Poll: What Do You Think of the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Demo?

They let you shutoff vibration during cutscenes and on during gameplay. Such a underrated option. I hate my $70 controller shaken off the table during long cutscenes.

Pre-ordered, against my normal judgement, so I am just going to wait until the game launches and play it then.

I pre-ordered before playing the demo, but I found it really boring. Trying to decide whether to cancel or not.

Demo was decent, don't think it was great visually and certainly didn't look any better than the previous game but the updated combat is fun. I've long since had the Deluxe version preordered and am looking forward to it.

Though I'm unlikely to be playing it at launch as Like A Dragon is too much fun and I doubt I'll have finished it by then

lmao, already a day 1 buy for me even before Rebirth was announced. Already pre-ordered

I regret playing it... Because now the wait feels even longer.

I feel like you had to play the original to get into this remake. I gave part 1 a run for its money when it came out but it just wasn't doing it for me story or combat wise. I was either confused or annoyed the whole time. If it wasn't for Tifa I would have been out after an hour lol

It looks like it’s 720p or below being upscaled. Digital Foundry was looking into it and said it runs at 1440p, upscaled to 4k… but post-processing has compressed assets to as low as 400p. The corridor sections will run like Remake, the open world will be much much rougher. Which is disappointing as the PS5 is much more powerful than the PS4 that the Remake was made for. I will be waiting for a Day 2 patch.

Unsure what if anything they can change about that in a couple weeks but hopefully they do. I appreciate that they had a demo at all. All too many games release next to no information before release.

The game is horribly optimized visually. Playing on OLED and Graphics Mode looks “soft” and even the text/HUD seems lower resolution (John from DF confirmed the game doesn’t have a 4K UI). Performance Mode is super blurry. Apparently the game is post processing at 1/4 the resolution. I’m still excited for the game but hope there is a Day 1 patch. I went back to Remake on PS5 and the clarity is night and day with Remake looking better than Rebirth. I know some sacrifices had to be made for larger environments but come on.

@Konks I was so disappointed in Graphics Mode. It looks very soft and lacks clarity. Even the HUD isn’t displaying in 4K. They keep using the graphics in marketing and it makes zero sense the game is utilizing only 1/4 the resolution. I hope they can fix it

I think this game will be something special

I thought the demo was a little janky, to be honest. Graphics didn't look great, for ps5 and some parts were just a bit tedious. Combat is solid, but sometimes it was impossible to really tell what was going on or where you were being attacked from.
I feel like there's been a slew of really good arpg games lately (ff16, gow, etc.) And maybe this just didn't feel much to me like it was holding up, in comparison. But I love the original and platted the remake, so will surely pick it up down the line.

@J2theEzzo FF16 looks way better than Rebirth. Two different visual styles but 16 is way better optimized. At least in Graphics Mode

I thought nibelheim looked gorgeous and could barely notice the graphics looking low res probably cause of how well it was running at 30 fps in graphics mode. But then I've literally only play like an hour. And 90% of that time has been spent playing on the piano. Maybe it gets worse further in lol

Minor gripe, I hate how zoomed in the camera gets when you go indoors

Don't plan on playing demo. Will go into retail launch totally blind. Haven't seen any trailers besides release date one

It looked fine to me and gameplay should always be prioritised over graphics.
I don't think I've let graphics interfere with my enjoyment of any game ever and I'm not about to start now.

@Judal27 After looking at the screenshot from Crisis Core, (below) I'd have to say that some parts do look really good, but maybe it's once things start moving around that there seems to be a bit of a dip in quality? Character models just looked a little last gen, and given Ragnarok (for example) was a ps4 game, I'd say that looked immensely better. But I suppose it also isn't as vastly open world!

I deliberately haven’t watched anything yet, since I want to be surprised when playing it. Could take a while though with my humongous backlist and I also want to replay Integrade first. So that will probably be in 2025.

The combat is immediately gratifying and engaging, similar to how FF16 hooked me in, but I may end up liking this even more, with the mixture of realtime combat and then slow down time commands system. The graphics are meh, some low res texture work and simplistic assets, but great art and music 👌 It's a definitely maybe 😉

@MrMagic when a game is blurry enough it hurts my eyes that takes away my enjoyment

Way more enjoyable and prettier than FF16. I'm struggling getting into the latest Like a Dragon (despite loving and getting platinum on its predecessor) and this demo made me long for the 29th even more.

It was great and a day one for me but it still had some of that annoying padding like... dragging around a slow box to clean up mako gas... Also did anyone notice how some of the shadows looked terrible?

The demo was fun. Was awesome to find the hidden Comet materia and play as Sephiroth. Will wait for PC release though.

