When I covered Final Fantasy VII Remake on Switch 2 just a few months ago, I wondered if/when the console would get the sequel, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Turns out we didn’t have long to wait, and Rebirth has arrived on Nintendo’s Little Tablet That Could 2: Electric Boogaloo. The demo for the game held great promise, with decent enough image quality and a fairly solid 30 frames per second. It wasn’t as good as Remake looked and ran, but that was generally the case across all consoles and PC for Rebirth. Progress just a bit beyond that demo, though, and I started running into problems.
Once the party steps out of the cave and into the Junon region, the game immediately begins struggling to even exist. The cliff overlooking the region just causes the framerate to die a slow and painful death. That is the worst of it, though, at least, and heading down into the region proper did cause things to improve, mostly. You’re simply not going to get a stable 30 anywhere you go in the Junon region until you head up into the city proper (not including Lower Junon). I also encountered some very odd graphical glitches that I would show you here. but that would require a seizure warning: light bouncing off of fences directly into the camera, making the screen flash white, and something about Gilgamesh’s model freaking out. I have been informed by Square Enix that at least the former issue will be fixed with an update at or around launch, though they couldn’t even recreate the latter in testing, so that might just be a me thing.
Thankfully, Junon is the worst this port ever gets, and once I left everything was smooth-ish sailing once again. Upper Junon, the boat section, and Costa Del Sol all ran perfectly fine by my estimations. I wasn’t able to get too much farther after that, but I suspect the only other place you might run into fps issues would be sailing around the high seas, given how wide open that area is.
Enclosed areas are definitely where Rebirth shines brightest on Switch 2, letting the game strike a nice balance between fidelity and performance. This version never got as blurry as Steam Deck, which is already a massive improvement in portability, but you can definitely see where they had to cut corners to get this thing working. The draw distance for detail is incredibly small, with some textures still looking incredibly low quality and smudgy even up close. Grass is constantly popping in just a few feet in front of you, you’ll probably run up to monsters that only start animating once you’re in range to start the encounter, and you’ll definitely bump into a few NPCs before they fade in. If this is your first time playing Rebirth, I’m honestly not sure I could recommend playing it on Switch 2. Docked and portable modes have surprising parity, but that also means they share the same issues, so no matter how you play, you’ll always be noticing the flaws.
As a second playthrough to experience the game portably, it’s not the worst. Still far from ideal, but cutscenes look consistently great, especially in close ups on the characters. There were times I was surprised a portable system could render things at such a high quality and level of detail. Cloud’s hair is full of aliased pixels, but it still looks amazing.
Combat feels surprisingly fine at 30fps (or lower) as well. I did feel a somewhat slower response time with certain abilities or actions, such as switching Cloud from Punisher to Operator modes and back, but I was still able to perform split-second parries and counters. Playing this and Remake back to back really puts into focus how much the game feel improved between titles, with battles feeling faster and more fluid than its predecessor.
Overall, I think fans who really want to play Rebirth portably will be OK with this port. If you’re just going to play docked, go for any other platform. I’d also suggest waiting for an update or two to see if Square can improve the issues I listed above, as well as overall performance and image quality. It’s harder to recommend than Remake, but it’s still a fantastic game.
