on Steam, though it’s still a long way from that goal — only about half of Steam’s top 100 games are playable on the Deck so far . Even if games do run on the Deck, not everything will fit (I gave up squinting at the UI and trying to use the trackpad as a precise mouse pointer for 10 minutes).
Japanese role-playing game Yes Still, the ideal match. They’re designed for controllers, are usually turn-based, so they can be played comfortably at 30 fps, and they’re light on system requirements, meaning hours of battery life. Being able to put the system to sleep and restore it later is a godsend for these long games.Hone random battles are Far It’s tastier when I can put a movie on the TV and pay little attention to the handheld on my lap. When I put 93 hours into Dragon Quest 11, I wish I could have the Steam deck.
With the power of the Steam library alone, the Steam Deck will be a great device for JRPG fans: Nihon Falcom, Bandai Namco, and of course Square Enix are all releasing games there. But just like the Vita, the real trump card of the Steam deck is its versatility, and how many games it can play that weren’t designed for it.
The PlayStation Vita was 2012’s all-around gaming handheld.Just as Valve gave Steam Deck the features and control options for any game imaginable, Sony gave the Vita a pair of analog sticks, cameras, bluetooth, motion controls, touchscreen and The touchpad on the back can be used for input in every possible situation. Not only can Vita users download a ton of classic PlayStation games, but they can also stream games from PS4 to Vita via Remote Play, making new high-end console games portable as well. The Vita is even backward compatible with PSP games, further enriching its catalog.
Sony infamously dubbed the Vita a “legacy platform” in 2015, and only three years after its release, the Vita appears to be slowly dying (related) for most of its life. It was more or less abandoned by Sony, but indie and niche Japanese games have supported it for years, until 2020 when the Vita RPG was still released in Japan. The Vita also has an active hacking and emulation scene, although it’s not powerful enough to emulate many systems beyond the Super Nintendo without any issues.
Still, the Vita was a multipurpose device at the time, a system that inspired people to understand what they could play on it. The hardware is as appealing as the game itself.
laptop
Part of me wants the Steam Deck to be as slim as the Vita: I want to be able to tuck it into my pocket instead of putting it in a chunky suitcase in my backpack. But in addition to being more powerful, Deck has many other advantages: cloud saving, Steam’s controller configurator, and community tools like EmuDeck from its being an open platform. As Vitas around the world wear out and Sony finally stops selling its old games, I hope Vita fans will use the Steam deck as a replacement.
The Vita has been the best way to play PS1 games for years, and now those games are now perfectly emulated on the DuckStation’s Deck, running at a higher resolution than ever before.It can also handle PS2 games and the emulator hack is turned on to make older games run perfectly in widescreen and use HD Texture Replacement Mod.
Meanwhile, the final versions of JRPGs like Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 9 are now unquestionably PC, thanks to AI high-end mods such as Satsuki Mito and Mao Li. I installed the Moguri mod on the Steam platform and Final Fantasy 9 looks great; I also loaded the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and modified their fonts, which you won’t be able to do when they inevitably release on the Nintendo Switch at this point. Can you imagine being stuck with this problem?The recently remastered Chrono Cross port received mixed reviews on Steam, thanks to Weird performance issue The upgrade isn’t great, but modders are already working hard to improve it.
With Retroarch, it’s even possible to install emulators for Japanese PCs like the NEC PC-88 and PC-98, opening the door to exploring the origins of Japanese RPGs on the same handheld device, from the new version of Final Fantasy 1 to the strange remake of Paradise Stranger people. Ironically, some of the JRPGs that Steam Deck can’t play right now were released exclusively for the Vita. The Sims Still in its infancy, only about 10% of games are currently playable. But at least it gave us something to look forward to.