The PC port of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has had a number of issues in the performance department. Sadly, this isn't exactly all that uncommon for many recent Square Enix offerings on the PC.
In general, performance seems to be pretty bad for the game, and this is in addition to other technical hiccups and inconsistent visual quality. Apparently, there are some scenes featuring a character wearing a fur coat that can bring the game into sub-30FPS territory on an Nvidia RTX 3090. Another scene, featuring the character Astos, can bring framerates down to the single digits.
These dire framerates were reported by Twitter user AkiraJkr. In a follow-up tweet, AkiraJkr shows the same scene but with a whole lot less hair. This removal of hair caused their framerates to go from 8 to a 30FPS average.
AkiraJkr created some tools that can provide better performance for PC users playing Stranger of Paradise. They provided a lengthy writeup on Reddit detailing the steps taken to remove the hair from the game for those who are suffering from a lack of frames.
Still having issues with framerate even after giving everyone a buzzcut? Well, that could be due to the fact that some of the models in the game use an absolutely absurd number of polygons.
Just the geometry for a common bat enemy is 30MB, and apparently uses almost three times the number of polygons than the entirety of Kiryu's cutscene model from Yakuza 0. The model used for Kiryu in cutscenes obviously being of higher quality than the one used during normal gameplay.
Likewise, a boss model in Stranger of Paradise uses 90MB before any texture work and is made up of 1.8 million triangles. These issues with the high poly models aren't limited to the PC release either. It impacts all platforms, but due to dynamic resolution scaling the consoles encounter fewer severe framerate drops.
There is no word from either Square Enix or developer Team Ninja about making any optimizations in the near future. Hopefully these pretty major issues are all taken care of prior to the Steam release, which I assume will be in 2023.
Epic Games Store users are probably well-acquainted with the poor performance of Square Enix games by now. Final Fantasy VII Remake on PC, another timed EGS exclusive, also suffered from very poor performance on PC. In fact, I'm not sure if those issues were ever fixed. So, shoutout to the beta testers and early adopters using the Epic Games Store to find these issues before the game hits other PC storefronts.
If after all of this you just don't care about the issues and want to purchase the game, you can do so from the Epic Games Store (creator affiliate link thing) for $59.99 (USD).
