Modder suggests Strangers of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin’s insanely high polygon models cause performance issues

Strangers of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is one of the most unique and ambitious Final Fantasy games ever to enter the franchise, but it's not without its issues. For one, the sometimes low framerates that players have encountered in-game.

But community modder DeathChaos has one pretty good theory why these issues are happening. After viewing the models in an external program, they discovered that even common enemies had over 30MB worth of geometry. 

A series of screenshots showed off the raw geometry of some of the game's entities and listed details such as the number of tris (triangle polygons) in each model. NPCs, Bat enemies, and even regular soldiers were listed with six-digit polygons, meaning an enormous file size and huge processing power needed when they're on screen.

Related: Streamers can’t livestream the end of Strangers of Paradise, according to Square Enix’s rules

But beyond just regular enemies, DeathChaos shared a model of one boss enemy, which contained over 1.8 million polygons, and consisted of 90MB worth of data before textures, animations, or anything else was added.

Overall the deep dive potentially shows two things: Strangers of Paradise is a lovingly crafted game with insane detail. And that it's incredibly under-optimized. Keep in mind the full game required over 70gb of file space, and that was before any patches.

There have been other instances of Square Enix being accused of under-optimized or even over-detailed seemingly insignificant parts of a game. Noclip's 2017 documentary on Final Fantasy XIV revealed that one barrel of flowers featured the same amount of polygons as a full player character model in the original release of that game. It was used as an example of that games' initial mismanagement. 

If DeathChaos' theories are correct, the Strangers of Paradise team may have to shrink the size of their own barrel of flowers if they want to get the game to run smoothly on all platforms.

For more Strangers of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin info and guides, check out How to level your class by wearing affinity gear in Strangers of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin on Pro Game Guides.