Despite looking much nicer and more stable on the more powerful PlayStation 5, Square Enix’s game is still selling poorly according to the publisher (and that goes for the previous installment in the franchise as well).

Digital Foundry has provided some new insight into Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s performance on the PlayStation 5 Pro, with seven minutes of footage from the beginning of the second chapter, as Cloud and the others explore the game’s first open-world area. It’s immediately apparent how much better the game looks on the console, with the unnamed graphics mode delivering crisp 4K resolution at a steady 60fps frame rate. Everything looks better than on the base PlayStation 5’s performance mode. Many of the visual issues seen on the base console have been fixed (ghosting, shimmering trees in the distance…).

Image quality remains sharp during Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s biggest battle scenes, with near 4K detail. Particle effects have been improved, but this required the use of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling, as the base resolution was 1152p or 1224p and scaled up to 4K from there. The PlayStation 5 Pro’s performance was also compared to the PS5’s base quality mode: the image quality is mostly the same, but the balance is tilted towards the half-generation model, with only a slight performance drop here and there.

This is one of the rare cases where Square Enix is being reasonable, as both games really did underperform compared to past entries.

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) September 18, 2024

Square Enix announced in its latest financial report that HD Games, the console gaming segment, did not live up to expectations despite the release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the PC port of Final Fantasy XVI. The MMO and Smartphone/PC segments also saw a decline compared to the previous fiscal year. Foamstars and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did not sell as well as they should have, and the “impairment charge on the content production account” also resulted in an operating loss.

Final Fantasy XVI is also underperforming, but the release of the PC/Xbox versions should help…

Source: WCCFTech, Square Enix