Potentially one of the most exciting games of the year, Final Fantasy 7 Remake takes a beloved, stone-cold PS1 classic and revitalises it with the power of current generation console technology. What were once basic polygon models overlaid on pre-rendered backgrounds, interspersed with full motion video CG sequences has evolved – with full real-time rendering at a quality that far exceeds what Squaresoft could even dream of, let alone achieve back in 1997. The excitement is palpable – stoked still further by the surprise ‘drop’ of a demo early on Monday morning.
In an age of often colossal downloads, it’s refreshing to see the demo clock in at just 8GB – a drop in the water next to the 100GB install size understood to be listed on the retail box. Still, the demo packs a real punch, offering 45-60 minutes of action, depending on how you tackle it, covering Cloud and Avalanche’s route up to the first Mako reactor core. You learn the basics of combat, evade laser beam traps and end it all with a boss battle against a Scorpion boss.
It’s literally the first hour of the game, but obviously, it’s not final code – PSN hackers were able to access the demo months ago, after all. With that in mind, gameplay elements can be altered and story elements tweaked by the time the game launches on April 10th. Technically though, what we’ve got right here with this Unreal Engine 4-powered project is already extremely polished on PS4 and PS4 Pro, to the point where if Square-Enix ships the title like this, we’d be perfectly happy.
Perhaps learning from the lessons of a somewhat uneven showing on Kingdom Hearts 3, Final Fantasy 7 Remake reveals a developer more at home with the UE4 technology. The somewhat disappointing 900p/1296p resolution split seen with Kingdom Hearts on base and enhanced consoles gets a significant upgrade to a dynamic 2880×1620 on PS4 Pro and a dynamic 1920×1080 on the vanilla PS4. The DRS solution on Pro is relatively restrained, with most of the action playing out at the 1620p upper bounds, with the most heavy scene – the Scorpion boss battle – dropping to 2304×1296. Owing to the frenetic action and the reliance on TAA, the drop to image quality is not especially an issue.
Dynamic resolution is less commonly seen on base PlayStation 4, but there are cases here where it can drop to 1600×900, notably in the Scorpion boss. No further tweaks or cutbacks are immediately noticeable between the two machines: motion blur, depth of field, shadow quality and volumetrics all play out at the same quality level. Meanwhile, performance is entirely locked at a properly frame-paced 30 frames per second on both consoles. Try as we might to break the game, the FF7R demo played out with absolute consistency – a breath of fresh air after the variable frame-rate (and uneven frame-pacing on Pro’s stable mode) in Kingdom Hearts 3.