Final Fantasy 16 on Steam Deck sure is an experience

But it’s worse on the Asus Ally

Final Fantasy 16 / Square Enix

Square Enix is bringing Final Fantasy 16 to PC in September 2024 and launched a free demo to give folks an idea of what to expect. My first reaction was to download Final Fantasy 16 on Steam Deck and the Asus Rog Ally – the latter of which I use far more often than Valve’s handheld – to see how it fares on both handheld devices. The answer is not great, and on the Ally, it’s downright unplayable at times.

Of course, this is just the demo, and it’s possible Square Enix pumped more optimizations into the launch version or will tweak it after release so it runs more efficiently on handhelds. No PS5-to-PC port has run well at launch, particularly The Last of Us, but they were fixed pretty quickly.

Final Fantasy 16 on Steam Deck tells you it can run at 60fps and 30fps, and it lies. I feel confident saying there’s absolutely no way FF16 can hit and maintain 60fps on Steam Deck, not when it struggles to stay at 30 during cutscenes – which are capped at 30fps – and fluctuates wildly from 20fps up to the 45-50fps range during gameplay segments. The opening sequence between Phoenix and Ifrit stuttered almost to a halt during the cinematic and struggled its way through until the setting changed to the battle against Titan and Shiva, where things evened out a bit.

Final Fantasy 16 / Square Enix

This was while playing on low graphics settings with FSR 3 and dynamic resolution enabled. Bumping the settings up to medium knocked the framerate down further. It’s not unplayable, but it’s not great either, nor does it bode well for the large-scale Eikon battles later in the game.

Of slightly more concern was combat, where it often felt like Clive was moving through a layer of invisible water. Slight input lag isn’t ideal in a fast-paced action game, and it certainly doesn’t feel good to play. There’s a chance this isn’t FF16’s default state on Steam Deck, though, as I suspect a frame rate problem might be causing the issue.

There’s a non-zero chance the game will just ignore your fps cap and do what it wants anyway, particularly in cutscenes or when a cinematic transitions into an action scene. I tried capping it at 30, 40, and 60fps, and it just kept trying to hit 60fps in every gameplay segment, regardless. Performance tanks when that happens, as you’d expect, though on the few occasions where it settles down and the cap works the way it should, action and movement feel normal. Those occasions just didn’t happen very often.

Final Fantasy 16 / Square Enix

Performance takes a much bigger hit on the Asus Ally in those situations. Despite the handheld’s advantage when it comes to processing and graphical power, I ran into so many issues that, unless the launch version is in a much different state compared to the demo, I don’t think I’ll bother with it on that platform. Performance is more stable during cutscenes, but the game has a brief meltdown any time a scene starts, freezes, and plays a few frames in fits and starts, then moves ahead like everything’s fine. During action sections, the game crashes to a halt for a few seconds if there’s any kind of object collision or a new character or item comes onscreen. I tried lowering the resolution to 1200x900, bumping the graphics settings to low, adjusting the refresh rate – nothing fixed it. Performance stabilized a little after the prologue on low settings, but not by much. 

I’m hopeful Square Enix launches the game in a better optimized form. Yes, it works on regular PC just fine – though it also has a habit of ignoring frame rate caps there as well – but I much prefer playing longer games and the best RPGs untethered from my computer. If you’re keen on playing Final Fantasy 16 on Steam Deck, it might be worth waiting for a while after it releases on September 17, 2024, to see if things get better.