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Reviews of FFT for the iOS all seem to complain about erratic smoothness due to frequent graphical slowdowns. Here, for example, is a review of the game as played on an iPhone 4.

Has anybody played the game on the iPhone 4S? I'm hoping that, given the 4S' improved processor, these slowdowns will disappear, but I'd like somebody to confirm/deny that.

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    Great question. I've considered buying this game, myself for the iPad, but these awful reviews have prevented me from purchasing the game. I believe the game may have had an update that improved this, but I'm not sure if it only helped certain iOS devices.
    – RLH
    Commented Nov 4, 2011 at 2:38
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    At the moment, the question is somewhat moot; Square Enix recently added the following to the FFT app description: "You may have a problem below when you play this app on iPhone 4S. *Freezed unexpectedly in many places. We apologize for the inconvenience. It will be updated soon." Hope the update also improves performance!
    – SuperElectric
    Commented Nov 17, 2011 at 23:15
  • Square-Enix has patched the game to fix the frequent crashes, so I bought it. I've added an answer to my own question below.
    – SuperElectric
    Commented Dec 16, 2011 at 21:19

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I've bought the game. The answer to my question is that during some spells, there's some slowdown, but most other actions aren't noticeably slow. There are still some occasional bugs. I've been playing for 9 hours now, and there have been 2-3 crashes. The autosave seems to do a good job of salvaging your interrupted game though. I once had a very weird bug where the background music (not sound effects) didn't play, despite the fact that it was turned on in the options. Rebooting the iPhone fixed this.

All told, the bugs aren't enough to seriously dampen the fun. It's as great a game as I remember.

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Here's a link to the basic specs of the game. It says nothing about the performance of the game in an iPhone 4S. However, if you check the comment section at the end of the page, a lot of users are complaining about crashes in the game.

As an iOS developer, I can tell you that most frame-rate drops and slowdowns happen due to poor optimization. And most of the time, the crashes happen due to poor memory management or random bugs in the code.

This is pure speculation, but given that this is a ported game, it is quite possible that many sections of the code are not optimized to work well on iOS.

Having double the processor speed in the iPhone 4s is going to do little to alleviate these issues. It just might help the game to keep more stable FPS or load quicker.

The only way I see for this game to run better in iOS is if the developers release a patch to fix bugs and optimize the code.

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  • I've played this game at length on my iPhone and, as a fellow developer, can confirm that the crashes act like a memory leak. It's a good idea to completely restart the app every so often to avoid the inevitable crash.
    – bpcookson
    Commented Aug 27, 2013 at 4:36

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