Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade Is About To Get A Lot Easier — If You Want It To
Play your own way.
Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox are finally getting Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade five years after its launch on other platforms, but PlayStation 5 and PC players have something to look forward to as well. Along with Intergrade’s addition to more consoles, all existing versions are also getting an update that adds some flexible, powerful difficulty options far beyond what’s offered in most new games.
Intergrade hits Switch 2 and Xbox on January 22, and a patch the same day adds what Square Enix is calling Streamlined Progression options to all versions. That patch brings a set of toggles to enable features you usually wouldn’t find outside of mods or console commands. On a new menu coming in the update, you can toggle on infinite HP or MP, increase the rate at which you gain experience points, give yourself unlimited gil and recovery items, and access other options designed to make combat move much more quickly with minimal difficulty.
Square Enix confirmed that Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade is getting its Streamlined Progression update on all platforms at the same time.
Square Enix previously revealed the existence of Streamlined Progression options when it announced the new versions of the game — what’s new is confirmation that they’ll arrive on PC and PlayStation 5 the same day the game hits new platforms. According to director Naoki Hamaguchi, Streamlined Progression is designed to let players approach the game on their own terms, especially those who want to experience Intergrade’s story but may not have the time to build their characters and fight their way through every battle.
“With the Streamlined Progression and its implementation, I do see that nowadays, and not just in games but perhaps all forms of digital entertainment, there’s a strong desire for players to consume the content in their own preferred, desired style,” Hamaguchi told Inverse last year. “So, of course, there’s also an issue of lack of time — some players want to play, but lack the time. From a development perspective, it’d be a great shame for players who are still interested to not be able to play because of such obstacles.”
The soon-to-be-added Streamlined Progression options are far more extensive than the difficulty options found in most games, but they’re not totally unprecedented. Various forms of “god mode” have been added to games for decades, and remasters of older Final Fantasy titles usually include menus to speed up gameplay, turn off random encounters, and otherwise tweak the games for a more story-focused experience. But an update to a fairly recent game that brings such flexible options does feel different, and speaks to Hamaguchi’s interest in letting players define their own approach to Intergrade.
The new update lets players choose from a whole new menu of options to customize Intergrade’s difficulty.
The discourse around what’s an acceptable level of difficulty is as inescapable as it is exhausting, complicated by the fact that there is no one solution that works for every game and every player. That’s what makes the approach Intergrade is taking feel like a much more elegant implementation than something like recent attempts to let AI-powered assistants hijack your gameplay or one-size-fits-all solutions that leave no room for players’ individual needs. If you want to play Intergrade the way it was originally designed, that’s still the default in every version of the game, and if you want to breeze through the story (perhaps if you’re returning to the game after originally playing it on release), that’s an option, too.
By making each Streamlined Progression toggleable from a menu, it also means you can tweak exactly how much help you need, and in which parts of the game. While I enjoyed a lot of Intergrade, playing it after the already lengthy Final Fantasy 7 Remake did make some of its longer, toucher fights feel like a chore, so it’s easy to imagine other players out there who might want to customize their difficulty for every major encounter or make the less important fights as easy as possible to speed through.
