Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (PC) Review – A Masterpiece Stumbles to PC

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (PC) Review

Near the top of just about every GOTY list (including COGconnected’s), Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was an unassailable hit. The middle game in a trilogy of titles making over the classic Final Fantasy VII, Rebirth checked a lot of boxes. Fantastic characters, a sprawling open world, and engaging combat: all present. Released in June 2024, Rebirth has made its way to PC, once again reminding us that “timed exclusive” is an oxymoron. PC players knew this was coming, eventually.

You can read our full review here. To recap, Rebirth begins after the first game’s events and opens with a compact prologue flashback that helps explain Sephiroth’s transformation into an antagonist. After that, the game tosses the familiar, beloved gang into the open world and the first of several different areas. One of the game’s many strengths is the diversity of regions that Cloud Strike and company visit. Although the overarching plot has at its core a fundamental “save the world” theme, the game’s narrative is convoluted. For some, it feels overly dense. Others relish the complexity. I fall somewhere in between. There are definitely moments where the story gets lost in layers of irrelevant side stories.

Never Enough Time

While some areas feel empty, there’s never a lack of things to do. Main story missions are supplemented by countless side quests. Mini-games abound, too. These include such distractions as racing games, rhythm games, a sit-up contest, frog battles, Cactuar hunts, and a fantastic card game called Queen’s Blood. Rebirth introduces several new characters. Some are more appealing than others. Its missions mix up the party dynamics and keep things interesting.

Combat is at the beating heart of Rebirth and on the whole, it’s fantastic. The ATB system returns, bringing along an engaging balance between offensive and defensive strategies. The Synergy mechanic creates some visually impressive and powerful multi-character attacks. Thanks to the game’s difficulty options, combat can be trivial or extremely challenging and tactical. On the whole, Rebirth’s combat is another positive step forward in refining the system introduced in the first chapter of the trilogy.

If Looks Could Kill

Like Final Fantasy VII Remake, Rebirth is built on Unreal Engine 4, with the developers squeezing as much juice as possible out of the aging tech. On the PS5, Rebirth didn’t look state-of-the-art. As always, though, great visual direction, art, performance capture, and music are more important than bleeding-edge graphics. The result was that Rebirth matched the aesthetic excellence of the first game. There’s still plenty of detail in the environments, the spell and combat lighting effects, and the animations. Rebirth’s music is stellar, too, winning a number of GOTY awards, and for good reason.

On the more negative side, the PS5 version of Rebirth had some issues. It was actually a pretty long list: pop-in, blurry or low-res textures, screen tearing, and framerate drops plagued the release. Prioritizing performance tanked the visuals. Opting for visual fidelity torpedoed the framerate. It was hard to find a balance. Many of these same problems plagued Final Fantasy VII Remake as well.

The PC port of Remake was disappointing to many gamers hoping for a real upgrade from the console version. It was beset by many — if not all — the same problems that PS5 owners experienced. There were workarounds and aftermarket mods that helped. But of course, it really isn’t the consumer’s responsibility to fix issues that should have been addressed before release.

Better Now?

After enjoying Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on PS5, I was really hoping that my powerhouse PC would elevate the game to a next-level experience. I suppose, given the built-in problems with Unreal Engine 4 and a disappointing port of Remake, I should have tempered my expectations. For reference, I am running the game on a Ryzen 9 7950, GeForce 4080super, 32 gigs of memory, and a plenty fast SSD. At least for the moment, that configuration has met every challenge thrown at it.

Square Enix promised 120fps at 4K. I was able to hit that by turning off VSync, though the framerate wasn’t consistent. Beyond that, some of the issues I encountered included near-constant texture pop-in (sometimes seconds long after loading in a new area), framerate stalls, and frequent crashes, especially when trying to skip cutscenes. Obviously, there’s no support for high-end features like ray tracing or an advanced implementation of DLSS. When it came to optimization and glitch-free gameplay, resolution or quality changes didn’t seem to help much. Textures popped in just as slowly at 30fps as at 120fps. The developers don’t seem to have learned the lessons from the first chapter’s port. In summary, whatever visual fidelity improvements the PC offers over PS5 are offset by frustrating, still-buggy optimization.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth isn’t a perfect game, but it’s a great one. Its combat, world-building, characters, art direction, and music are still impressive and probably always will be. It remains a game worth playing, both for Final Fantasy fans and any devotee of action RPGs. On the other hand, the port to PC is only a marginal improvement over the PS5 version. There are simply too many technical issues. In its present form, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on PC is not the ultimate experience of the game that it promises to be.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***