Final Fantasy VII Remake on PC: A gorgeous start, but where are the toggles?

Final Fantasy VII Remake's exclusivity on consoles ends today. Nineteen months after its launch on PS4 and seven months after its PS5 update, Square Enix's ambitious return to Midgar breaks out of Sony's console family to land on PCs. If you're the type of Final Fantasy fan who wants little more than a way to play this game on your computer, you can expect a beautiful and mostly solid port that delivers the perks of the PS5 version to many more people. I went into my testing of FFVIIR on PC with higher hopes, however. For gamers like me, the news isn't nearly as good, and that makes its unusually high PC price of $70 even harder to swallow.

A graphics menu brick wall

My first stop before starting any FFVIIR PC gameplay was the options screen, where I slammed into the brick wall that is the above "graphics" menu. If you've played an Unreal Engine 4 game on PC over the past few years, you can immediately tell which crucial settings are missing. There's no toggle to adjust anti-aliasing quality or methodology. You can't disable V-sync. And most of the finer-tuned graphical toggles that can increase performance for lower-powered machines are entirely absent, including ambient occlusion, reflection, depth-of-field, motion blur, and particle-effects sliders. Worse, the included settings are limited. The "FPS" menu limits players to a few pre-selected frame rates: 30 (same as PS4), 60 (same as PS5's default), 90, and 120. (Nothing higher for the 144 Hz and 165 Hz crowds.) As I've confirmed in tests, this attempt to lock frame rate to a rounded target leads to occasionally choppy performance when the game can't hit its mark. This problem results in something that resembles frame-pacing stutter; it seems the game does not play nice with a variable refresh rate. At 1080p resolution, my favorite medium-high-spec laptop runs the game mostly at 90 fps, but the frame rate can drop when the camera shifts to an entirely new real-time-rendered scene or when the game renders any particle-filled explosions. In these moments, frame rate stutter is quite severe, implying that some optimization work remains for Square Enix's PC porting team.

And if you're looking for ultra-wide monitor support, you won't find it here. FFVIIR on PC is locked to a 16:9 ratio. Currently, your only path to improving PC performance in the default menus comes from a shadow resolution option and a slider that determines the number of visible NPCs (applicable only in towns). The latter is basically a level-of-detail slider for how long it takes for a crowd of townspeople to pop into view. It doesn't seem to impact any of the game's more intensive battles, and changing the setting from its minimum spec to its maximum gets you only a 1.5 percent increase in performance. Switching shadow quality from high to low results in only 1.25 percent more performance at the cost of noticeably uglier shadows. Neither path to meager frame rate savings is worth the apparent visual degradation.

PS5 perks without having to track down a PS5

Still, the best news about FFVIIR on PC is that it includes every perk from the PS5 port. Both the PS4 and PS4 Pro versions of the game suffer from awful texture quality in select moments, and this port doesn't require much in the way of VRAM to enable the PS5 upgrade's much cleaner textures across the board. The port seems poised to deliver adequate 60 fps gameplay, which is on par with the PS5, even if its 90 fps and 120 fps modes aren't as optimized as I'd like. With those PS5-caliber boosts in place and the entirety of the April 2021 "Intergrade" DLC package included, you can expect this version to deliver a nice, full package if you missed its 2020 console debut. The game alternates between fast-paced action and occasional stretches of walking through humdrum corridors, but ultimately, it offers cleverly refined "action JRPG" combat and strategy, whether you play with a mouse and keyboard or a gamepad. (In great PC port news, this version makes it easy to rebind M+KB commands.) And FFVIIR renders its main cast of characters beautifully—and features some very welcome Unreal Engine 4-fueled light bounces in its moodily lit scenes to make its caverns and factories look all the prettier. For the uninitiated, this game only includes the "Midgar" section of the original FFVII game on PS1. I'm a fan of how Square Enix expanded the scope of the original game to make this piecemeal remaster launch feel substantial, but be warned that this game's ending comes much earlier than the 1997 original's. Speaking of Unreal Engine, yes, this is currently an Epic Games Store exclusive. While picking through the EGS install's files, I found direct mentions of "Steamworks," implying that the game could arrive on Valve's storefront after an exclusivity deal expires. (My first copy of Final Fantasy VII came in an oddly shaped white box full of discs that still work, no storefront sign-in required. I long for those days.) At any rate, I'm hopeful that Final Fantasy's modding community can figure out how to inject some UE4-modifying code into this port before long. UE4 ships with so many easily customized variables, and as of this article's publication, Square Enix representatives have not answered my questions about why those options aren't available for FFVIIR's buyers.