Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has had a rocky launch since its release last week. Before the game was even released, players on PC who got it early were complaining of severe performance issues. The game also has graphical issues on next-gen consoles. However, on PC one modder has been able to find a unique fix to the performance problems.
Twitter user @AkiraJkr1 noticed that frame drops were most prominent on PC when there was an excess of hair on screen. One egregious example of the frame drops occurs when one character has a fur coat. AkiraJkr1 found that with the coat on screen the frame rate dropped to 25 FPS with an RTX 3090. Removing the coat kept the frame rate stable at the 30 FPS target.
In another example, removing the hair of one character takes the FPS from 8 up to a steady 30. One Reddit user has even created a tool to make all characters in Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin bald in order to improve performance.
Sleuthing from other players has revealed that character models in the game are excessively large and could be responsible for some of the performance issues. Twitter user @DeathChaos25 was able to take a look at some of the character models in the game and found that they are far larger than necessary. They claim the models are “genuinely the worst optimized thing I’ve ever seen.”
For example, one bat (a common enemy in Stranger of Paradise) has 300,000 polygons. Typically the main character in a AAA PS4 game would have around 100-150,000 polygons. Meaning one common enemy is twice the size of most game’s main characters. With character models that large, it’s no wonder the game is struggling and looks, at times, like a PS3 or Xbox 360 game on next-gen consoles.
