Nearly two years after its debut, Final Fantasy 7 Remake is finally available for PC. It’s a port of the PlayStation 5 ‘Intergrade’ version that came out earlier this year and as you may have seen from the headlines, it’s a contentious release to say the least. While Square-Enix’s conversion retains all of the graphical features of the PS5 game, it’s a barebones release, plagued with awful hitching and stutter problems and one of the most basic options screens we’ve seen in years from a major release.
In terms of its qualities as a PC port, we’ve not got much to say that’s positive about this game but it is important to point out that the game itself truly is great. Character models are the highlight here, with superb definition and lighting. It’s rather reminiscent of Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children, the 2005 CG film, although of course rendered in real-time. Cutscenes are absolutely stunning, with well-realised characters, storytelling and action. Battles look superb as well, with smooth animation work and vibrant GPU effects. Environments are at times less impressive, with spotty geometric density in places, along with low resolution baked shadows, but the game is a visual showcase overall. The Intergrade release delivers enhancements to lighting, textures, volumetrics and performance – in addition to new content.
Beyond that though, the positives fall off dramatically. The menu system is fine – effectively a copy of the console user interface – but the settings menu is remarkably sparse. There are options for screen resolution, texture and shadow resolution, a choice of frame-rate caps and a bunch of HDR settings. Most curious of all is the ‘characters displayed’ setting with an 11-point scale, which isn’t actually about the amount of characters displayed but rather NPC draw distance. PlayStation 4 sits at the zero level, while PlayStation 5 gets an upgrade to seven here. PC at the max 10 all but eliminates pop-in on character draw distance – one of the very, very few enhancements available over the PS5 game.
As for texture and shadow resolution, there are just high and low settings. For textures, the high setting is much the same as PlayStation 5, while low sits above PS4 for much of the art but can be worse on some assets. There’s a missed opportunity here as some of the textures on PS5 are still a little rough – something PC could have addressed. As for shadow quality, high is a match for PS5, while low simply takes the axe to the quality level. It’s not really akin to PS4 at all, which has its own approach with high resolution, unrealistically sharp shadows up-close, with an aggressive resolution cascade.