How many times have you said to yourself, “I wish I could play that one game for the first time again?” How often have you enjoyed a game, movie, tv show, or book so much that you long to be able to experience it fresh again? I bet there are a few things that spring to mind; we’ve all got our own lists. What if it actually was possible to experience something you love for the first time again? I don’t want to oversell it, but Final Fantasy VII Rebirth manages to deliver exactly that.
Not quite a full year on from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth‘s release on the PS5, the PC version kicks off 2025 with a bang. Rebirth is the second installment in the trilogy of Final Fantasy VII‘s modern reimagining, and while there are plenty of questions lingering from FFVII Remake‘s ending about the nature of this trilogy’s story and its relationship to the original game, Rebirth remains faithful to the soul of its source material in the most important ways, and it is a truly stunning example of what a video game in 2025 can be.
Rebirth opens with the immediate aftermath of the destruction wrought on Sector 7 by the Shinra Electric Power Company, wasting no time in framing AVALANCHE for the massive tragedy and immediately raising the stakes for Cloud and his friends as they rush to escape Midgar. The opening hours of the game follow closely those of the original’s content in Disc 2; the party takes a breather in a lovingly and cozily rendered Kalm, where Cloud recounts to the group the story of his time with Sephiroth in SOLDIER, and the fateful mission to Nibelheim (Cloud and Tifa’s hometown) that would very directly turn Sephiroth down the path of revenge and destruction he is on currently.
Just as in the original game, this sequence is handled as a thorough, playable flashback in which your actions are regularly commented upon by Tifa, Aerith, and Barrett. Experiencing some of the original game’s touches preserved — like Tifa getting progressively more uncomfortable and peeved the more Cloud explores her house and her room, or the sequence of Cloud’s mom hounding him with questions about his time in SOLDIER and his love life — in such rich visual detail and with excellent voice acting, creates an almost unprecedented feeling of enriching your memories of the original game. Seeing this essential part of the story reworked to modern standards and getting to play through it firsthand was almost mind-bending both in terms of its sheer unlikelihood, and in how much the original presentation has been elevated. It took me back to a very specific place and time in an incredible way; it’s like reliving a moment from your past exactly as you remember it, while somehow getting to experience it as though it were brand new.
That effect never really goes away, even as you are constantly weaving back and forth between scenes recreated beat for beat, and expanded versions of gameplay or traversal sequences in more realistic environments that are effectively totally new. The incredible visuals, modernized exploration and combat systems, superb voice acting, fleshed out locations, and remarkable attention to detail work in concert to give you the almost impossible of experience of simultaneously revisiting a cherished classic and getting to experience it for the very first time.
The sensation reaches maximum potency when Cloud, Tifa, and Sephiroth leave Nibelheim to ascend Mt. Nibel; you round a corner and crest a small hill, where Mt. Nibel and the rocky path leading toward it reveal themselves to you in a beautiful vista, and the sweeping orchestral reimagining of “Toward Mt. Nibel” sets the stage for an epic adventure as the opening titles fade in and out while your party hops over stones and across small streams and ascends the mountain path. The unbridled joy in the musical fanfares match Tifa’s enthusiasm and confidence as she leads the group up the mountain, and you can’t help but get caught up in the sheer fun of the moment.
The entire first several hours of the game continue on this theme, faithfully retelling Sephiroth’s villain origin story with so much more gravity than was possible with the technology available in 1997, and following the party’s travels across the continent while they search for answers and Sephiroth himself. Rebirth’s story lingers in Kalm longer than the original game, giving you the chance to spend time with the supporting characters, explore more of the vibrant little town, and provide a greater sense of urgency for the party’s need to move on. It’s a great encapsulation of everything Rebirth does to make itself feel expertly balanced between the new and the familiar.
The thing that struck me repeatedly was the sheer depth of detail added to the game; hundreds of small touches or embellishments that make cities feel more lived in, or give you small ways to connect with the other characters that didn’t exist previously, or just altogether new ideas and places. I felt constantly impressed by how much there is to take in and to do; it’s evident that the people who made Rebirth have a great deal of reverence for Final Fantasy VII, and wanted to do it justice by leaving practically no stone unturned.
Rebirth‘s gameplay is largely iterative over Remake‘s, which is what you’d expect from a direct sequel that is effectively part of the same connected story and experience. Exploring the world is pretty much the same (although Cloud can now vault over some objects), and while the combat system is mostly the same, it’s received some nice quality of life improvements. Combat synergies unlock special moves between characters, and the ATB system feels like it’s been tuned a bit to give you access to your spells and abilities just a little bit more often. Similarly, the pressure/stagger system feels better balanced in Rebirth than it did in Remake; it still gives you a bit of resistance, but it also rewards you for taking advantage of an enemy’s weaknesses more readily.
