Just one year after its initial release, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is finally leaving the confines of the PlayStation 5 to invite itself onto a new platform. The PC port of the acclaimed remake will be entering the Steam and Epic Games Store catalogs starting this Thursday, January 23. While a new wave of players are impatient to discover the continuation of Cloud's adventures brought up to date, others are already imagining playing it on their favorite portable machine. The growing popularity of machines like the Steam Deck, the ASUS ROG Ally or the Lenovo Legion GO has brought portable gaming back into fashion.
Now that it is possible to transport ever more demanding games, players are fighting over these platforms and developers are doing their best to adapt their productions. Square Enix has made a point of honor to support Valve's PC console with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. The studio had promised to obtain Steam Deck certification before launch, and it has now been done. After testing the port on this machine as well as a classic gaming PC, here are our impressions of the gaming experience in portable mode.
A colossal optimization work
On PC as on Steam Deck, Final Fantasy VII Remake – the first part of which was ported in 2021 – is a title with impeccable optimization. Even less powerful configurations are capable of offering an experience that is as beautiful as it is fluid. Unsurprisingly, players therefore expect the same for Rebirth, but the structure of this second volume imposes a completely different exercise for the developers. Where the Remake opus offers a very linear structure with limited open environments, Rebirth is a vast, living and resource-hungry open world.
On PlayStation 5, the performance mode was forced to sacrifice the sharpness of landscapes and characters, but what about on PC? With an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060ti GPU, 16GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor, the experience is as fluid as on the Remake episode, with more than 120 frames per second by configuring the graphics on the “high” preset (but limiting the resolution to 1080p). Unfortunately, the Steam Deck can’t match such performance, but still manages to cope given the game’s colossal resource demands.
The reliability of the “Steam Deck Verified” badge
To make a long story short: yes, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is playable on Steam Deck. But you still have to be ready to make some concessions. With a resolution of only 1200x800p and all the graphics options programmed to a minimum, the game struggles to reach 40 frames per second despite a huge sacrifice in visuals. The dynamic resolution does not hesitate to blur certain environments as much as possible, while the faces of the characters are difficult to recognize when moving in open areas. The title, however, shows surprising stability during cutscenes.
After trying several configurations, our advice is to limit the game's display to 30 frames per second in order to avoid the dynamic resolution sacrificing too much visuals for a framerate that remains unstable beyond this limit anyway. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth therefore deserves to obtain the verified badge, since the game is playable, but it must also be recognized that the experience is far from ideal. Players equipped with a gaming PC will have every interest in using their main machine to play in optimal conditions and enjoy all the beauty of the title. Especially since to play on a larger screen with a higher resolution, the docked Steam Deck is unable to support this game. However, this PC console offers a decent alternative for players who would like to continue their game on the go.
Are AAA games really suitable for portable consoles?
As the Switch 2 launches, the release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on PC allows us to take stock of the future of AAA on portable platforms. We have to face the facts: such demanding titles will never be playable in the best conditions on such machines. Manufacturers are forced to sacrifice power to reduce costs and ensure a format that is sufficiently light, comfortable and transportable. But the rather satisfactory operation of Square Enix's RPG on Steam Deck is nonetheless encouraging.
When key technologies like DLSS are invited to all portable consoles, ever more surprising productions will be able to run without problems on these machines. Nintendo's new console should be one of the first examples of the genre dedicated to the general public, since the latest rumors suggest that it will make good use of AI upscaling. Maybe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will be one of the launch titles for the Switch 2. See you in a few months for the verdict.
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