Interview: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is officially coming to PC and the Epic Games Store
When Square Enix first revealed Final Fantasy VII Rebirth—the follow-up to 2020's popular and critically acclaimed Final Fantasy VII Remake—its PlayStation 5 exclusivity was a major talking point. With Remake already on PC, it felt inevitable that Rebirth would eventually hit PC as well, allowing fans to continue Cloud, Aerith, and the gang's fight against the silver-haired Sephiroth.
Now it's official. As part of The Game Awards, Square Enix announced Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is coming to PC on Jan. 23, meaning fans—whether relative newcomers or series vets—can finally continue their journey with one of 2024's best games.
So why's everyone clamoring over the middle volume of a trilogy, and what makes Rebirth's PC release so special? To tell that story, we need to rewind for a look at Final Fantasy VII's special history on the PC—a surprising story for a game that's broadly known for launching console RPGs into superstardom.
Computer gaming on your console
Back in the early '80s, a young Hironobu Sakaguchi, obsessed with PC RPGs like Ultima and Wizardry, used his new gig at Square (pre-Enix) to bring that genre to living room gamers using low-powered console hardware. This resulted in the first Final Fantasy, which—alongside Yuji Horii's Dragon Quest and Rieko Kodama's Phantasy Star—is generally considered the beginning of the console RPG subgenre, and spawned many successful sequels and imitators.
But June 25, 1998 is another important date for Final Fantasy. That's when Final Fantasy—and specifically Final Fantasy VII—debuted on PC, finally placing it alongside the series that inspired its creation.
Working from an early PlayStation build, the PC version (published by Eidos) is a unique experience, like a funhouse version of the original—but it was a fairly decent version of Final Fantasy VII on PC. More importantly, it signified a major shift for Final Fantasy as a series, breaking it away from the consoles that originally made it famous.
While Final Fantasy's PC releases ran hot and cold over the years, recent entries—especially the mega-popular MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV—have found broad success on PC, opening the series up to a whole new cadre of fans.
And now, with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's PC release, and Final Fantasy XVI getting a similar PC version earlier this year, Final Fantasy is establishing itself firmly (finally) as a series that's more than comfortable bridging the PC/console dichotomy that's defined the genre for decades.
Ahead of release, I spoke with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi—who pointedly refused to choose his favourite between Aerith and Tifa, a long-held fan debate, but was much more forthcoming about the challenges of nailing the second part of a trilogy, the relationship Final Fantasy VII's story has with life and grief, and what fans can expect from Rebirth's PC release.
Final Fantasy VII reborn
It's no hyperbole to say the original Final Fantasy VII is one of the most important video games of all time. It not only shot the Final Fantasy series to worldwide superstardom, but helped popularize the entire console RPG genre. The gaming landscape might look very different today without that surge of popularity.
For 20 years, fans clamored for a remake of Final Fantasy VII on more powerful hardware—but with the original's meteoric success comes a lot of pressure. A remake would have to both satisfy existing fans (with very specific and long-guarded expectations) and newcomers who potentially weren't even born when the original released.
With this pressure on their shoulders, Hamaguchi and his team understood a Final Fantasy VII remake could not simply be a direct reworking of the original, "but rather a reincarnation with a new appeal, culturally adapted to the times." By doing so, he said, they could balance those two audiences going into the game with vastly different experiences.
Final Fantasy VII Remake released on PlayStation 5 in 2020 (and on PC the following year) to major acclaim and millions of copies sold, justifying Hamaguchi's bold vision to create an experience that is (paradoxically) both a remake and a sequel.
Following Remake's success, it would've been easy to put together a cookie-cutter sequel, something that emulated Remake's limited structure and traded in the original game's expansive world for something more narrative-driven. Hamaguchi's team surprised everyone however, delivering a sequel that dramatically expanded on the scope of Final Fantasy VII Remake with a fully explorable open world full of cities, towns, quests, and enough collectables to satisfy even the most ardent checklist enthusiast.
Citing games like Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as inspiration—a nod to the cultural exchange between Japanese and Western RPGs going back to Final Fantasy's inception—Hamaguchi and his team spent a lot of energy finding the right scope for Rebirth's ambitious new structure.
"During the first year of the Rebirth project, we were repeatedly making prototypes to define the size of the world map," Hamaguchi explained. "The key concept of 'narrowness that's just enough to feel spacious' was born out of this process, and we were looking for the perfect size that would make users feel that the world map was spacious, but would also be feasible to achieve from a development standpoint."
A huge part of Rebirth's success is thanks to the Remake development team staying largely intact, giving them a familiarity not just with the engine and other development tools, but with the plot, world, and characters themselves. Expanding Rebirth beyond the scope of both the original Final Fantasy VII and Remake wasn't just a matter of making a bigger world, but of leveraging technology to create more believable characters.
