Last week, Square Enix had us all scrambling to wrap up Remake as quickly as we could, as it announced that it'll be bringing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to Switch 2 in just a few months on 3rd June.
We only caught a brief glimpse at how the ambitious follow-up will fare on Nintendo hardware in the Partner Direct, but it was more than enough footage for the tech experts over at Digital Foundry to take a look and suss out what we can expect from a performance perspective.
The good news is that the team was overall rather impressed with what they saw. Cutscene comparison shots to the PS5 version reveal that the Switch 2 edition makes some clear cutbacks in terms of environmental clutter (set dressing, foliage, etc.), and the textures once again see a significant drop in the resolution department, but it's far from a deal breaker. Besides, without the comparison shots, you're unlikely to spot many of the missing details on an initial Switch 2 playthrough.
The trailer seems to be counting in at 720p internally — a drop from Remake, but this is a much more demanding game — and the team did notice some frame pacing issues on display before pointing out that Remake's early marketing had similar problems, which were resolved by the time we got to launch.
Overall, the outlook is pretty optimistic. A downgrade from the PS5 version, of course, but the team suggests that things seem to be falling roughly in line with the Steam Deck, which is no bad thing.
We're sure that we'll be seeing a lot more from Rebirth as we get ever closer to June, so don't assume that this is it on the performance analysis front.
We had a wonderful time with Remake earlier this year. "The Switch 2 version makes impressively few compromises to get this gorgeous-looking game running on the system," we said in our review, "even at 30fps, this looks and feels fantastic". Here's hoping that Rebirth can keep the good times coming.