Final Fantasy VII Rebirth review on PC — A clearer vision of the unknown journey

I really enjoyed Final Fantasy VII Rebirth when it launched on PS5 last year. Well, for the most part – it had way too many minigames and I felt it was a much less focused experience than Remake. If there’s one thing I’ve seen everyone complain about, however, it’s the visuals. Not the art style itself, but dynamic resolution making everything look just a bit too blurry. If there’s one thing a PC port could fix, it’s that. Alongside increasing the overall fidelity, allowing for portable play on Steam Deck, and throwing in a ton more frames, of course.

Rebirth doesn’t make the best first impression on PC, unfortunately. The opening sections up until you reach the open world are some of the most intensive areas in the game. Don’t try to start the game on Steam Deck, as you’ll be getting around 20 fps there, while my desktop with a RTX 4070 hovered around 50 to 60. Once you do reach the open world, however, I would easily clear 80 fps at almost maximum settings (with crowd density and crowd shadows turned down to 5 from 10). Steam Deck mostly hit 30 with the default settings, giving it a decent amount of battery life too.

There is one big caveat with Steam Deck: it’s much, much more blurry than PS5. The game still uses dynamic resolution by default, like Remake, but you can adjust the range from a few minimum and maximum percentages, turning it off entirely by setting both to 100%. On desktop, playing at 1440p, I had this set to 50% and 100% and never really noticed the dips in resolution, at least visually. On Steam Deck, at 720p, this defaults to 33% and 66%, so you’re never going to hit 720p. It does clean up a bit for cutscenes (which you can now speed up by 1.5 or 2 times speed by holding R2), but consider Steam Deck a way to grind out World Intel rather than a way to play the entire game.

All that said, playing on desktop is a massive step up from PS5. Even as someone who wasn’t too bothered by the blurriness, I don’t think I could go back now. Everything is just so crisp and clear when in motion. In screenshots you’ll be able to notice when Cloud’s hair isn’t quite as luscious as it should be, such as in the middle of combat with a ton of effects around, but when actually playing only the most detail oriented players will pay that any attention.

I did have one, persistent issue, but as I had the same problem with Remake and no one else did I’m willing to chalk this up to a peculiarity with my rig. When turning the camera, the framerate will suddenly nosedive from 60-80 to 30. If I had to guess, this has something to do with the game not being able to utilize all of my CPU’s cores. Most people probably won’t experience this, but it’s something to keep in mind as a potential bottleneck.

Make no mistake, Rebirth will require a beefy PC to run it properly as the game is fairly intensive even on low settings, and the options menu isn’t the most robust out there. You can adjust the aforementioned dynamic resolution, from 33% to 100% (no supersampling here), the details of background models, the ocean, character models, and effects, the resolution and quality of textures, fog, and shadows, and the number of characters displayed and how from how far away their shadows will be displayed. There’s also an option for low-resolution font, though it’s greyed out on my desktop and enabled by default on Steam Deck. Most of these options can be set to Low or High, while others might add in a Medium or an Ultra. Finally, and this may disappoint some people, but there are various caps for the framerate, up to 120 fps. Sorry, no 170 or unlocked modes for you.

The real weirdness comes in with Anti-Aliasing. There are three options: TAA, TAAU, and DLSS. I have no idea why DLSS and upsampling are hidden here. I understand that using these usually precludes you from using AA, but it makes far more sense for these to be a separate option in resolution. It’s also odd that you cannot turn AA off at all, it’s either TAA or upsampling.

As for the game itself, you can read Lead Editor David Burdette and Henry Viola’s review here. I’m not quite as positive about the game, I don’t like Cloud’s reworked Punisher Mode for example, but it’s still fantastic and PC is absolutely the best way to play now. The basic control scheme for Keyboard and Mouse seems fine enough, but there’s no mouse support for menus and such, so a gamepad is still the way to go here. With the overall quality of this PC port, issues aside, I do hope that the third part of the trilogy launches on PC and console simultaneously. If it does, I know what I’ll be playing on.

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