Final Fantasy 7 Remake patch levels everyone up and lets you speed up cutscenes to help you replay it before Rebirth comes to PC

2 weeks ago 9

Aerith from the Final Fantasy 7 remake looks a little confused.

(Image credit: Square Enix)

The PC release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth finally got announced at The Game Awards, and it'll be here on January 23. What's more, it'll be coming to Steam and the Epic Games Store on the same date—no exclusivity period this time.

That doesn't leave me with much time to get my second playthrough in, and I'd like to have everything that happened fresh in my mind for the sequel. It took me 55 hours to get through Final Fantasy 7 Remake once, and that's after skipping a couple of sidequests. Fortunately, the 1.004 update has got my back.

This patch adds a "head start" option when you begin a playthrough that bumps all characters up to level 45, with the appropriate number of skill points. It also gives you some materia at max level, gear and accessories from "toward the middle to the end of the story", extra items, and 50,000 gil. Head start mode can also be selected for the Intermission expansion where you play as Yuffie.

The most unusual part of this patch is that it also lets players fast-forward "event scenes", increasing the playback speed to 1.5 or 2.0x. This sounds amazing? I don't want to skip the cutscenes completely on my replay, but I also don't want to sit through all that anime grunting at 1.0 speed. For sure someone out there is going to complain about this being a sign of the times, the young people of today don't have attention spans like they used to, this all used to be fields. But I will tell you as a middle-aged man who has a lot of podcasts to keep up with, this sounds like an absolute fucking godsend.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.