Final Fantasy 7 Remake director says lighting is the ‘crucial factor’ in making it look good on Switch 2

The director of Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade says the key to making the Switch 2 version look good is not compromising on the lighting.

The game is set to release on Switch 2 (and Xbox Series X/S) on January 22, 2026, and early hands-on reports suggest it’s a solid port that still looks graphically detailed on Nintendo‘s handheld.

In an interview with Automaton, Naoki Hamaguchi was asked about the process of porting the game to Switch 2, and how it manages to still look impressive despite the obvious drop in processing power.

Hamaguchi agreed that a straightforward port of the game wouldn’t have allowed it to run with any real stability on Switch 2, especially in handheld mode, and so the rendering programmers had to optimise the game.

He explained that, in his eyes, lighting is the most important element of making a modern game look detailed, and other visual elements can be reduced as long as the lighting remains untouched.

“I believe lighting is the crucial factor in terms of graphics quality and expression in this day and age,” he said.

He went on to note that if the lighting had been compromised for the Switch 2 port, it would have affected characters’ expressions and would have made the game feel “cheap” as a result, so the team insisted on rendering the lighting in the same way as in the PS5 version.

Optimisation was instead focused on reducing processing load in other areas of the game such as fog and other post-processing effects. The result was a game that runs at 30 frames per second on Switch 2 without looking drastically inferior to the PS5 version.

“In our experience, if you just use the hardware properly, you’ll be able to deliver games at the quality players expect,” Hamaguchi summarised. “All in all, my honest opinion is that Nintendo Switch 2 is a truly amazing piece of hardware.”

Last month Hamaguchi said the reason the physical Switch 2 version of Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade is a Game-Key Card is because the read speeds from cartridges wouldn’t be fast enough to ensure optimal performance.

“I think perhaps the biggest issue for developers, certainly for people like us who make high-end HD games, is the loading speed, because you compare that to the solid-state drive and the speed you can get from loading from that, it’s going to be inferior to that,” he explained. “It just has to be, that’s the way the media works, physically.

“So that’s the bigger issue, really, in terms of making games, making high-end games for the Switch 2, and what it allows, obviously, by doing a semi-download version of the game, you can then use the SSD and rely on that for that smoother loading. So that’s perhaps the bigger issue in terms of a developer.”