I’ve made my feelings on Denuvo perfectly clear (the short version is that I find its inclusion so disrespectful that I outright refuse to review games that use it, even on consoles), but what happens when I review a console-only game and a later PC port decides to cram it in there? Since this has finally happened, I figured I’d clear up how I plan on handling this particular situation and where the lines are drawn.

I reserve the right to edit reviews

The game in question is Final Fantasy 15, which I reviewed right at the start of 2017. It’s now over a year later and a PC port has been released with Denuvo in it. Honestly, I have enough experience with Square-Enix to have somewhat planned for this, as I made sure to put my few positive impressions in a single section. Those paragraphs will now be deleted outright, and the reason for this is that it’s a negative review. Were it overflowing with praise, I’d remove the review altogether in protest.

Remakes/remasters can be separate entities

I will never review Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age because it has Denuvo, but the original Final Fantasy XII is fair game. Older games that eventually get remastered or remade by a bunch of tools can’t be reasonably judged by the actions of said tools, so I’m considering the PS2 original an entirely different thing than the remake. The same goes for Star Ocean: The Last Hope for the Xbox 360; the PC version was released long enough after the original that it can be considered a different thing. The lines here are blurry, so it’s a bit of a judgment call on my part.

In closing

Obviously this is a bit of a nuclear option, but I go out of my way to avoid Denuvo and this isn’t bound to happen often. In this case, I was banking on Square-Enix’s ineptness ensuring that the PC version never materialized, and I had hopes that consumer misgivings about the DRM would cause it to be dropped by the time a hypothetical version did come out. It was a mistake to assume that Square-Enix has that level of awareness, and I’ll be sure to give them less credit in the future.

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