The launch experience stands to benefit from more polish and refinement.
How does the Unreal Engine 4-powered Rebirth take advantage of PS5 hardware?
What are the enhancements over Remake?
And are there any unexpected visual follies along the way?
Let’s start with what Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth does well and that begins with its excellent cutscenes.
The level of visual quality achieved here is very impressive, and the cinematics are often outstanding.
That was true of 2020’sFinal Fantasy 7 Remakeas well - so what’s changed?
Skin is more detailed with better-defined specular highlights, while hair rendering is significantly improved.
The card-based hair system is less angular and possesses more fine detail, with less dithering and break-up.
There’s more obvious light occlusion and self-shadowing, looking shinier than its Remake counterpart.
There’s effective indirect lighting in these scenes too, with obvious light bounce from reflective surfaces like sand.
Though subtle in isolation, these upgrades give the cutscenes a more consistently high-quality appearance.
Rebirth’s real time sequences aren’t particularly close but still look great in their own right.
The game’s action combat is another high point.
These battles are a flurry of GPU-driven particles and smoothly-animated combat moves.
I think Rebirth very effectively handles its more naturalistic environments as well.
Relative to Remake, there’s a big boost in the basic fidelity of these more naturalistic environments.
These wide-open gameplay spaces are new for Rebirth.
Rebirth’s cities are also worth commenting on.
The broader scope - plus the improvements to character rendering in cutscenes - are the basic enhancements here.
Environmental lighting tends to be a serious pain point here.
Some of the interiors can look quite nice as well, at least when judged from a distance.
The problems really emerge when we start examining some of the game’s models up close.
It often doesn’t look great, making the environment look like just a bunch of models jammed together.
For a big budget current-gen game, Rebirth can look a little baffling at times.
That becomes especially clear if we take a look back at Remake.
That’s just not the case much of the time in Rebirth, with worse lighting in typical play.
There are other lighting problems too.
Rebirth’s shadows are generally at a very low resolution.
I’m not one to harp on low-res shadows usually, but the quality difference here is pretty profound.
Low resolution textures can also be problematic.
For Rebirth though, there’s a bizarre mixture of low and high resolution assets.
Rebirth also has problems with traversal animations.
Finally, there are a couple other things I wanted to touch on.
Splashing around kicks up sprites, but the actual water surface remains quite flat-looking.
Additionally, there’s no animated collision between the player character and foliage.
Cloud simply passes through the foliage, with zero apparent reaction from the bushes and leaves.
In the final game this is totally absent.
It’s a larger, and often improved visual experience over that game, but these concessions are annoying.
That’s nothing particularly special, but there is a very odd quirk with the performance mode.
It’s noticeably blocky and still doesn’t look much sharper than more conventional scaling methods.
I did notice a bit of ghosting as well, but it’s otherwise a good image resolve.
Again, I do wish camera-based motion blur was added.
Interestingly, camera-based blur is also absent in cutscenes, which is a change from Remake.
At least the graphics mode does hold a very stable 30fps.
The 60fps performance mode is wobblier.
Nibelheim also exhibited frame-rate issues in my testing.
As an aside, loading performance in Rebirth is very good - just like it was in Intergrade.
There are no loading screens during the game itself either, except of course for fast travel.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has some impressive visual strengths - but some unfortunate visual lows as well.
FF16 had great baked lighting, extremely detailed assets and stunning combat.
Its cutscenes were beautiful as well, showcasing an excellent physically-based materials pipeline and super high fidelity characters.
Its environments also had very dense geometric detail.
FF16 was achieved on a custom engine developed around the needs of the title.
Tech like Lumen would be hugely transformative here I think, if used appropriately.
As a game though, fans of Remake will find a lot to like here.
I think its critical acclaim is well-deserved, even if the somewhat intrusive minigames were a little annoying.
It’s a good-looking title, just one that arrives with certain key caveats.
