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I was impressed by the Switch 2 release of Final Fantasy VII Remake, especially after seeing how it worked on handheld gaming PCs, but my early hours spent with FFVII Rebirth might be even more shocking. The second part in the trilogy is a bigger game that covers a larger span of time and scope of environments. I’ve also tried it on a Lenovo Legion Go and, while it worked and looked okay on it, it took some fiddling to get things just right. But the now-available demo out on Nintendo’s eShop seems like a taste of something that might prove even more impressive.
To start, the FFVII Rebirth demo is a slice of the start of the game. We pick up with a brief cinematic showing Cloud and Avalanche racing to escape Shinra while destruction rains down around everyone. After a short segment that hints at the nature of this retelling of the story in the trilogy, things pick up in Kalm with a flashback. Cloud is telling Aerith, Barret, Red XIII, and Barret about how he met Sephiroth and the mission that led to everything going wrong. It’s at that point that I started to realize the Switch 2 version of FFVII Rebirth might actually perform better than the PC version on handheld gaming devices.
The opening cinematics look striking, of course. They’re crisp in the FFVII Rebirth demo on the Switch 2. Character models look good. Textures are sharp. Also, another positive is the font size is shockingly good. I was a bit concerned when I first started the trial and some informative text in the upper right corner. It seemed a bit small. However, once I got into the opening moments chronicling a return to Midgar and encounter with Shinra soldiers, everything looked perfect. Cinematic font, if you enable it, is large and clear in handheld mode. Text in the UI during combat looks fantastic. It all looks solid so far.
Another encouraging element came when I actually reached Midgar in FFVII Rebirth on the Switch 2. When I played it on a handheld gaming PC, I was able to get it looking and running okay. I mean, of course it would look much better immediately on a gaming laptop or desktop. However, I did need to fiddle around with the settings there. Here, there’s none of that. I can mess with HDR and lighting, but otherwise things are good to good. Everything is visible and easy to see. The default lighting options seem fine in these early hours.
There’s something else I’ve noticed and am starting to suspect. I think FFVII Rebirth might actually look a bit better on Switch 2 than Remake did. I mean, I can’t tell 100% yet. I played the demo in handheld mode. I only had a few hours with it. I didn’t mess around a lot with photo mode and we’re limited to a set number of locations. But some of the character models, textures, and artifacts seemed a bit stronger and maybe a little more detailed than things did when I played the port of the original. It could be improvements to the lighting system or the team being more comfortable with the new console. It did surprise me though, and it made me wish I had more places to explore to investigate it.
What is certain is that the FFVII Rebirth Switch 2 demo is insightful and looks good while it lasts. It’s a substantial sliver of a big game. The things I did see looked encouraging. So much so that I wish I’d had more time to investigate the performance and see if perhaps it is better than the first game in the trilogy on the system.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will come to the Switch 2 and Xbox Series X on June 3, 2026, with a demo out now, and the second part of the FFVII remake trilogy is already on the PS5 and PC.
