Many people are excited for the latest installment in Square Enix’s piece by piece remake of Final Fantasy VII, this latest one being Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. But some worrying news has arisen lately about the game, and it’s not anything to do with the game’s story retcons or gameplay, rather it has something to do with the game’s absolutely massive storage size for Playstation 5.
145GB is absolutely massive. For reference’s sake CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, a massive open world RPG with a plethora of different cars and weapons and models, is a mere tiny 70GB. Less than half of what Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is going to cost you in terms of storage space. In fact, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is comparable to Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption II, another game with an absolutely colossal file size.
Now, with the improved graphical fidelity of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, as well as an apparent open world, one could expect that the game would have a comparable file size to another high-fidelity open world like Red Dead Redemption II, so for many this news isn’t surprising.
But this news of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s file size raises an interesting question about the size economy of video games as the industry moves forward. For example, if someone wanted to play the latest hot RPG in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth while also having Red Dead Redemption II on their Playstation 5 to play later, those two games by themselves will take up an insane 300GB. The Playstation 5 has around 825GB, so those two games by themselves will take almost half of what that console could provide so you’re gonna have to really squeeze your machine to make room for any other games. Heaven forbid we talk about PCs, the average of which have around maybe 500GB of storage, and we aren’t sure if Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s file size is going to remain consistent between platforms so PC players might have to invest in an SSD.
Now, there are ways around these limitations, SSDs and separate storage devices for the Playstation 5 exist, but how much longer until these games become the norm, and a external storage device becomes a necessity and not a luxury? And that’s not even accounting for how long those huge downloads will take. The video game industry should really take a long look at the sheer size of their games, and consider advancing technology used to compress these games into manageable sizes. Until then, though, many players are going to have to go through the digital equivalent of spring cleaning if they want to experience the latest Square Enix product.