Final Fantasy 16 Is More Playable on Steam Deck Than I Expected - First Impressions

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Final Fantasy 16 is now out on PC, and it is everything I was hoping it would be. It's awesome to finally be able to experience this incredible entry in the franchise on PC, and I really love it. Playing on a desktop PC has been a blast, and it's amazing seeing the game looking as good as it does while running at higher framerates, but is it worth trying to play it on the go? I decided to try the game out, and while Final Fantasy 16 is playable on the Steam Deck, it is harder to run. Even still, I was impressed with the performance, knowing what kind of game this is, and I found it more playable than I expected.

I am so glad to finally see Final Fantasy 16 on PC, and for anyone who is even remotely interested in JRPGs or action-adventure games with real-time combat, this should be an essential to buy. However, the game does have some hefty requirements, making it much harder to run on most hardware without some upscaling help. Thankfully, the game has DLSS, FSR, and XeSS, so there are definitely options, but it does mean some of the game could be blurry.

This is certainly the case with the Steam deck when trying to play the game. It is hefty and absolutely needs upscaling to make the game playable, and from my time so far, FSR 3 at Performance with all low settings is the best. With this, I was getting around 30 - 36 FPS in fights, with some slight drops to 28 in larger fights or walking around very crowded cities and towns. It makes things a bit unstable at first, but I was shocked at how well the game could hold 30 in the fights that mattered.

Cutscenes are the opposite. They almost never hit 30, and when they do, they will almost immediately drop down to the 20s or 12-15 FPS. It's not great, and with the reduced quality due to FSR 3, it can feel like the experience suffers. They are still watchable, and I have had no crashes (which surprised me due to the high RAM usage), but it will not compare to an experience from a more powerful rig.

I did try to change up some settings, other upscalers, and even force the resolution lower, but nothing helped the performance overall. There were some minor improvements, like hitting 30 FPS in some towns, but general gameplay remained the same. I initially thought forcing resolution to 800x500 helped, but in deeper comparisons, it didn't really do much.

So far, I have played up to going into the Greatwoods with Cid, so I am not far in the game, but the performance has been consistent throughout each area I have been in so far.

Yet, even with all of these issues, I am still enjoying playing Final Fantasy 16 on the Steam Deck. It's crazy to me that I am able to even play it on the go without needing to stream or be connected to WiFi, but I can say that I would definitely keep doing it. The biggest thing is to hamper expectations. The Steam Deck is using older hardware and newer games are going to struggle on it. Final Fantasy 16 even struggled on the PlayStation when it was released. So it makes me happy this can run at all and hit 30 FPS more often than not.

If you go in expecting a terrible or iffy performance, you will most likely end up enjoying the experience overall. And that's exactly what I did. I expected mid-20s in all fights, and I was happily sticking to 36 FPS with minor drops. This is an awesome way to experience the game, and I can't say that enough!

Final Fantasy 16 is now available on Steam for $49.99.

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