Final Fantasy 3 comes to OUYA

With three quarters still to go until launch, OUYA is starting to get not only the trust of future customers, but also the trust of many launch partners. Just a few days ago they announced that OnLive games are coming to OUYA, and today they are announcing that Final Fantasy 3 will also be available to OUYA players.

This morning, we are honored to announce that OUYA is partnering with Square Enix to bring you one of the most beloved franchises in gaming — Final Fantasy. We will kick this off with Final Fantasy III, which will be a launch title on OUYA. This will be the first time gamers outside of Japan can play FFIII on their televisions through a console.

I believe we’re going to see more popular game makers announce partnership with OUYA in the future, and the reason is simple. Porting an Android game to OUYA should be pretty easy, because OUYA will be based on Android 4 or later. However, they still need to make that game look as good as possible on that console, and being a console it means that they might get more flexibility on how they get to use the hardware.

For example, their games could get to use up to 500 MB of RAM, while regular Android apps are only allowed to use like 50 MB of RAM, so they can be as lean as possible for mobile devices. But OUYA developers won’t have to worry about that sort of restriction, because energy efficiency doesn’t matter as much for a console, which is why we might also see a beefed up Tegra 3 processors, that uses a lot more power than the one found inside mobile devices. I’d still prefer Tegra 4 over it because it’s a new architecture, with presumably unified shaders, a lot more cores and OpenGL ES 3.0 support, which means more graphics features, but this might do for starters.

OUYA also seems to somewhat confirm this, by saying the OUYA version of Final Fantasy will be HD and with “glorious” graphics detail:

We’re promising to deliver Final Fantasy III like you’ve never seen it before – Hironobu Sakaguchi’s third installment in the role playing game franchise will be updated to exploit OUYA’s high-definition resolution in glorious graphic detail. For those of you who are new to Final Fantasy, we’ll offer a free demo so you can give it a go!

If you want to still donate and “pre-order” your own OUYA, you can still do so on their Kickstarter page

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