With more than 5 years having passed since its initial release for the PlayStation 4 in 2020 and subsequent PlayStation 5 and Windows ports from the following year, Final Fantasy VII Remake is finally coming to Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S in 2026. AUTOMATON Japan recently talked to director Naoki Hamaguchi about the difficulties he and his team faced when porting the game to Switch 2, and what it took to get the game to run smoothly on the console.
“The Nintendo Switch 2 has great hardware specs,” Hamaguchi comments. “However, due to power consumption constraints, it’s designed to dial back performance a bit in handheld mode. So, since a straightforward port wouldn’t be enough to make the game run stably in handheld mode, we had our talented rendering programmers put in extra work on optimization.”
In order to secure smooth performance, and above all, make the game look good according to modern standards even with reduced specs, FFVII Remake’s dev team heavily prioritized lighting. “I believe lighting is the crucial factor in terms of graphics quality and expression in this day and age,” Hamaguchi says.
Although using approximations for lighting optimization would have been a shortcut, Hamaguchi says that this would have noticeably altered the appearance of characters’ expressions – making the game feel “cheap” overall. In order to avoid this during porting for the Switch 2, the devs made sure to keep lighting rendered in essentially the same way as the original. Instead, they reduced processing load in other areas, like post-effects and fog. Thanks to this, the development team managed to achieve a port that runs stably even at 30fps, without compromising on quality. “I’m extremely happy that we kind of managed to become a model case of a high-end game being ported for the Nintendo Switch 2,” Hamaguchi comments.
Despite the challenges, the director praised the console for packing a lot of memory, which makes the porting process very straightforward when it comes to docked mode. While things do get a bit trickier in handheld mode, Hamaguchi seems very pleased with the Switch 2. “In our experience, if you just use the hardware properly, you’ll be able to deliver games at the quality players expect. All in all, my honest opinion is that Nintendo Switch 2 is a truly amazing piece of hardware.”
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