FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE INTERGRADE

The most-upvoted negative review of this game, at 2,309 votes, isn't about the game:

Great Game, but 70 dollars for a game that was console exclusive for years, then released exclusive to Epic, and finally released to Steam. Don't be greedy Enix.

The most-upvoted positive, at 2,555 votes, is about the same thing from the other side: "Steam > EGS. Please Square Enix stop selling your game's exclusivity to Epic Games Store."

Four years on, that argument is settled — the game is here, it's 65% off, and it costs NZ$22.38. So this review is mostly about the two things that are still live.

The port complaints are largely over

This is the finding that should change a prospective buyer's mind, because the store page won't tell you.

Steam's most-helpful negatives are full of technical anger: "it still has the stuttering issues from the Epic Games release" (779 votes), "they still have not added any more graphical options in the menu than with what they initially had on the Epic port… they do not support Ultrawide" (478 votes), "They gave us the same version they gave to the Epic Games Store. Poorly optimized" (344 votes).

Every one of those is from June 2022, launch month.

Dating the whole set: 14 port-related negatives in the hundred, of which 11 are from 2022, two from 2024, one from 2025, and none from 2026. Of the hundred most recent English reviews, two mention stuttering, optimisation or ultrawide.

And Square Enix kept working: version 1.002 in May 2023, 1.003 in February 2024, 1.004 and 1.005 in December 2024, 1.006 in January 2026 and 1.007 in February 2026. I can't tell you what each patch contained — the announcements are bare version notices — so I won't adjudicate the 1,191-vote review claiming a 2024 patch prioritised censoring a scene over fixing performance. What I can say is that the complaints it was angry about have faded from the record, and the game is still being updated four years after release. Performance scores a 7 rather than the 5 the loudest reviews would suggest.

The argument that hasn't ended

Now the real one. Count the hundred negatives: original 56, story 54, combat 46, remake 43, filler 23, Midgar 19, side quest 18.

This is the sixth game I've reviewed today whose critics measure it against one specific other game — and here that game is its own 1997 ancestor. FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE covers only the Midgar section of the original, perhaps five hours of a forty-hour game, and expands it to forty hours of its own. Some of that expansion is superb: Jessie, Biggs and Wedge become real people, Aerith and Tifa get scenes the original could only imply, and the city is realised rather than suggested.

Some of it is corridor-walking and fetch quests, which is what the 23 mentions of "filler" are about. And the plot makes deliberate, structural departures from the source — the "ghost" mentions, at 7, point at the mechanism — which the game treats as a feature and a slice of its audience treats as a betrayal.

A 735-vote review from May 2026 makes the case as fairly as anyone: "As someone who absolutely loves the original FF7, this is one of those games I desperately wanted to like… And to be fair, technically and visually it is undeniably impressive." It's a genuine disagreement about adaptation, not a bug report, and it isn't going to be resolved by a patch.

That's why negatives haven't decayed the way the port complaints did: 35 in 2022, then 15, 17, 14 and 19 so far in 2026. Recent English reviews sit at 83 of 100 positive, three points under lifetime.

What's unambiguously good

The combat, first. It's a hybrid that shouldn't work — real-time action that you pause into a menu to spend ATB charges — and it does, giving fights both the immediacy of an action game and the deliberation of a turn-based one. Combat appears in 46 of a hundred negatives largely because people want to praise it before objecting to something else.

Then the presentation: this is a 9 for visuals and a 9 for sound without much argument, and the orchestral rearrangements of Nobuo Uematsu's themes are worth the entry price on their own.

The INTERmission episode starring Yuffie is included rather than sold separately, which for a game carrying five DLC entries is worth noting.

The verdict

FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE INTERGRADE earns an 8, matching FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth and sitting half a point above FINAL FANTASY XVI.

It's a technically dazzling, superbly scored, mechanically inventive action RPG that treats its characters better than the game it's remaking ever could. It loses ground for padding a five-hour act into a forty-hour one, for a story that divides its own audience by design, and for a launch history that earned Square Enix a lasting reservoir of ill-will.

But the reason to write this review now is simple: the technical complaints that dominate its Steam page describe 2022. If you skipped this because of the port, that reason has expired — and at NZ$22.38, so has the pricing one.