Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director says Nintendo players ‘don’t need to worry’ about Switch 2 port
FF7 Rebirth on Switch 2 will be “just as high quality as the first game”
Final Fantasy 7 Remake series director, Naoki Hamaguchi, has said Nintendo fans need not worry about how the second game in the trilogy, Rebirth, will run on Switch 2, because he thinks it will be “just as high quality as the first game”.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade is due to release for Nintendo Switch 2 in January, and so far, its graphics performance looks fairly impressive compared to the more powerful console versions.
On paper, the second entry, Rebirth, could be seen as a bigger challenge for Square Enix’s engineers, since it was originally a PS5 console exclusive, but Hamaguchi told VGC in a recent interview that, because of its experience optimizing the game for PC and Steam Deck, he believes it will offer a high-quality experience on Nintendo’s hybrid.
“Obviously, we are working very hard to make sure that [fans are similarly impressed by Rebirth on Switch], and that people are going to get that high quality they are looking for,” he said.
“I think we have kind of proved that concept to the world already, in some ways, with the release of Rebirth on Steam Deck. I think we saw a similar kind of reaction there, where people said,’ wow, it’s actually running on Steam Deck, it looks really good, it’s a quality much higher than I thought they could get on Steam Deck’.
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“In that sense, that was where we did the experiments, to work out how to get these high-level games into a mobile platform. Obviously, there is a bit of a difference in the specs and the capacity between Steam Deck and Switch 2 and various other handheld game systems. But I think we managed to get such a good result there, and that really did help with the planning and the understanding of how to do that going forward in the series.”
Hamaguchi said that, with his engineering background, he sees it as his personal mission to ensure that all versions of the Final Fantasy Rebirth trilogy run well across their various platforms.
According to the director, Square Enix’s early work on PC gave it the flexibility to support different levels of graphical capacity. The game’s development team built a system similar to Unreal Engine’s Nanite, he said, which can adapt graphical elements on the fly, reducing polygons or lowering resolution, depending on the processing power available.
Final Fantasy Remake’s development team was able to plug this system into the Switch 2 version, and then make manual tweaks to ensure a stable frame rate, Hamaguchi explained.
“I think we got a really good response to the first game on PC, and that’s really helped us and given us the know-how and the ability to keep that going, reflect on that, and maybe even push it further in Rebirth and in the third game in the series going forward,” he said.
“So what I want to say is, because of all that experimentation stuff we’ve done on the PC to make sure of that, Nintendo players in the future, you really don’t need to worry at all. They’re going to get a version that is just as satisfying and just as high quality as the first game, if not higher.”
