We have some surprising news about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
Digital Foundry has shared their analysis of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and, well, even as spectacular as it clearly looks, on a technical level, Square Enix’s graphical upgrade to the PlayStation 5 has mixed results. In fact, they found that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has lower performance compared to Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade.
Quoting Digital Foundry on the text version of their analysis:
“Resolution for the performance mode averages at around 1152p, while the graphics mode is usually at or near 4K, with both modes employing dynamic resolution. That’s nothing particularly special, but there is a very odd quirk with the performance mode.
The game doesn’t upscale using a typical bicubic or bilinear method, but instead seems to double the pixels using a nearest neighbour technique or something similar, albeit with a slightly soft final resolve. It’s noticeably blocky and still doesn’t look much sharper than more conventional scaling methods.
…Unfortunately, the relatively low resolution in performance mode – likely combined with some low-res post-processing or another visual bugbear – means that Rebirth is a lot softer than Remake when targeting 60fps.
I thought Remake looked solid with its 1512p typical resolution in performance mode, but Rebirth really doesn’t hold up well on a 4K set with the same visual options and requires improvement.”
There are other visual issues with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as well. Low resolution models of items, incorrect lighting effects, and several traversal animations aren’t quite right. There is also no animation for when your characters go through foliage – they just clip through them.
There are other elements of the game that are impressive on this same visual level. For example, the expansion from Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade’s curated level design to the more open structure of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth reflected in more detailed cities, towns, and areas, filled with people and lots of activities.
This also does not do anything to affect the metascore of the game, which will be based on the experience of playing the game itself. Barring that the graphics become distracting to you, it shouldn’t affect your experience at all.
But as we know, gamers have high expectations for game performance because of what they were promised in this console generation. And an honest accounting of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s merits and problems demonstrate that it doesn’t live up to expectations.
This is a strange situation, not only because there are points where it looks lesser than Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade, but because last year’s Final Fantasy XVI seemingly demonstrated that Square Enix had fully figured out the PlayStation 5’s capabilities.
But that comparison may be somewhat misleading. Final Fantasy XVI was made with an in-house Square Enix game engine. Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade may have started production much earlier, and as a result, could be using Unreal Engine 4 instead of the more state of the art Unreal Engine 5.
So these issues may reflect how long Square Enix worked on the game, but honestly, it may also reflect on previously unknown issues in how the studio makes games. Square Enix will likely fix this in time too, but there’s the rub – that’s additional costs added to development that will require this title to sell a possibly unrealistic amount of copies. Given that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has that nostalgia audience that Final Fantasy 7 XVI did not, Square Enix is likely hoping that it will sell at that level.
You can watch the Digital Foundry analysis of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth below.
