‘Still beloved by legions of fans to this day,’ but the Steam version has been butchered: Final Fantasy VII launches on Steam to a storm of negative reviews

Square re-released the original 1997 Final Fantasy VII on Steam on Feb. 24 once again, and it was immediately met with a barrage of negative reviews. Fans of the game are citing various problems, ranging from broken combat to audio stuttering.

On top of things that previously worked well but now don’t, such as resolution settings players can’t change, users are complaining about a mandatory launcher that’s both unwelcome and buggy. Even when the game is running in full screen, the launcher keeps responding to player inputs meant for the game.

But none of that is even comparable to the most egregious problem to emerge from this re-release. Fans noticed that the first version was zero bytes in size, meaning Square just forgot to even upload the game file.

That issue has been solved, though it has landed us in the current predicament. Fans are not happy, and their complaints are pretty reasonable, for a change. “I just don’t understand how they tested this and said “yes, this is the definitive edition of Final Fantasy VII,” a comment reads.

The game is just broken now that the FPS limit has been increased from 15 to 30, as this has doubled the speed of fights and actions without adapting the animations to it, causing audio desyncs.

None of this was necessary. Final Fantasy 7’s previous re-release dates back to 2013 and had a 92 percent “Overwhelmingly Positive” user score on Steam, as well as graphical quality-of-life improvements that don’t exist in the new release. That’d be the version I’d recommend, but it has been delisted from Steam to make way for the new one. Sadly, this issue isn’t unique to Steam. This re-release also hit GOG, featuring all the same issues.

A few of the myriad reported issues have already been fixed, like how the attempted framerate improvement in this version caused the animations and cutscenes to also run twice as fast. So we at least know Square is on the case, but it remains to be seen just how long it’ll take the company to fix all issues, and whether they’ll all be fixed at all.