The hair in Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is seemingly killing the game's performance on PC.
As spotted by PC Gamer, users have turned to modding characters' hair out of the game to make Stranger of Paradise run at a higher frame rate. A necessary sacrifice for some players.
Reddit user MorrisonGamer found that hair could be the culprit when they discovered the closer players get to other characters the poorer the performance gets — reporting drops as low as eight frames per second if a lot of NPCs are on screen.
The Minister drops a RTX 3090 to 25 FPS because of a fucking FUR COAT
uncompressed videos above 💀thanks Twitter pic.twitter.com/9I8uTlXn2N
— AkiraJkr (@AkiraJkr1) March 20, 2022
They shared their findings on Twitter, posting a video of their RTX 3090, a high-end graphics card, dropping to 25 frames per second as they stood next to a character wearing fluffy shoulder pads.
While it's not a true fix, MorrisonGamer did share a workaround: a mod that lets users turn off hair. This means that, while every character in the game walks around bald, they at least do so at a reasonable frame rate.
The poor performance is seemingly a result of the PC port being poorly optimised, as noted by Twitter user DeathChaos25, but no drastic issues have been reported on console.
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
In our 8/10 review, IGN said "Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin's story doesn't come together until the final hours, but when it does it pairs nicely with a solid and engaging action combat system and a strong dose of FF nostalgia."
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
Source: IGN.com Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Apparently Runs Better If You Make the Characters Bald