Final Fantasy VII Remake is (almost) perfect on Steam Deck

digitaltrends.com:

Square Enix surprise-launched Final Fantasy VII Remake on Steam during its 25th anniversary livestream, and it leaned heavily on the fact that the game is Steam Deck Verified. For good reason, too. Final Fantasy VII Remake is over two years old, and it’s only been available on PC through the Epic Games Store for six months.

I bit the bullet and bought the game for a third time to answer one question: Is it worth spending $70 again just to play Final Fantasy VII Remake on the Steam Deck? It’s a solid version of the game, much better than I expected it to be, but it still has one major flaw that I hope Square Enix addresses in a future update.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is all about fluid combat, so I was immediately worried about the Steam Deck version when I saw it defaulted to a 30 frames-per-second (fps) cap. Thankfully, it seems Square Enix was being conservative. I was able to get through the first mission and the Scorpion Sentinel boss fight while mostly staying at 60 fps.

I didn’t get there without tweaks, though, and unfortunately, Final Fantasy VII Remake doesn’t give you very much room to compromise. You have two graphics settings — shadow quality and texture quality — and they each only have two options. I had to bump both down to Low to get the smooth 60 fps. At High, which is the default, the game hovered in the 40 fps range.

As you can see in the comparison above, these graphics options do very little to impact the look of the game. They can improve performance quite a bit, but I was happy to turn both down to hit a higher frame rate. I wasn’t perfectly locked at 60 fps — a point I’ll address later — but the frame rate drops haven’t hurt the experience so far.

Final Fantasy VII Remake plays great on the Steam