@jmac1686 this was my problem. It took until the demo ended for me to not have motion sickness. Rebirth looks like it was the 2020 game and Remake looks closer to a 2024 game.

The 30/60 FPS part is meaningless to me. I play PC games at 155 fps and Switch games at 20. In Rebirth the big problem is the textures vary so much in quality that it’s like a water-colour painting anywhere but the closest foreground. No amount of increased FPS will help that at all. That is not how that works. It is a setting in how its processing the visuals.

Some guy on a different forum pointed out how the open world in FF15 on PS4 looks better… this is my issue with it. If it ran at 20 FPS but gave me no headaches from blurriness, I would be completely fine. I ran it on 4k mode (despite not having it plugged into a 4k tv but a 1440p monitor) and the gains are marginal at best. The open world still looks really bad. When Horizon and GoW aced this on a cross-gen game… this just looks bad.

The demo was a huge step down visually from remake. Much like others here, I was pretty disappointed in the visuals compared to the previous entry considering that it was a Ps4 title. The combat was more of the same which is great but something about movement and traversal felt janky and unpolished.

Visuals don't entirely make a game but when you have a blurry mess with low quality assets and textures combined with horrible lighting, shadow LOD and extremely close pop in for vegetation it can be very distracting and take away from the experience. Especially when we do get into the open world areas like the grasslands.
I mean this demo was pretty linear, and to have these downgrades to get it to run doesn't bode well. Even cloud's character model in game appeared downgraded. Some camera issues came up indoors and during combat as well. Ooooo and that English voice acting dub,...... Not great.

The demo in fact unsold me on this as a day one pickup. I will now be waiting until they better optimize the title, as it seems very rushed visually and overly relying on up scaling and downgraded visual settings to meet peeformance targets. If it never gets fixed it will be a wait for steep discount scenario.

Cross Gen titles have been able to run without this level of visual downgrades, look far better and perform great. Even with Jedi Survivor's comparable blurry FSR mess, it still had far higher quality assets being pushed than this.

Ironic for this demo to drop alongside the Square Enix corpo stating they were going to focus on releasing better quality products. Pretty underwhelming for sure. Hopefully Ronin and/or DD2 turn out!

@Konks I will honestly admit it felt very clunky to me the moment I started playing it, especially after playing FF16. The 60fps imo made it feel less clunky, but it looked pretty fuzzy in comparison to the graphics mode.

Maybe you need glasses? I'm not being funny its just the only time a game has hurt my eyes is when I already had eye strain. Do you have 20/20 vision or maybe you already wear glasses. Motion blur could be a big factor though because some people are highly susceptible to it.

@Icey664
True and also Crisis core as well.
Playing through both helps understand the events Cloud is telling the others about and why Sephiroth descends into madness.
People won’t understand Zack’s storyline without playing Crisis core first since it’s going to be in a different timeline to the normal one

It already will be a day one I’ve had the deluxe edition on pre order for a few months already.

Went straight to preorder it halfway through the demo when I wasn't even planning on playing to play it on launch.

But I do dislike the motion blur and how I can't turn it off. :/

Not sure if it's been mentioned but how long is the demo roughly? I haven't yet played it but I am interested to try it out. I liked the demo from FF XVI a while back.

Day one baby, cannot wait!

@andrix9743 right now it is roughly 1.5-3 hours depending on if you play through and explore a bit or spend a ton of time just looking at stuff. I spent 2 hours 15 minutes.

In a few weeks it will have additional demo content in the form of a free roam area.

Was torn on the demo. I played it entirely in my ps portal, so looked great on that. Loved the combat, music, and lively sounds throughout.

However, the pacing is off. There are parts that feel completely slowed down intentionally to add time. The vacuums, following, and even just running all felt just slightly slower than id expected.

A new FF title, especially anything to do with 7, will always be a day one for me.

@Martijn87 Agreed

Not going anywhere near a demo, trailer, pictures, nothing!!! Blackout baby

Visuals are okey (though looked a bit last-gen), but the game design feels very dated. And those sequences, when you have to push L2 and R2, to crawl and turn the valve, just felt like something that should have died, in the PS3 era. The demo for the Remake was much better paced. This felt kinda boring, to be honest.

Hope you can turn of the motion blur in the full game, as it gave me motion sickness. Something I rarely get, even in VR games.

Easy day 1 purchase

@Splat Put it between your legs....

@SJR Yep. My first anticipated "must play" after Itchy Balls Kasuga and the Hawaiian Curse

Never enjoyed any Final Fantasy or Square Enix game all those ridiculous hair cuts and angst but that's just my opinion and I'm way way outnumbered, just glad people enjoy it.
Tried that Foamstars this week what a load of cringey tosh.