Equipment, materia, character skills, and party management have all been enhanced as well, providing you with more depth of customization with each of the game’s playable characters and thus helping all of them to feel more distinct from one another. There are a lot of small bits of polish that work together to provide a much more meaningful experience in setting your party and abilities up to suit your play style. As a result, the combat in Rebirth is still fun to engage with, and it feels improved over the combat in Remake.
Arguably, the biggest components that make Rebirth so impressive are its visual fidelity and the quality of its art design. PC players can take advantage of much more powerful hardware than is available in the PS5 (or the PS5 Pro for that matter), and so the PC is the definitive showcase platform for Rebirth, allowing players with high end systems to see it as it stunning, uncompromising detail.
Rebirth is an absolute feast for the eyes, taking full advantage of Unreal Engine 4 to squeeze every last ounce of power and performance out of it. It’s a testament to how much can still be achieved with Unreal’s previous engine, and the viability of Square Enix’s choice to continue developing Rebirth on it given the development team’s existing knowledge of UE4 and the tools they had created for it.
While it may lack some of Unreal Engine 5’s flashier new features and tech, The PC version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth sports enhanced lighting effects over the PS5 release, as well overall higher fidelity and crisper visuals owing to the ability to render at native resolution and with higher resolution textures. The graphics settings menu gives you a fair amount of options to tune (not as many as you might want, but there are enough), along with providing DLSS upscaling support, so it’s relatively easy to adjust the game’s performance to your liking.
Curiously, Rebirth has no ultrawide display/aspect ratio support out of the box. This is pretty easy to solve with community-made mods, but the fact that this was overlooked at a point when ultrawide monitors are becoming more commonplace and more games are supporting them is somewhat surprising, especially considering the game renders and performs without any weird glitches or behaviors with mods applied to add the functionality.
I spent the majority of my time playing Rebirth on Windows 11 Pro; while I’ve recently switched to gaming on Linux for the majority of the time, there were some major Nvidia driver issues with Rebirth on Linux, and many AMD users were reporting a variety of issues as on Linux as well. These issues have very recently been largely resolved via some light modding, but I’m hoping to see some driver-level fixes for Linux soon, as it’s the first game I’ve encountered in a long time that’s had such major rendering issues on Linux at launch. Thankfully for the majority of PC players, this won’t be an issue, but if you happen to be playing games on Linux or considering the switch, know that as of the time of this review being published there are some slight hurdles to clear for the game to be playable there.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth preforms pretty well overall on Windows, which is impressive considering how large many of the environments are and how much is being rendered on screen in most scenes. I generally needed to have DLSS enabled to maintain a consistent frame rate around 70-80 FPS with most of the graphics settings turned all the way up. With DLSS turned off, the game would hover between 60-70 FPS, and would dip below 60 in enough instances that I preferred to have DLSS turned on. Supposedly, the new DLSS4 transformer-based model for upscaling should provide some noticeable improvements here as well, and I expect to see additional optimization come via drivers and game updates in the near future.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– CPU: Intel Core i9 12900K
– GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
– RAM: 32GB DDR5
– Storage: WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (2 TB) nvme SSD
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– Alienware AW3423DWF 34″ OLED (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
It’s hard for me not to gush about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I’m admittedly a mark for the FFVII Remake project as I have such strong nostalgia and fondness for the original game, but I have to say it would be significantly easier to mess up on a project like this and make games that are a let down than it would be to execute so strongly on so many key components. The story choices later in the game will be the main thing that longtime fans may get hung up on, but frankly I think that’s true of any modern reinterpretation of a beloved property. Part of being a fan of something is having a willingness to see it through change, and in the case of games, to be willing to see a remake with fresh eyes and acknowledge it as something separate.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is such an incredible showcase for video games as an entertainment medium, I’m pretty willing to go along with where it wants to take me. The level of polish present on the game’s visuals, character design, facial and motion capture, voice acting performances, the soundtrack (don’t get me started on how excellent Nobuo Uematsu’s work here is), the fluidity of the combat system, the wild number of minigames, even navigating the menus; all of it is in a class of its own.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is what a mainline Final Fantasy game should be. It’s showing us what could be, and where the series could go if given similar freedoms. I sincerely hope that when the remake project concludes, we get to see new stories told in the Final Fantasy pantheon with this level of polish. As for now, Rebirth is clearly the grandest feather in Square Enix’s cap, and it sets the high mark for whatever comes next.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
