2024’s highly anticipated (and very good) Final Fantasy VII Rebirth broke out of its PS5 containment cell to emerge on PC on January 23, 2025. Here, the open-world RPG ostensibly improves its arguably disappointing technical performance and presentation issues on console by way of more powerful CPU and GPU combos available in the PC gaming world. It also launched as a Steam Deck-verified game, bolstering an alluring green checkmark on the Steam store page and even saw a promotional video from developer Square Enix touting Steam Deck playability with a cute, feathery chocobo-themed Steam Deck. But as many have found since release, while the game certainly “runs” on the Deck, it’s far from an ideal experience. This prompts two questions: Should you bother playing Rebirth on Steam Deck? And, perhaps most importantly, is this what we should expect from a “Verified” Steam Deck game?
I’ve spent about half a dozen hours with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on Steam Deck, using the default settings (with one notable tweak to the framerate). I’ve played up to the Junon section, the game’s second open-world environment, as I felt this would take me through enough combat, exploration, dungeon crawling, and cutscenes to establish an opinion on how well (or poorly) this game runs on Valve’s handheld.
In motion, I’m averaging a decent-enough 30 frames per second, often a bit more as I lifted the 30 FPS cap in the default graphics settings (which sets all visuals to “Low” on first boot and doesn’t feature any AI upscaling tech). Performance will dip into the teens at worst from time to time (moreso when I tried nudging some graphics settings up to “Medium”). Overall, the experience reminds me of what it was like to play your average AAA game on the Xbox 360 or PS3 during the tail end of their lives: Playable, but it certainly left you wishing your gaming box had a bit more digital horsepower. (Though admittedly, even at their worst, PS3 games typically had cleaner image quality in comparison.) I seem to be getting about two-and-a-half hours of battery life, too.
At an average of 30-40 FPS, the performance might just be good enough for you. But unfortunately, the image quality really struggles. More often than not, the game looks like…well, it’s just ugly. Here, have a look:
It’s not always this bad, mind you. Sometimes the game looks quite good for the form factor it’s running on. Have a look at a better shot:
But then you’ll move the camera and things will look fuzzy, jaggy, smeary, blurry, blocky, or whatever descriptive term you prefer. Draw distances look funky and dull, diminishing the bold natural beauty of the game’s world, which is unfortunate not just because it denies you the incredible visual spectacle the game is aiming for but also because that beauty has thematic meaning in-game: it is, after all, the beauty of the very in-game world the protagonists are fighting to save. On top of all this, I find the UI to be a bit too busy and small. And in Rebirth, you’ll spend quite a bit of time menu-diving as you spec out your characters.
Still, Rebirth’s somewhat reliable framerate performance on the Deck has kept me playing the game, and I’ll likely keep playing this way for a while as, right now, I’m just looking to dust off my rusty combat skills for a run at Hard Mode in the future (when I’ll almost certainly play the game on a more powerful machine).
I find the game’s fusion of real-time fighting and command-based action in combat comes through well enough on the Steam Deck for me to keep going. In fact, given how much combat is in the game, and how much time you may wish to spend grinding the open world and Chadley’s training simulations, the Steam Deck version isn’t a bad portable companion to a proper PC experience, if you switch to that better hardware for the game’s more impactful narrative sequences. I could easily see myself grinding out some new weapon skills while playing on the train, only to switch over to my more powerful gaming machine to move the story along and enjoy those far better visuals once I get home.
If you travel a lot and have a high tolerance for visuals that range from “meh” to “oh, god,” the reliable performance of Rebirth on Deck might be a compromise you’re willing to make—especially if you’re an FF7 super fan who will be won over by the story, music, and characters.
I do worry, however, about how well said performance will hold up across the rest of the game. Later combat sequences, such as one featuring multiple opponents in a large arena, or the more climactic, physically larger boss battles that feature way more flashy visual effects, could result in dips that might test your patience.
And despite being technically playable, FF7 Rebirth’s messy visuals yet again call into question what Valve is communicating by slapping the “Verified” green checkmark on a game.
What should our expectations be for Steam Deck performance?
Rebirth isn’t the first game to usher in a conversation about whether or not Steam’s “Verified” status is as trustworthy as it should be. 2023’s Remnant II: From Ashes brought up similar issues as it received a Verified status only to be a miserable experience for almost everyone who tried it on Valve’s portable gaming PC.
Valve has three tiers to indicate how playable a game is on Steam Deck. A white “no” sign with “Unsupported” means that the game most likely will not run on the Deck (though many Steam Deck users have found ways around this). This can be because the game is simply too graphically intensive, or something about it simply doesn’t play well with the Deck’s behind-the-scenes Linux magic that tricks Windows games into thinking they’re on Microsoft’s operating system. A yellow exclamation sign with “Playable” means that the game will almost certainly run, but either features text and icons that are just too small for the device’s screen or it’s a kind of game that really needs a full keyboard and mouse to enjoy. And then there’s the green checkmarked “Verified” status, which in theory should be an open invitation to enjoy the game on Steam Deck with no issues.
That said, most gamers with at least some knowledge of CPU and GPU limitations probably do (and should) expect compromise on something as portable on Steam Deck. Cyberpunk 2077, for example, will run on Deck, but no reasonable person should expect it to do so with high graphics settings across the board and ray-tracing turned on. And while 2077 might run into some framerate troubles here and there on Deck, its visuals are way cleaner than what Rebirth offers on Valve’s mini-PC. During my time with Rebirth on Steam Deck, I also compared it to the visuals found on Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding, which immediately offered a stark contrast to Rebirth’s fuzziness with much clearer depictions of its landscapes and highly detailed character models.
If we are to accept Rebirth as being worthy of the Verified status on Steam Deck, it seems clear that this is the very minimum of what we should consider acceptable, and such games should leave us asking just what kind of “Verified” a given game might be when we choose to purchase it. Why couldn’t Rebirth have been awarded “Playable” status instead? To many, including myself, that would be a more accurate description and is certainly how I’d describe Rebirth’s portable experience. Then again, without that Verified status, Square Enix wouldn’t be able to advertise the game as such and Valve would have one less AAA title to proudly display as Verified on their popular device. It’s hard not to worry that “Verified” status can play too much of a marketing role for all parties involved when ideally, it should perhaps be a more scientific, objective assessment of what any given game is like on the Deck.
Video game graphics in general have been an increasingly complicated subject of late. More and more games on PC are relying on upscaling tech like Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR in a way that sometimes leaves those games looking a little too blurry and artificial. And, honestly, is it ideal that we live in a world where a thousand-dollar graphics card still relies on software trickery to render its image? We’ve also come to expect a mid-cycle “Pro” refresh of consoles to make up for framerates that are ever slowing and resolutions that are ever shrinking.
Perhaps Rebirth runs about as well as anyone could reasonably expect on a very limited machine like the Steam Deck. But still, it’s hard to deny that lately, each shiny new piece of gaming hardware that comes along feels like its power is falling short and it’s headed for obsolescence way too fast.
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