@Konks Awesome, thank you! Gonna check out this weekend.

I’ve been on complete blackout on every thing since the reveal trailer. No demo for me. It’s a day one buy … too bad I have to wait several days to play it because I’m going on a cruise the beginning of March and there’s no point in me starting it just to stop.

That piano nonsense is going to be tied to a trophy or some great item and it will drive me insane.

Was really disappointed with the visuals. It's unbelievable that Remake looks far more polished up than Rebirth. That blurry mess killed my excitement a little bit. I'll still play day 1, but I doubt Sqaure Enix will fix it knowing how FFXVI went down.

@carlos82 It looked very poor in 60fps mode on a 55" screen, very blurry. FF16 is far sharper, I'm sure part one was much sharper too.

I thought it was mediocre, need some more polish. Cutscenes was great though.

Demo was great and this is a day one purchase for me. Which is saying something. I exclusively play PS+ games or games that are heavily discounted as I just don't have the time to invest in games and can't take the risk. This is not the case with this though, I'll absolutely fall straight into this. I just hope I can complete it before I go on holiday on the 31st March. 2 hours a day, 5 days a week should be a out 80 hours of game play.

Haven't played it, I'm not a FF fan, but reading the comments , one thought came to my mind...this happens if a title with millions of fanbase gets new releases every year or so. The developer gets content and a bit lazy, knowing their game will be sold no matter what. Reuse the same assets for every game, even downgrading the visuals, instead of improving, as it takes much less effort, money and time. I think quality is more important than quantity, but I know it's all about money.
Happy gaming for the fans though, they'll enjoy it I'm sure

Decent demo, tbh it's a segment I have skipped plenty of times on the original, so I don't seem it to be something that will ruin the game for me, but it's nice to see it realised in to something much bigger than the original. and the music is top draw! Looking forward to the release.

Mixed feelings.
Never had a 60 fps game that left me feeling so much eye strain before, to the point it was putting me off playing to the end.
I'm guessing to do with the upscaled low resolution graphics, and the constant close up jarring camera changes in cutscenes make it hard to watch.
Really wish sometimes they'd just let you watch an event rather than overload with dramatic crash-cut camera jumping all over the place.
And just running around the hilly landscape feels incredibly lightweight and janky and cheaply made somehow.
Combat seems a bit improved though and music is fantastic.

I'll wait for a PS5 Pro patch to play this next year, given the apparent soft/blurry graphics on PS5. By then it will likely have been discounted too.

It's ok.

I'm probably buy it day one, though. I've run out of things to play 🤷‍♂️

It doesn't feel responsive, and the presentation is a mess visually. I've lost count of how many times I've played the PS1 game - so far, Rebirth is on track to be 'ok' much like Remake, which is disappointing.

@IntrepidWombat
Remake was incredible!
Yeah I get it's your opinion, but I struggle to ever see how it's just an ok game. Personally FF7R was better than I ever could have dreamed.
Perhaps it just wasn't the remake you wanted?

@Rosona I don't really think it was a remake at all, just a sequel with a cheeky subtitle, but that's neither here nor there. It was a game that was paced an awful lot like the devs really, really wanted to get a full game out of the Midgar section, and they packed content accordingly. There was a lot of filler as a result. The combat is a chore, and not very fun for me - I think it might be more tolerable if I could remap the controls, but for some reason, that's not an option. I don't like the game's implementation of ATB or how the standard attacks are just so terribly weak through to the end. It's a game that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be turn-based or action-based, so it chose to do neither particularly well. It ended up being more similar to Parasite Eve, but without the proper balance. I thought the geeky fellow with the VR (I can't remember his name) was a lazy way to tack on extra challenges and add summon acquisition. I adore the original game, so I had high expectations for "Remake," and they just weren't met. I understand that I'm in the minority with this, and I'm fine with that.

It was okay. I didn’t really get any enjoyment from it other than watching my partner geek out about it since she was a fan of the original. Seems like a worthy discount purchase, but not day one for me.

@Bentleyma yeah this is interesting. I finally got around to playing Reunion last weekend and noticed many similarities, especially regarding the UI. CC definitely feels dated gameplay-wise, but I really enjoyed Zack's scenes with Aerith, as I feel they'll be paid off in Rebirth

I really enjoyed the more fleshed out story. FF7 had holes and left me confused on what was going on. The gameplay in the demo was fine but I could barely tell when I was running when I pushed the button. Also the lack of a dedicated jump button really annoyed me. There was a spot where a materia was on a ridge and I had to be in the precise position to jump up to it. In a game where you are rewarded for exploring you should be able to explore freely without hindrances to your movement. Fix this issue and I'll be sold.