Why Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth feels right at home on Nintendo Switch 2
"Porting the Switch 2 version of Remake based on the Intergrade build was a very meaningful endeavor"
by https://www.techradar.com/uk/author/ural-garrett · TechRadarFeatures By Ural Garrett published 29 April 2026
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Despite Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's larger scale compared to the first game in Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy, very few compromises were made for the port to Nintendo’s hybrid console.
The Nintendo Switch 2 may be less than a year old, yet performance comparisons to previous eighth-generation and current generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft aren’t quieting down anytime soon. Ports of AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws more than prove the hybrid console can keep up with its less portable counterparts. However, there perhaps isn’t a better example of the Switch 2’s capabilities than last January’s release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade last January.
The team took a full year to port the game, starting with “getting it to run” on the hardware before pivoting to a three-month optimization period. This allowed them to get Remake Intergrade working at a stable 30 frames per second with 1080p resolution in docked mode while using DLSS and dynamic upscaling between 720p and 1080p.
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Warming up
When Game Director for Remake Intergrade Naoki Hamaguchi, alongside his team at Square Enix, set out to bring part one of the Unreal Engine take on Cloud’s adventure to Switch 2, it served as both a warm-up exercise and a technical lesson on the console.
"Porting the Switch 2 version of Remake based on the Intergrade build was a very meaningful endeavor," Hamaguchi said. "Not merely for the sake of porting, but also to allow the development team to gain a practical understanding of the Switch 2's technical specifications. Even if challenges arose, rather than giving up, we made decisions based on how to overcome them and make it work."
Though Remake Intergrade was a linear experience by design, as it focused entirely on the Midgar section of the original 1997 title, Final Fantasy Rebirth was significantly bigger. Featuring larger open-world sections when it released exclusively on PlayStation 5 in 2024 (and a year later on Windows), there were many questions about how the Switch 2 would handle the title when it was announced.
“Based on our experience with Remake, we felt confident that we could handle the scale,” explained Hamaguchi. “However, the technical challenges are clearly different with an open-world design, so in the end we knew we'd just have to try it out and see.
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