Your phone can play Final Fantasy XIII thanks to Square Enix’s DiveIn

DiveIn, SquareEnix’s recently announced game-streaming service for smartphones, was playable at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, and I took some time to check it out.

(See: Backwards compatibility? Nah, Sony’s got the Playstation Now streaming service)

Available to be played were both Final Fantasy VII and (more impressively) Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy XIII played with no noticeable stuttering or frame rate issues, too, which was fairly reassuring.

In the promotional trailer for the service, however, were some snippets from a some very interesting classic Square titles. Bahamut Lagoon, a SNES classic that has a following even in the West thanks to a solid fan translation, was featured briefly, as well as the more niche Romancing SaGa 3, among others.

The hands-on experience itself was a mixed bag. While the titles on display were perfectly functional, the touch overlay was anything but an ideal way to play. When Final Fantasy VII is available on a portable console as comfortable and high-res as the Playstation Vita, it’s hard to see what the appeal of playing on such a cramped screen would be.

The unnatural claw hand needed to hit all the buttons in rapid succession, as you need to do in FFXIII‘s real time battles, is going to give you cramps. For FFVII‘s less frantic fights, it’s less important to be quite so fast, but even then having your own fingers blocking your view gets annoying.

Regardless, it’ll be interesting to follow the service’s performance over the next year or so. But even if DiveIn is a massive success in Japan, its potential future outside the country remains in doubt. The kind of internet speeds required for the heavier-duty games to perform well, and on the go to boot, are not really common in many regions outside Japan. A scant few may have the infrastructure to pull it off (the most likely candidates being South Korea and Singapore), but whether these would merit rolling the service out beyond Japan is still anyone’s guess.

This story is part of our Tokyo Game Show 2014 coverage. 

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