If you haven’t heard, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will be massive, not just in terms of playtime (easily over 100 hours, per game director Naoki Hamaguchi). The installation size is around 200 GB, and since consoles have a single Blu-ray disc, that means a hefty download. It’s even worse for Nintendo Switch 2 players, since they’ll receive a Game-Key Card.
Of course, there are also optimization concerns. The team at Square Enix optimized Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth quite well for the platform, but this is a whole different beast. Interestingly, Hamaguchi doesn’t just want to meet the standards set by Part 2 but go even further beyond.
“If we were trying to do that without the experience we had doing Revelation – a completely fresh team coming in where we’ve got to develop for Switch 2 at the same time as the other platforms – I don’t think we’d do very well,” he told Nintendo Everything.
“That would be a very big challenge. I’m not sure we could achieve it if we were doing it from scratch. I think the really big thing that helped us achieve that was the experience we got from working on Rebirth, importing that to other platforms. That knowledge was key to getting it right.
“Obviously, we were very happy, very satisfied with the level of quality we managed to get on the Switch 2 version of Rebirth. For Revelation, we understand we’re doing Switch 2 and all of the platforms at the same time. We didn’t want to limit ourselves based on that.
“The idea is to take the graphics quality and the presentation even higher than it was on Rebirth to the top level it can be. We’re confident that with the experience we got from working on the Switch 2 port of Rebirth, we’ll be able to bridge that gap and take that extra level on the comparatively lower-spec platforms as well. So we really didn’t want to let the fact we’re doing it multiplatform limit the game’s quality.”
While Hamaguchi didn’t share any technical details, like the frame rate or resolution, he said it’s a “very nuanced discussion that, like everything, is now super powered up over what it was on the previous one. To explain a bit more, what we managed to do on Rebirth and then the differences in the game, Rebirth and Revelation, we’re going to take the optimization for that based on what we did for Rebirth, and that will all be done to probably a higher level of optimization because of the knowledge we have.
“It’s not that everything is much higher on Switch 2, just because we pushed it that far. But with optimization, it should all come out as a really good result in the end.”
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is out April 8th, 2027, on Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC, so there’s still time to optimize and further polish, even with three other platforms to consider. For more details on the finale going multi-platform at launch, head here.
You can also read Hamaguchi’s thoughts on mini-games. Their abundance in Rebirth has garnered mixed reactions from fans over the years. However, he believes that it’s more about making them enjoyable and less of an obligation for players.
