Look, let’s be honest, Square Enix is a hard company to get behind right now. Between layoffs, peculiar restructuring plans, and a penchant for chasing the hottest controversial flavour of the month, there are many reasons to be sceptical of one of Japan’s biggest publishers in 2026. But, for all the dubious business moves and articles about NFTs, there exists a publisher that looks like the Square Enix we remember from generations past; one that was keen to push technical limitations, to iterate on the boundaries of what video game RPGs look like, and that wanted to be at the bleeding edge of our bizarre little industry.
I see shadows of that Square Enix in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake projects, and how they are being handed when they’re being ported to the Switch 2. Earlier this year, our own Alex was deeply impressed by the port of the first game in the series, Remake itself, and how well it runs on the most recent Nintendo hardware. Now, with the sequel, I am blown away by Square Enix’s technical wizardry all over again. Maybe even more so than I was with Remake.
I only got 30 minutes to experience the Switch 2 version, but the confidence Square Enix has in the port is clear. For the demo, the publisher dumped us into Kalm (near the start of the game, sure, but probably one of the most NPC-filled and textured areas of Rebirth as a whole). Here, it felt like the game was taking us through a quick rundown of how the console – played in handheld mode – deals with a quick grab-bag of all the features you can expect to see throughout Rebirth. The first time I stopped to marvel at the port was as we went up the clocktower with Aerith to see Midgar in the distance. It’s a poignant scene in Rebirth for sure, but also a show of the engine and the game’s tech. As the cutscene shows Cloud and Aerith chatting about the hero’s tiff with Tifa, you see a few fuzzy, poorly-rendered hairs at the fringes of Aerith’s head, but otherwise this is a slick experience. And, really, not that far apart from that of the base PS5.
The subsequent chase through the markets and cobbled stone alleys of Kalm shows the game when it’s all a bit more frantic: HDR-buffed light blooms on the floors, looking nice and crisp against the shadows cast by overhead walkways. Graphics options are limited to Brightness and HDR Luminance (at least on the version we played), which is in line with the Remake settings. But that’s fine, because what’s actually happening under the hood on these ports is that DLSS is doing most of the work: the game is being rendered at a lower resolution and then AI-upscaled appropriately (no, it’s not quite the same thing as Nvidia’s controversial ‘yassification’ filter).
As a result, you get some fuzziness and it feels like the some textures (specifically those in the background) might look a bit sub-par compared to what the game chooses to frontline. But that’s fine: when all the character models look like this, and the facial capture and performance walks this tightrope between visual fidelity and curated art style, I don’t if the creatives in charge of this experience guide my eyes around the screen with a leash. Sometimes, you can see some pop-in mid-cutscene, but so what? If that’s the tradeoff I have to take for a game looking and playing like this in my hands, I’ll take it. I’ll take it with bells on.
You know, I think because I entered this demo thinking so deeply about performance and technicality, it made me appreciate Rebirth more. I still swoon every time Aerith’s Theme kicks in, and when she steps out of the air-raid shelter to see the “living, breathing planet, despite everything,” her enthusiasm matches my own. In this moment; Aerith is marvelling at how the planet can look and feel like this in spite of Shinra’s best efforts to sabotage and sacrifice this splendour for its own bottom line. Likewise, I marvel that a handheld machine can pump out something that looks, sounds, runs like this, even as we migrate from the more curated and hemmed-in city walls into the green, breezy expanses of the wider Gaia continent.
You may be able to see little clumps of grass and wildflowers spawn and despawn as you cross invisible thresholds, but it’s a small price to pay to experience this game – bigger, broader, and more self-assured that Remake ever was – running easily in the palms of your hands. I only got to experience one proper battle in the more open spaces of the Grasslands before a Square Enix rep prised the Switch 2 out of my desperate hands, but even here, everything seemed to be firing on all proverbial cylinders. The particle effects, the magic effects, the 30fps framerate (which is perfectly fine for a game like this, thank you very much) – all of it feels just as at home on Switch 2 as it ever did on PS5. Somehow.
