Here are all the platforms it's been released on since 1987: Famicom, MSX2, NES, WonderSwan Color, PlayStation (as part of Final Fantasy Origins), Game Boy Advance (as part of Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls), PlayStation Portable, mobile, Nintendo 3DS.Įvery single one is different-many of them dramatically so, with complete graphical remakes, new dungeons, or even redesigned mechanics.

Let's look at the very first Final Fantasy as an example. One of my favorite things about the collection is you can play the arcade version of a game like Ikari Warriors and then switch over to the NES version, seeing how the technical capabilities of the hardware influenced the art, the color choices, the level design-everything. The SNK Collection, which developer and historian Frank Cifaldi likes to call a 'playable documentary,' contains all kinds of amazing art and design documents scanned at high resolution, along with touched-up emulated versions of a bunch of 80s games. Basically, Square should look at the fantastic work Digital Eclipse did with the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection and build a subscription around that kind of reverence for its past works.

A digital museum of rare Final Fantasy ports, along with supporting materials that add context to how those games were made and sold in their day. But that quote from Matsuda got me thinking about what Square Enix could offer that none of these others could: a comprehensive archive of every version of its games, not just a single definitive one. The subscription space is getting crowded quickly, with Xbox Game Pass, UPlay+, Origin Access, and soon Google Stadia. Square has ported, remastered and remade Final Fantasy games so many times over the years, compiling all those versions would be fascinating

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