Despite Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's larger scale compared to the first game in Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy, very few compromises were made for the port to Nintendo’s hybrid console.
The Nintendo Switch 2 may be less than a year old, yet performance comparisons to previous eighth-generation and current generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft aren’t quieting down anytime soon. Ports of AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws more than prove the hybrid console can keep up with its less portable counterparts. However, there perhaps isn’t a better example of the Switch 2’s capabilities than last January’s release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade last January.
The team took a full year to port the game, starting with “getting it to run” on the hardware before pivoting to a three-month optimization period. This allowed them to get Remake Intergrade working at a stable 30 frames per second with 1080p resolution in docked mode while using DLSS and dynamic upscaling between 720p and 1080p.
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Warming up
When Game Director for Remake Intergrade Naoki Hamaguchi, alongside his team at Square Enix, set out to bring part one of the Unreal Engine take on Cloud’s adventure to Switch 2, it served as both a warm-up exercise and a technical lesson on the console.
"Porting the Switch 2 version of Remake based on the Intergrade build was a very meaningful endeavor," Hamaguchi said. "Not merely for the sake of porting, but also to allow the development team to gain a practical understanding of the Switch 2's technical specifications. Even if challenges arose, rather than giving up, we made decisions based on how to overcome them and make it work."
Though Remake Intergrade was a linear experience by design, as it focused entirely on the Midgar section of the original 1997 title, Final Fantasy Rebirth was significantly bigger. Featuring larger open-world sections when it released exclusively on PlayStation 5 in 2024 (and a year later on Windows), there were many questions about how the Switch 2 would handle the title when it was announced.
“Based on our experience with Remake, we felt confident that we could handle the scale,” explained Hamaguchi. “However, the technical challenges are clearly different with an open-world design, so in the end we knew we'd just have to try it out and see.
This included maintaining the 30fps frame rate. "Our goal of 'consistently aiming for 30fps wherever possible' is not about sticking to a specific number, but about ensuring a stable feel during exploration and combat," Hamaguchi said.
"In QA testing, we have a policy that if the frame rate falls below 30fps for a sustained period, it is treated as a bug rather than a design feature."
A recent demo at the publisher’s El Segundo, California office covered the opening chapters set across the Grasslands, somewhere past the point where players get their first Chocobo. I played in handheld mode, where performance stayed locked at 30fps without any noticeable dips below that. If I were to compare the graphics settings, it would be the equivalent of a low-end PC build.
According to Hamaguchi, this was accomplished by doing several things. One way was using the Junon and Gongaga sections to stress test the most extreme of the game’s environmental designs. Others included a ground-up reconstruction of how Rebirth’s world is rendered on the Switch 2 hardware, reorganizing the overall rendering order of the environment and implementing culling to suppress geometry rendering outside the player’s sightline.
"The background models themselves have been optimized specifically for the hardware," Hamaguchi explained.
“This wasn't just a simple reduction; it includes redesigning the LOD stages and reworking material expressions with high rendering costs from the ground up. After clearly defining in advance what needed to be preserved and to what extent, we conducted validation based on actual gameplay scenarios, identifying reproducible conditions where load tends to spike and addressing them one by one."
Furry friends
When it came to hair and fur rendering, Rebirth on the PS5 was a significant upgrade from Remake and the Switch 2 version. Due to Intergrade using dynamic resolution scaling alongside DLSS, hair had noticeable artifacting, which Hamaguchi acknowledges, came into conflict with rendering extremely fine details.
Rather than rebuild the hair system, the developers apply a slight blur depending on the direction and density of the hair, preventing DLSS from over-emphasizing edges and producing that odd-looking ghosting effect.
Controlling party members in the open world in both exploration and combat felt great on Switch 2. It’s literally the same game that’s currently available on PS5 and PC. Don’t expect any console-specific features like GameChat, Joy-Con 2 mouse control support, HDR calibration and the like.
What is returning from Remake Intergrade, however, is the Streamlined Progression system. Available through the settings menu, these are boosters for players who want to simply enjoy the story. These range from maximum HP and MP to accelerated XP and AP game, among other things to make the game easier.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will hit Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X and Series S on June 3, 2026. There is a free demo for it available right now for both consoles featuring the first two chapters with save progress carrying over if players decide to buy the full game.
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