Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is a remake that manages to blow up the middle-act of the original 1997 PlayStation game into a game twice as long. Take your time, see the sites, wrap your head around every little nook and wrinkle of its sprawling world, and you’ll be saving the planet for well over 100 hours. A new update will help players cut down on that runtime by letting them fly through cutscenes at 2X speed.
Released on December 13, FFVII: Rebirth version 1.060 includes a way to move through the game’s many story beats more quickly without skipping them entirely. “We have implemented a fast-forward feature for cutscenes,” the patch notes read. “This will allow you to watch the scene without skipping over it, at 1.5 or 2.0 times speed.”
FFVII: Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi recently shared a demonstration of the feature on social media. The first response to the post on X (formerly known as Twitter) is a player asking, “Why would anyone want to fast forward through this masterpiece, you need to experience every second of it?”
Good question! When the speed is doubled, players talking become mostly incomprehensible. It’s fine for reading the subtitles, but makes the entire scene sound like fast-forwarding through an old VHS. It might be fine for trying to consume info really quickly in a podcast, especially when those podcasts are multiple hours long and full of repeating conversations and fluff, but it does seem to defeat the purpose of engaging with an epic, dialogue-driven RPG.
Many modern blockbusters have various ways of dealing with players’ impatience. Some are very clever about silencing characters and skipping only through the next piece of spoken dialogue when players hit the next button. Others, like The Witcher 3, fast-forward the animations but not the voice acting to move things along. Personally, there are still lots of conversations in games that I wish weren’t voice acted at all, the RPG equivalent of “this could have been an email.”
Still, FFVII: Rebirth’s new option is better than none at all, especially for players just grinding through side quests or plaything through a new game plus. The PlayStation 5 console exclusive is also one of those games for which the Platinum Trophy requires beating the game twice. Those achievement-chasing completionists will certainly appreciate the new 2X speed option. The game is also headed to PC on January 23, 2025.
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