Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on Nintendo Switch 2: Square's most ambitious game goes portable, with compromises

Earlier this year, while discussing the Switch 2 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake, I mentioned taking this opportunity to resume my long dropped playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, now that the remake series is being port to my favorite console. Despite my eager excitement for it initially, I just couldn’t make time for Rebirth when it came out in 2024. The plethora of side content on offer just overwhelmed me at the time. Also, given how long AAA games take to make these days I didn’t want to just sit with that for nearly four years like I had prior. I put it back on the shelf until we got word of the third and final game in the trilogy.

With the teasing that the third game will not only launch on all platforms at once, but also on the Switch 2, I thought it would be fun to restart my Rebirth playthrough from scratch on this platform. Originally on base PS5, I had made it all the way to Barret’s hometown in Corel originally when I tapped out, roughly 25 hours in. This isn’t that long in the grand scheme of this massive game, but for a guy who already works a full time job I just needed a break. I was sad to find out that I stopped playing just as things started to get really interesting.

This time around I’ve made it all the way to Chapter 9, doing every bit of side content I could get my hands on. After clearing out all of the currently available side content in Corel at around 36 hours, I’m preparing to move on to the next region of the game. For over 11 hours of gametime I’ve been experiencing Rebirth with fresh eyes. I’ve grown to appreciate a lot more of the experience as a whole. Maybe it’s just because the Switch 2 makes it very easy to play, but I’ve been diving headfirst into quests and world exploration that I just started skipping on my original playthrough. Which was a genuine shame on my part, because now I find it pretty rewarding.

Rebirth is an adaptation of the middle chunk of FF7, where the game changes tone dramatically after leaving the linear and atmospheric Midgar section. This is a massive tonal shift, but it’s necessary to have an understanding of the scale of the world and the people in it. By extension, Rebirth becomes somewhat of an aimless hang out game. You have a driving force guiding you from place to place, but it largely exists as an excuse to see the sites and have Cloud spend time with the party. 

There’s an overwhelming number of things to do, and the minigames do get overbearing at times, but the writing feels more on point than ever. I was worried about revisiting this game after being very underwhelmed with Remake’s quest writing, but it seems the dev team took some criticism to heart. Even if a quest itself isn’t the most interesting thing you’ve ever seen, each of them sees Cloud paired off with a specific member of the team. In helping this person, you’ll often learn an anecdote about your friend’s life. Even if the open world intel gathering isn’t your cup of tea (I actually quite like checkbox open world mechanics, even if I admit it's not the most deep), the side quests are more than worth it. 

I think if I had played this any other way but the base PS5 version running the game in performance mode, I might have had more issues with Rebirth on Switch 2. The game in my limited experience has never been a looker in the resolution department, which was one of the common criticisms it received on launch. This new Swith 2 version has no graphic settings to toggle between, and we are left with a single preset that uses DLSS to improve the image quality as much as possible. You’re left with a blurry image that is discernable but can leave a lot to be desired. If you were as impressed as I was with the Switch 2 version of Remake, Rebirth might give you whiplash. This was always a much more ambitious game, especially when you’re in the open world sections, so this gap in clarity was also felt on the original hardware it was released for.

Having spent my fair share of playing this game docked and undocked on Switch 2, I find both to be merely adequate. On my 4K OLED TV, at a normal viewing distance, docked play with its DLSS implementation felt similar to performance mode on the base PS5. I doubt the actual resolution count is close, and it’s not as visually clear as Remake was when docked, but I think it gets the job done. Undocked play takes a bigger hit to internal resolution than I expected, with much more upscaling artifacts present. On close-ups and during cutscenes the game looks just fine, but the resolution can drop a bit more than I would like out on the field. Neither mode’s resolution dips down to be truly unplayable, but it would be definitely a good idea to check out the Switch 2 version’s demo before getting this version of the game. 

