Final Fantasy Crisis Core Final Fantasy Crisis Core Art
Foursquare Enix abased FF7 Crunch Core to the PSP, so these fans are making an HD remaster themselves
Last Fantasy 7 was such a large deal back in 1997 that information technology was the first Terminal Fantasy game to go a PC port in the w. It'due south been ported to all kinds of platforms since then, PC again, and remade (which nosotros hope to encounter on PC in 2021). To celebrate its tenth anniversary, Square Enix even made a suite of sequels and spin-offs, including a mobile game, the movie Appearance Children, a weird third-person shooter, and an activeness RPG for the PSP. That last 1, Crunch Cadre, was the all-time received of the bunch: It starred Zack, the cool guy whose identity Deject stole, swinging around the Buster sword in a game that looked ridiculously skillful for the PSP'south hardware. Thirteen years and one huge FF7 remake later on, Foursquare Enix hasn't touched Crunch Cadre, leaving information technology to linger in obscurity. So some modders decided to requite it the Hd remaster handling themselves.
It was prissy to take something to really look forrard to doing at habitation to have my mind off of questions like 'I wonder if I was exposed to the virus today?'
"I saw it every bit a chance to teach myself a new skill and entertain myself during the coronavirus shutdowns," says Evan Qualls, who's spent the final ix months working on the FF7 Crisis Cadre Upscale Project in his spare fourth dimension. Qualls works in telecom sales, and has continued going into his job as an 'essential worker' throughout the year.
Modding Crisis Core quickly turned into a distraction from the stress of working throughout the pandemic. "It was overnice to have something to actually wait forward to doing at dwelling house to take my heed off of questions like 'I wonder if I was exposed to the virus today?'" he says.
While many modders take on projects to enhance their favorite games, Qualls had actually never played Crisis Cadre, or even owned a PSP. But later playing the new Terminal Fantasy 7 Remake, he decided he was interested in learning more almost Zack's story. Fifty-fifty playing Crisis Core on an emulator, though, information technology was clear some parts of its presentation, similar the text, didn't concord up on a bigger, college-res screen.
"As I was playing through it I got stuck at some office and looked upward a YouTube video and noticed the text looked better and the creator mentioned he was using a text mod," Qualls says. "And then I looked it up and saw how the modernistic worked with the PPSSPP emulator. And so I remembered the AI-upscaled FF7 Remako modern and the FF9 Moguri mod and thought 'why hasn't someone just dumped all the textures in a PSP game and used AI to automate upscaling them?' Next affair I know I was teaching myself Python and the project just went from there."
Unfortunately, upscaling an unabridged game isn't as easy as feeding a agglomeration of jpgs to an AI and letting it work its magic. After trying out the popular ESRGAN model, Qualls settled on Topaz AI, which is faster and amend documented. Simply he says that both tools are built for RGB images, rather than RGBA images—the 'A' is the alpha channel used for transparency. And Crisis Core has a lot of textures with transparency.
"These tools don't handle transparency very well at all," he says. "They actually strip out the transparency aqueduct all together and upscale that as a separate paradigm before fusing them back together. Unfortunately that resulted in some very poor upscales."
That meant that much of the work on the Crisis Core Upscale Project had to be washed past mitt. Thankfully, Qualls wasn't taking it on solo. He made his projection open source, and two other members of the Qhimm.com forum, which hosts a number of Concluding Fantasy modding projects, joined in to help. Working with Qualls, modders Devina and Zakkura have upscaled something like 6,000 textures to 4x their original resolution, sometimes creating textures from scratch if the original source couldn't upscale well.
"I felt Crisis Cadre was overlooked," says Devina, who's still actively working on the Crunch Core Upscale Project equally a texture artist. "I desire people to feel similar they're really in Midgar and the game'due south world, and then I don't desire blurry textures to remind people they're playing what was originally a handheld game with arrangement limitations. Hopefully when people employ our project, they'll see something resembling a PS2 game at least, since a lot of the textures in the game are very Nintendo 64-like."
Devina pointed out that Crisis Cadre'southward textures include some strange choices or oversights, like spelling Nibelheim "Mibelheim." They've been fixing those sorts of mistakes, just have mostly tried to keep their HD version of Crisis Core faithful to the original. "We've had to brand some creative choices because the original PSP textures were defective or hid the system'due south shortcomings, so not everything in the projection is going to exist a perfect representation of the original, simply I like to recollect most of our decisions won't bother virtually people," Devina says.
Even earlier information technology's done, this is likely to be the definitive version of Crunch Core for years to come.
That management was a deliberate pick for Qualls, who said after playing Crisis Core, he really didn't beloved the game. Just some Concluding Fantasy fans do. One time he'd posted some initial work on the Qhimm forum, he realized how much information technology meant to some people, and decided to proceed the upscale every bit close to the original as possible.
Devina has made a few original additions to liven up the game world, like creating legible textures for signs that were once unreadable blobs. The event is peachy—similar the AI-enhanced mods for Final Fantasy seven and 9, the upscale of Crisis Cadre looks better than many of Square Enix'southward own ports. Installing the hello-res texture pack is easy, too, thanks to emulator PPSSPP. Afterwards downloading the files from Github, you lot merely open PPSSPP'due south carte du jour with the game running and gear up it to replace textures with the ones y'all've downloaded. The emulator volition insert them on the fly.
Qualls and Devina estimate they're about ninety pct finished with the project, merely that last bit of tinkering could go on for a long time. "I still have a lot of work to do on the characters and I experience like this is sort of a situation where you find a speck of a grit on the floor, but then more dust near something you already vacuumed," says Devina. "I'm always finding things to improve."
Still, fifty-fifty before information technology'southward done, this is likely to exist the definitive version of Crisis Core for years to come. Information technology seems like an obvious pick for Square Enix to port to newer platforms alongside the FF7 Remake, which I said to Devina.
"I used to sort of recollect like that, too (why can't Square just remaster this game already?), but having looked into the files and how the internal logic works, I can see why information technology would be hard for them," Devina says.
Qualls agrees—both think that Crunch Cadre was divisive enough to discourage Square from putting in the attempt of what would likely be a full-on remake. A port would have to grapple with some of Crisis Cadre's stranger pattern decisions and the limitations of the PSP hardware, similar its single analog stick, that experience awkward today.
The void of a modern port gave these modders a way to pass 2020, though, something Qualls is especially grateful for. He hopes a few more people will be interested in helping stop off the Crisis Core Upscale Projection, or utilise the tools he created subsequently educational activity himself Python. They help organize dumped textures and generate the file PPSSPP uses to observe them. Downloading the modern, tools, or getting involved is every bit unproblematic as heading to Github.
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Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/square-enix-abandoned-ff7-crisis-core-to-the-psp-so-these-fans-are-making-an-hd-remaster-themselves/
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