Final Fantasy Origin modders are making everyone bald for better performance • Eurogamer.net

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has major performance issues on PC, partly caused by the most hilarious thing imaginable.

It turns out hair and fur textures absolutely tank performance, with Twitter user AkiraJkr reporting frame rates as low as 8FPS (thanks, PC Gamer).

This Elf, even on MINIMUM, NO SHADOWS drops my FPS to 8 ? pic.twitter.com/mpaPhMWzGC

— AkiraJkr (@AkiraJkr1) March 20, 2022

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view.
Manage cookie settings

Fortunately, modders have found a way to mitigate the issue, albeit in a rather drastic way.

Reddit user MorrisonGamer has adapted a tool to toggle shaders on or off to improve performance, including one to make everyone in the game bald.

If you can tolerate the hair loss, you’ll be compensated with a considerable gain in framerate.

It should be noted that hairy characters are one of many causes of the game’s performance woes. MorrisonGamer writes that particles from Soul Bursting can also destroy performance: “Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin has been an actual monster in terms of performance.”

These issues aren’t limited to PC either, with MorrisonGamer deducing that the same intensive game models were also shipped on console versions of the game.

FF Origins Strangers of Paradise seemingly has a lot of framerate (and resolution/visual) issues (especially on consoles), it’s because their models are genuinely the worst optimized thing I’ve ever seen, including stuff like 30mb geometry for (some) common enemies. pic.twitter.com/IeZTg5QSMs

— DeathChaos (@DeathChaos25) March 19, 2022

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view.
Manage cookie settings

“Baffling writing aside, default story difficulty makes this the breeziest Soulslike ever, while combat still carries depth,” writes Alan Wen in Eurogamer’s review of the game.