The latest Steam re-release of Square Enix’s original 1997 classic Final Fantasy VII dropped last night on February 24, and it’s already sitting at an “Overwhelmingly Negative” score, with only 36 percent of the 308 reviews being positive. For comparison, the previous Steam version of the game, now titled the “2013 Edition,” has a 92 percent “Overwhelmingly Positive” score. That could be this debacle’s one saving grace, but, unfortunately, Square Enix decided to delist the 2013 Edition of Final Fantasy VII when the new version dropped last night.
It’s somewhat difficult to sum up all of the many issues that users have reported in their Steam reviews due to the sheer number of them, but the main problems reviewers are taking issue with are stuttering sound effects, a forced launcher (that somehow registers inputs even when the game is fullscreened), buggy resolution settings (that don’t actually alter the resolution when selected), and a lack of optional filters. The lack of filters is especially ridiculous, as reviewers are reporting “blurry” visuals, and because the delisted 2013 Edition featured options for linear filtering and an “Original Graphics” mode.
However, the silliest issue has, thankfully, already been patched out. Although “patched in” might be the better wording here, as several people on X reported that the original Steam depot for Final Fantasy VII was 0 kilobytes. That’s not an exaggeration or a joke: someone at Square Enix seemingly forgot to upload the actual contents of the game to Steam.
“You guys had what… 13 years? 13 YEARS and all the money in the world, just to add 4 features, controller support, bilinear filtering and steam cloud save files,” reads one review on Steam. “This version is a disaster avoid it all all costs,” warns another.
On the plus side, some of the reported issues I chose to omit have been fixed. For instance, the FPS of the original release of Final Fantasy VII has been doubled in the new version on Steam, from 15 FPS to 30 FPS. That sounds great in theory, except that the FPS increase also resulted in animations and cutscenes playing at double their normal speed. I can see why Square Enix chose to fix that particular issue first. Hopefully, the speed at which they rectified the issue implies that another patch is on its way soon.