"In the original version of Final Fantasy VII, the characters' emotions were expressed in overt ways, such as jumping up and down to express anger and joy. We believe that Remake and Rebirth allow users to more realistically perceive the characters' emotions, making it easier to experience even greater emotional resonance with the main characters," said Hamaguchi.
And, as anyone who's played the original Final Fantasy VII can attest, emotional resonance and a close connection to the characters is vital to the experience—especially once you hit the Temple of the Ancients.
Middle Child Syndrome
As the second volume of a trilogy, Rebirth faces a challenge familiar to classic films like The Empire Strikes Back and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. How do you tell a compelling story, complete with all the expected and necessary rhythms of a suspenseful narrative, without a definitive beginning and end?
"The second title within a trilogy is extremely important," Hamaguchi said. "If the second title fails to attract attention, fans will lose interest in the third. Because of this, I believe that the second title tends to be the most beloved within any memorable digital entertainment trilogy."
What did Hamaguchi want players to take away from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's narrative ambiguity, as the middle part of a much larger story? Conversation.
"One of the comments that producer [Yoshinori] Kitase often made about this title is, 'Once Rebirth is released, I hope that users will share their various opinions amongst each other until the third title is released,'" said Hamaguchi.
Kitase sure did get his wish.
Among the greatest challenges for the middle volume of a trilogy is to craft an ending that feels satisfying, but also leaves enough plot threads open for the third and final installment to bring home. It's no surprise then that an outsized amount of online Rebirth discourse revolved around its surprising and divisive ending. No spoilers, but anyone who played the original Final Fantasy VII was waiting for that moment—among the most well-known and consequential twists in video game history—but Rebirth's resolution was dramatically inconclusive.
"It was an intentional creative choice we made to leave the ending as something that can be interpreted differently by many fans," said Hamaguchi. "While it is certainly important to know how the trilogy will end, until then, we hope that fans will enjoy the discussions arising among themselves as a form of entertainment in and of itself."
This ending, and the divisiveness surrounding it, intersects deeply with Final Fantasy VII's original theme, which Hamaguchi described as "life."
"The basic philosophy of the world of Final Fantasy VII is that not only people, animals, and plants, but also the planet itself has life," described Hamaguchi. "In today's world, there are many ongoing environmental problems such as climate change, and it can be said that these practices are shortening the life span of the planet. As human beings, we are creatures that coexist with the planet, and therefore we must address issues concerning its life."
In this way, going back to the original release, "the real world and the world of Final Fantasy VII share a common theme, which continues to resonate with the people even as times change."
But life is too often followed by grief—a crystallization of the love we never got to share with someone or something we lost too soon. Even more than the original Final Fantasy VII and Remake, Rebirth explores life through its relationship to grief, culminating in its dramatic ending and the various responses from the game's main characters.
It's a story, Hamaguchi said, written around series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's "Gaia theory."
"The Gaia theory proposes that planets—like humans, animals, and plants—have life. It’s a way of thinking that postulates that even when one passes away, they remain within the planet in some form, continue to affect us, and will one day be reborn," Hamaguchi explained. "Of course, since the deceased cannot come back to life, it is difficult to incorporate the aforementioned, seemingly contradictory theme of the cycle of life into the story, but Rebirth's story captures how those who are left behind with the wishes of the departed feel—not only the characters such as Cloud and his comrades, but also the players themselves—and how these wishes are carried on in the form of rebirth."
As a series that first began as an abstract effort to make PC-style RPGs accessible to console players, the recent PC support for major Final Fantasy titles represents a new chance for the series to compete directly on the platform that originally inspired it. A rebirth of its own.
Console gaming on your computer
Despite Final Fantasy's long history with PCs, stretching back more than half its life, it still feels like a console series to many fans—but that's something Hamaguchi and his team are hoping will change, especially when it comes to newcomers.
"While Final Fantasy is a popular series in the RPG genre, PC players who may have never played a Final Fantasy game before may not know that each installment is a unique and standalone experience," Hamaguchi explained. "As such, Rebirth on PC is a perfect entry point."
Beginning with the second volume in a trilogy might put off some potential fans, but Hamaguchi said his team worked hard to make it accessible no matter the player's experience with the series or previous Final Fantasy VII titles.
"Although it is a trilogy, we made efforts to design Rebirth as a standalone experience for newcomers as well," said Hamaguchi. However, he also pointed to the "Twin Pack" edition, which features both Remake and Rebirth in a single bundle. "I’d love for players to play both and discover why Final Fantasy VII, a game that released over 20 years ago, has captured the hearts of so many players to this day."
