Final Fantasy VII is Now on Steam (But Not in Japan)

Final Fantasy VII‘s Steam release comes with steamworks features, such as cloud saves (no pun intended).

About a year ago, Square Enix released a PC remastering of what many fans consider the “best” Final Fantasy game: Final Fantasy VII, on its official online store. The game is now finally available on Steam, and comes with a whole suite of Steamworks features, such as Steam achievements and “Cloud” (har har) saves. It’s also, somewhat ironically, unavailable for purchase in Japan.

You’ll be able to unlock 36 Steam achievements, and play the game with a controller in Steam’s “Big Picture Mode” for just $11.99. A “Character Booster Tool” is also included, that allows players to tweak HP and MP bars of their characters.

Early reports suggest that the Steam version still requires you to log in to Square’s servers to play, meaning you’ll have to deal with a double-dose of DRM.

For a quick recap, the remastered PC version contains:

• Much higher resolution textures
• The addition of a Z-buffer, so no more shaky polygons like the PSX version
• Support for 16:9 resolution (but the image will be stretched)
• Support for most modern machines without any issues (unlike the previous release by EIDOS in 1998)

If you’re looking to get the most out of your Final Fantasy experience, a helpful reddit user has pointed gamers to this excellent guide to Final Fantasy VII modding, which while designed for the 2012 version of the game, should work fine with the new Steam version.

Is Final Fantasy VII the best Final Fantasy? It’s certainly the most recognizable one.

Source: Steam (Thanks Reddit!)