Final Fantasy 7 Remake PC review: it pretty much does the job

There was a time when PC versions of Japanese games tended to be terrible, if at all. But in recent years, Japanese publishers have put more effort into their ports. These are not always the most complete conversions, but games like Monster hunter world and Final Fantasy XV are great examples of titles that perform much better on PC than their console counterparts. Play days like Dark souls Locking down PC users to low resolutions and frame rates is mostly complete.

The long awaited PC version of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, which is launched today, is not exactly an example of the latter. But it also doesn’t seem well suited to the PC. If you were waiting to play this game because you don’t have a PS4 or PS5, it will probably give you a reasonable version of the console experience. It won’t go further than that.

First of all, the good news. Unlike some recent PlayStation to PC ports, Final Fantasy VII remake feels well optimized for the PC from a performance standpoint. I tested the game on my own PC that I built over five years ago, which has an Intel Core i5-6600K processor, an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU, and 16GB of RAM, and only had no problem running it at 1440p and 60fps on “high” settings even though it was installed on a spinning hard drive.

This is not necessarily surprising. Final Fantasy VII remake is often an incredibly good-looking game, but its linear and closed levels seem designed with console hardware from 2013, so it would have been disappointing not to get better performance even with an aging PC.

What is Disappointingly, you won’t get much better performance from a much better PC. This version of Redo has very few graphics options and you are forced to choose between fixed frame rate limits – it can run at 30 fps, 60 fps, 90 fps, or 120 fps. I tried running it at 90fps to see how things would hold up and the image quality was a lot more blurry, so it looks like dynamic resolution scaling is being applied.

Better PCs should therefore be able to run the game at 120fps with higher resolution, but actual assets won’t look better. Besides basic output resolution and some HDR settings, the only other options you have are low and high texture resolution, low and high shadow resolution, and the ability to limit the number of characters on the screen between one and 10. There is also no ultra-wide media at all; Which, again, doesn’t really surprise me given how often the game bounces between pre-rendered cutscenes and real-time action, but it’s still unfortunate.

Texture resolution was a major flaw in the original version of the PS4, although it was improved with the Intergrade update for the PS5. You’ll still see the weird fuzzy texture here and there on PC, but it’s a much better situation than when I first played on the PS4 Pro. More importantly, I can confirm that Cloud’s bedroom door no longer appears to be from an N64 game – although his sink is still visibly chunky.

This all adds up to a port that does the bare minimum to run well on PC hardware. This is by no means a showcase for the platform – it’s a showcase for the quality of a console game. Final Fantasy VII remake has been. Well, I have to admit that’s what I learned playing the PC version this week. It could have been a more thoughtful port, of course, but this game is still insanely good and performs better than on PS4, which is still something. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t played it on the PS4, but I wouldn’t recommend double-dipping if you have a PS5.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade will be released today on the Epic Games Store.