More than five years after its release on PS4 in 2020 and subsequent ports to PS5 and PC, Final Fantasy VII Remake will arrive on Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S in 2026.
In an interview, game director Naoki Hamaguchi spoke about the difficulties of porting the game to Switch 2 and what it took to run stably on the console.
"The Nintendo Switch 2 has excellent technical specifications. But due to power consumption limitations in portable mode, performance is slightly reduced. A simple port would not provide stable operation, so our talented rendering programmers did additional work to optimize."
To ensure smooth gameplay and modern visual quality even with reduced specifications, the team paid special attention to lighting.
"I believe that lighting is a key factor in the quality of graphics and expressiveness."
Using simplifications for the sake of optimizing lighting would mean noticeably changing the characters and making the game "cheap." Therefore, when porting to Switch 2, the lighting was left almost unchanged, reducing the load on other elements such as post-effects and fog. Thanks to this, the port runs stably at 30 fps without loss of quality.
"If you use the "hardware" correctly, players will get the expected quality. My honest assessment is that the Nintendo Switch 2 is a truly amazing device."