While I found the resolution more than good enough to sustain my own playthrough, it’s hard to not notice the outright cuts to asset complexity just to get this working on the hardware. Some geometry has been simplified, including any set dressing asset to give the world life. Certain things were just cut all together, like items on shelves or decorations on tables. Foliage in the field has also been reduced substantially, and I was shocked to look at comparisons online and see just how sparse Rebirth looks on the system. The most blatant this got was during the parade segment early on. The pre-rendered video that plays early on shows bustling streets packed with people, only to cut to the in-engine version where the crowd density drops to such a low amount that I started to seriously doubt Rufus’ popularity.

The port’s worst problem by far though has to be pop-in. Whether it be assets, textures, shadows, or LOD your immersion will be interrupted often by it popping in awkwardly. NPCs will randomly pop in, or foliage will go in and out as you walk through the world. Sometimes shopkeep NPCs won't even load in when you go to click the prompt, leading for you to wait to browse their wares until the model takes a few seconds to pop in. It takes what should be a gorgeous world and muddles the presentation of it. The surfboards at Johnny’s hotel have edges so jagged they could cut you, or Divine Intel Shrines having a garbled mess of textures. When I see a low quality texture, I’m never exactly sure if it was just compressed by default or if it was struggling to load in. This pop in is where I think the porting team should be focusing on for post-launch support. That, and maybe higher quality textures. While I appreciate the decreased file size, I promise you I would download a texture and asset expansion pack just to get the game looking a little nicer. 

If it wasn’t for the fact that the framerate was consistently hitting its 30 fps target with minimal input lag in most areas, I think I’d be a lot harsher on the port. Despite halving the framerate target I was used to with my original playthrough, I barely felt a difference. It’s a responsive and smooth level of performance, improved further by what is likely the day 1 patch dropping the day before this was set to go live. I had no issues with traversal stutter or combat, with the only drops I noticed being in the game’s towns. But for the meat of the game, exploration and combat, I wasn’t hampered by the lower framerate cap at all. Given all you can do in battle now, and all that’s going on with the large maps you fight fiends in, that’s pretty impressive. 

Content wise, this matches everything you can do in the original game. All the mini games are here, all the story is here, and all the battles are here. The hours I spent hunting through the open zones to clear out all the towers, challenging fiends, or just building the perfect Queen’s Blood deck. I swear, at least five of those 36 hours of playtime was dedicated to Queen’s Blood. Please, make an app version of this card game. I cannot get enough of it. Rebirth might not be the focused game like the first part, but the content on offer has been a delight this go around. I'm also constantly stunned at all the little flourishes, like whole dungeons you'd only know about from side quests or the ridiculously high number of unique battle themes. This truly feels like Square Enix's "super game".

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on Switch 2, with it’s utilization of DLSS and lowered visual fidelity, feels like the PS4 port we never got. In my book, that makes this version fascinating. It’s clearly not what this game was meant to run on if you wanted the best presentation possible, but considering that it runs at all given the hardware it was designed aroun, I do find it to be just a bit impressive as a total package. It might not have met my wildest dreams earlier in the year as I speculated for another miracle port, but it's a fine way to play the game. If you’ve never played the original version, I think you might find yourself not too bothered by all this. Once I had caught up to the original game and everything started to feel truly new, I also stopped really minding. I had gotten used to it, and was able to just fully enjoy Rebirth as a game on its own. 

I’m not really sure how the final part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy will play out. Maybe this was meant to be the only large scale entry of the trilogy, with the final part focusing more on linear setpieces like the original game. With Square Enix well aware of the popularity of the Steam Deck and Switch 2, I sincerely hope the final trilogy game is properly being designed around smaller scale hardware. I also wouldn’t be surprised if these Switch 2 ports were a great way for the team making these games to scale their fidelity down for weaker hardware. Either way, I’m pretty excited about what’s to come. I’ll be finishing my playthrough on Switch 2, hoping they find ways to improve it more in the coming months. Then, to keep the bit going, I’ll be playing the last game on Switch 2 as well. The novelty of it intrigues me so much, I just have to.