All eyes are on the third Final Fantasy 7 Remake entry now, but with fantastic Xbox and Switch 2 ports of the first game plus a new Steam re-release of the 1997 original, fans haven’t been neglected recently. That new OG FF7 version hasn’t landed as well as the powers that be at Square Enix had hoped for though.
After a surprise announcement a few weeks ago, the new Steam version of FF7 arrived on 24th February alongside a first-time launch on GOG. The problem? Midgar veterans are blasting it online, and the Steam reviews are currently “mostly negative” despite new QoL improvements like a 3x speed mode, the ability to turn random battle encounters off, and autosaves.
“The FPS limit has been increased from 15 to 30, doubling the speed of fights and actions but without adapting the animations, so the actions desyncs with the audio,” one negative review from a disgruntled player explains. “The filtering for the background looks god awful,” another veteran with “over 1400 hours” in the original added. Tech woes are to be expected with each new re-release of a classic, especially when things are touched up, but after the removal of the previous 2013 release (only previous owners can access it now), this could be seen as very worrying and yet another sign of how important game preservation is.
As first reported by IGN, a quick patch has already dropped to fix the speed in battles and other unspecified bugs. Combat encounters running at twice the intended speed is a huge oversight though, and makes us wonder about Square Enix’s QA process when it comes to these small re-releases and updates.
Regardless, even after the patch, other odd choices and terrible changes remain, such as the removal of resolutions which aren’t in the original 4:3 format. Even worse, some players can’t get into the game: “Still can’t get the game to launch. just crashes on clicking play.” The same people are reporting that, meanwhile, the 2013 version they own works fine. At least, it has been added to their libraries at no extra cost.
While angry, some fans are still giving valuable feedback in hopes they can recommend this iteration of the game at a later date: “All backgrounds and FMVs are blurry from whatever upscaling they did… Any SFX that should play rapidly or cut itself off… These need to be fixed for it to be possible to recommend this version.”
Looking at Square Enix’s actions following the disastrous launch, chances are it’ll be in good shape sooner rather than later, but all this mess made us wonder why the 2013 version had to be delisted in the first place and how much money publishers put into some of these awful re-release and remastering efforts. It’s not a good look!
