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It makes me happy to see that Square Enix is continuing its strategy of releasing its games on Playstation and PC. Despite there being a lengthy delay, their PC versions are usually superior than their console offerings. We’ve seen this multiple times already. Final Fantasy VII Remake. Final Fantasy XV. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
While first part of the Final Fantasy remake trilogy wasn’t too impressive on PC, I prayed and hoped that Square Enix would do better with the continuation. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth performed abysymally on the regular Playstation 5 when I reviewed it and I truly hoped that Square Enix would fix the issues with the PC port.
Lo and behold, months later…here we all are.
Has Square Enix answered my prayers or is this just another phone in port like the first part?
What is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth?
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the continuation of Final Fantasy VII Remake. It is the middle part of a proposed trilogy. The game is developed and published by Square Enix and is available right now on the Playstation consoles and PC.
Our review code was provided by the kind folks over at Square Enix! Thanks so much!
Since I’ve already written the review of the game for the Playstation 5, you can refer to that for nitty gritty.
There’s nothing PC-exclusive (content-wise at least), so everything that was on the Playstation version is here too. You can get special items if you have saves from Final Fantasy VII Remake and Intergrade so make sure you have them on your SSD before you start. You don’t even need to have to finish either, just a save from both, at any point, will do.
Now for the juicy bits.
First, the good news.
The PC version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has much, much more visual options than Final Fantasy VII Remake. It allows you to tweak a larger variety of visual effects, which is great if your PC needs all the help it can get to play the game. The PC version even has DLSS support…of a sort.
Don’t break out the champagne just yet…because the DLSS support only comes via the aliasing options. It doesn’t make use of the tech for anything else. It’s honestly a massive disappointment, because the game could’ve made use of it to improve performance.
Despite our gaming rig exceeding the recommended specs by a large margin, the game still has issues with stuttering. It happens everywhere. Get into a new area and the game stutters. Traverse the open world and it stutters. Spin the camera around? Yup, it stutters.
Now to be fair, the stutters aren’t a massive hassle. They’re just micro-stutters here and there. The game doesn’t freeze for a second or so, just teeny hitch now and then. In the grand scheme of things, it’s nowhere near game breaking.
It’s still super annoying despite that.
It’s not a matter of hardware.
Even if I play on 1080p, the stutters are there. I’m not a developer so I don’t know the full details, but I have a feeling this has to do with Unreal Engine (or the heavily customized version the game is running). There has to be a streaming or shader compilation issue that’s cause all these stutters.
Thankfully, the major issues that plagued the Playstation 5 version are mostly fixed here.
Weirdly low resolution textures? Gone.
Frame rate drops in populated areas? Gone.
Horrendous foliage and object pop-in? Mostly gone.
There still object and foliage pop-in (even on the highest settings) but thankfully, they’re much less pronounced. The pop-ins also trigger much further away from you, so you’re not going to notice it most of the time unless you’re looking into the horizon purposely.
Travelling on a chocobo is much more enjoyable, simply due to the framerate being much more stable and the foliage not just popping up every few steps.
The ROG Ally X, the gameplay is much more fluctuating. You’re going to be constantly fiddling the settings throughout the game to get decent performance. Since it’s so finicky, I mostly just stuck to the presets.
I played on 720p (on the ROG Ally’s 25W and 30W modes) and allocated 12GB RAM and still couldn’t get a stable 60FPS in some areas. I played on Medium and High because Low made the game look like crap. It’s simply too ugly to even consider playing on Low, unless you’re really hard up for the game and have no other way to play it.
There’s a silver lining though.
If you’re OK with 30FPS, the game is playable. It’s more than playable. The game is surprisingly stable on Medium at 720p (High in some enclosed areas) with the framerate somewhat locked to 30FPS.
If you can bear with fluctuating framerates, you can even go up to 1080p. You can mitigate this somewhat by enabling dynamic resolution and fiddling around with the minimum and maximum resolution output. 66% for minimum is the best threshold in my experience. Go any lower and the visuals look like crap, go higher and the FPS tanks.
It’s not ideal but it still is a good approximation of the full experience and is enjoyable enough, especially when you consider that it’s now a portable game.
The Bottom Line.
If you’ve been waiting for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to hit the PC, you’re in luck. This is the best version of the game by far. Without the constraints of the PS5 hardware, Square Enix has pushed Final Fantasy VII Rebirth further than what it did previously with Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Everything that was an issue on the PS5 has been resolved or mostly resolved. Sharper textures, better lighting, a very stable framerate, less pop-in. This is definitely how Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was meant to be played,
Unfortunately, there are still some kinks that need to be worked out.
The stuttering present in the first part is back with a vengeance this time around. It’s ever present, never really going away. You do get used to it but I really hope that Square Enix patches the engine to run better. At the very least, I hope the final part of the trilogy doesn’t suffer this issue.
On the portable side, performance is certainly an issue. At least if you’re wanting a stable 60FPS throughout.
Put that expectation aside though and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth becomes a superbly enjoyable 30FPS experience. It looks decent enough on 720P at Medium and/or High settings, especially considering you’re getting the full-fledged experience on a portable machine.
No matter which style you play, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is still undeniably better on the PC than on console. With the modding scene working on it, its future is certainly in a much better state. I can’t wait to see the mod community try to improve the game’s issues, something that no PS5 gamer can say.
TLDR:
The Final Fantasy VII Rebirth version that we all deserve.
The Good:
- Maxed out visuals are incredible.
- Stable framerate with decent hardware.
- Playable on a portable machine.
The Bad:
- The micro stuttering.
- No full DLSS or FSR support.
- No extra content.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
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