Final Fantasy's first iPhone outing is a mixed bag

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Square Enix on Monday night released Final Fantasy: Crystal Defenders ($7.99, App Store) and Final Fantasy: Crystal Defenders Lite (free, App Store), a tower defence game expressed using the world and characters from Final Fantasy Tactics A2, where you defend crystals using different units such as Black Mages.

A game developer with the resources of Square Enix, you would think, would be able to fairly easily produce a good, if not better game for the iPhone than smaller outfits. It seems that they've been able to produce an acceptable game, with the drawback that a pretty rubbish looking joystick takes up half of the screen.

To make things worse, this joystick controls a mouse cursor which is used to interact with the game itself, which possibly adds up to the ugliest and least intuitive control scheme for a touch screen ever devised. We should have sussed something was up from oddly shaped screenshots released two months ago.

Despite this, it seems that Square Enix's first foray into the app store has been saved by the game actually being quite entertaining, even if it is fiddly to control and fairly ugly. You can take a risk and buy it now, or wait to see if or when they integrate proper controls.

Nevertheless, it's curious to see that a lot of larger developers still manage to release sub-par products on the iPhone compared to independent developers with significantly smaller teams and development budgets.

Article by AppleInsider.