Sitting alongside Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws, some would label the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Final Fantasy 7 a “miracle port”. However, director Naoki Hamaguchi believes that label is a bit of a hyperbole.
Despite already pushing the PlayStation 5 to its limits, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is currently completely playable on the Switch 2. While there are reductions in detail, everything important has been preserved, and that was the main goal of the port.
Speaking to Automaton, Hamaguchi explained that Rebirth was “already designed with a certain degree of scalability”, but the Switch 2’s low-power restraints required further optimisations. “Our approach wasn’t ‘What can we cut?, but rather, ‘What should we redesign in order to preserve what has to stay?’” Hamaguchi said.
This led to a brand-new level of detail system, rebuilt lighting systems, a new streaming solution and an optimised shader delivery system. “Rather than simply lowering the rendering quality, we needed to redesign where to allocate our limited resources,” Hamaguchi said. “Therefore, instead of optimising rendering, lighting, and streaming individually, we adjusted things while viewing the entire system as an integrated whole.”
The director explained that “rather than merely adjusting asset quality, we made FFVII Rebirth feasible on the Switch 2 through comprehensive optimisation of the entire system”. However, Hamaguchi doesn’t believe the so-called “miracle port” term really suits a release that has seen such a grand reworking under-the-hood. Instead, it’s just a lot of hard work.
“Frankly speaking, there are no shortcuts in this kind of work,” he said. “People sometimes call it a ‘miracle port,’ but in reality, it’s the result of a painstaking process of measuring load, identifying bottlenecks, and eliminating them one by one. Ultimately, I believe this accumulation of effort is what allowed us to successfully bring the FFVII Rebirth experience to Switch 2.”
Hamaguchi’s push to preserve everything important about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on Switch 2 also meant that the most intensive scenes in the game has to stay. For example, the military parade in Junon, a hugely intensive scene with effects and large crowds in a highly-detailed city, pushes the system to its limits.
“The bustle and atmosphere of the cities are core parts of the FFVII Rebirth Experience,” he said. “So we started from first determining what absolutely needed to remain, and only then proceeded with optimisation. I believe we’ve managed to achieve a balance that works on the Nintendo Switch 2 without significantly compromising the sense of density and immersion unique to FFVII Rebirth’s urban areas.”
Hamaguchi also claimed, in a different article, that the work done for Rebirth proves that the Nintendo Switch 2 is a place for large-scale RPGs to “thrive”. While a lot of work had to be done to bring Rebirth to the system, it shows that great ports of current-gen only console games are more than possible with enough time, patience, and care.
Alongside the development of the new port, work has also been done on the remake trilogy’s third and final entry. In the past, Hamaguchi has claimed that the finale has been using Switch 2 as a hardware target alongside Valve’s Steam Deck. The game has not been announced at the time of publication.