Over the past decade or so, there's also been a "dramatic change" to the environment in which players are discovering new games. "When the original Final Fantasy VII was released, they were able to capture much of the game market's users by releasing a game for a specific console, such as PlayStation," said Hamaguchi.
"However, in this day and age, an increasing number of users play games from a variety of environments, including smartphones, consoles, PCs, and the cloud, creating a more pronounced tendency that simply launching a game for one environment is not enough to attract a large number of users," he continued. "As such, it has become more common for many developers to offer their games for multiple platforms, and we believe this trend will continue going forward."
This PC release also provides an opportunity for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to shine on the unique hardware available to PC gamers—above and beyond the already impressive PlayStation 5 version.
"The lighting rendering has been greatly adjusted," Hamaguchi said, referencing one of the major complaints from Rebirth's console release, in which the game's dramatic lighting would sometimes create an uncanny valley effect with character faces. "For high-spec PCs, we have prepared even richer 3D models and texture resolutions that cannot be processed on the PS5."
Hamaguchi said his team also enabled popular graphical options like DLSS and VRR, along with graphical presets for players who are less comfortable fiddling with complex settings panels. "By selecting the preset option that best suits one's PC specs, one can easily apply the settings for the most optimal environment, and of course, it is also possible to set further granular options for core PC users," he explained.
One unique challenge for the PC port? The myriad mini-games. "As you know, Rebirth contains many mini-games," he said. "It was a challenge to tackle the huge number of required tasks, such as enabling unique key configuration settings for certain mini-games."
Seventh Heaven
While the console release of Final Fantasy VII served as the catalyst for the impressive glow-up of console RPGs in the West, its popularity on PC mostly stems from a 2012 remaster. While this older remaster was nowhere near as extensive as Remake and Rebirth, it focused on making the game more accessible to PC gamers (the original was difficult to run on newer versions of Windows) and added quality of life improvements like cloud saves, achievements, and character boosters to power up your characters in a pinch.
This made Final Fantasy VII accessible to many new players for the first time, long before Remake was even announced—but this early remaster really got its wings from the immense fan modding community that coalesced around its release. Fans have spent a decade tweaking, rebalancing, and improving the Final Fantasy VII remaster in myriad ways—with most of the popular mods gathered together in a bundle called 7th Heaven.
According of its website, 7th Heaven allows fans to "change nearly any aspect of the game, including, but not limited to: music, movies, SFX, character/NPC/enemy models, gameplay, battle/world/field textures, animations, skill/spell effects, user interface, dialogue, tweaks and cheats, and more." This modding community speaks to fan dedication in the PC gaming community, and helped carry momentum for Final Fantasy VII for almost a decade between the first PC remaster and Remake's 2021 release on PC.
So will Final Fantasy VII Rebirth be as mod-friendly as the 2012 remaster? "While the team has no plans for official in-game mod support," said Hamaguchi, "we respect the creativity of the modding community and welcome their creations—though we ask modders not to create or install anything offensive or inappropriate."
Though no additional features are planned for the release—unlike the PC release of Final Fantasy XVI earlier this year, which added features and improvements that eventually trickled down to the console version in patches—Hamaguchi's team (the same group that developed the base game on PlayStation 5) did have to fight the urge to add new content.
"We did have the desire to add an episodic story as a new DLC to the PC version," he admitted. But with limited resources, Hamaguchi decided that finishing the final game in the project as quickly as possible was the "highest priority."
"However, if we receive strong requests from players after the release regarding certain matters, we would like to consider them."
Final Fantasy VII renewed
Going back to its initial release, Final Fantasy VII has long symbolized Square Enix's desire to bring console RPGs and PC gaming together under one umbrella. It's an apt goal, given Final Fantasy and the PC have been spiritually intertwined since the beginning, and a perfect tribute to the ambitions of Hironobu Sakaguchi.
"Final Fantasy titles often adopt a story-driven game format that emphasizes narrative experiences, but Rebirth does the same while also making good use of a vast world map and providing users with the freedom to choose their own adventure," Hamaguchi said. "We believe that longtime fans can get a sense of a new Final Fantasy game experience, while new fans can enjoy a Final Fantasy experience that incorporates the more freeform style prevalent in today's generation."
And now, with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth released on PC, Hamaguchi's team can finally put it behind them and work full-bore on the highly anticipated sequel—a sequel that not only promises to match Rebirth's scope, but surpass it entirely, just as Rebirth one-upped Remake.
"Our development team is in full force," said Hamaguchi, "and you will be able to freely travel around the world map on the Highwind [airship] in the third title of the trilogy. Thank you for your patience, and please look forward to the next installment."