While Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was a pretty great game, it wasn’t the smoothest experience in terms of performance. Despite being crammed onto the tiny Nintendo Switch 2, the game still has some performance issues on console and PC, issues the team is keen not to replicate with the trilogy’s final entry: Final Fantasy 7 Revelation.
Releasing next year, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation has been designed from the ground up for lower-power hardware targets compared to Rebirth’s quick PS5 target. While we’ll have to wait to see the game’s true performance, game director Naoki Hamaguchi claims the game’s Nintendo Switch 2 hardware target has improved performance for every platform, especially on PC.
Speaking to WCCFTech after Gamescom, Hamaguchi confirmed that they are working with the goal of making the game much smoother on PC compared to its predecessor. “We do have a goal to make the PC version run a lot more smoothly than Rebirth did,” he said, “and we’re trying a lot of different things right now.”
Hamaguchi confirmed that Switch 2 is a main target, but the game is still being built first and foremost for PS5 and PC. Nevertheless, with Switch 2 and low-power PC handhelds as a hardware target from early development, Revelations has been designed to avoid some of the pitfalls that Rebirth fell into.
The Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director explained that it’s “not an easy feat to bring that kind of open world exploration to a portable device”. While Rebirth was a big open world game, Revelaion seems even bigger, and the game’s selling point of dropping into any region from the Highwind.
“Our team’s experience porting Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth to Switch 2 was incredibly helpful,” the director explained, “because we already had that knowledge and expertise”. While this meant that some under-the-hood optimisations were discovered, the director claimed they’re “not directing the main development team to run tings at a lower resolution so it runs properly on Switch 2”.
Hamaguchi is clear that Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will is “not going to make any compromises just because we’re porting to lower-spec platforms”. Furthermore, they claim that “creativity isn’t hindered by the fact that we’re releasing multiplatform”.
What this means is that some under-the-hood improvements, such as how textures are streamed, make the experience better for everyone, but PS5 and PC players won’t have a lower-quality version due to Switch 2’s prominence.
Of course, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is still a massive open world game built on Unreal Engine 4, so it’s not going to be particularly easy to run. At the time of writing, Square Enix has yet to release any system requirements for the game on PC. (I just hope it doesn’t have awful upscaling on PS5 like Rebirth did, eugh.)
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation releases on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC on April 8, 2027,
