In Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, you can’t use your old Remake save

In Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, you can’t use your old Remake save

Image: Square Enix

If you’ve poured dozens of hours into Final Fantasy VII Remake, that unfortunately won’t give you much of a leg up in the game’s sequel, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. As part of an interview about the new game posted on the PlayStation Blog, game director Naoki Hamaguchi confirmed that you won’t be able to port over your Remake save or character builds into Rebirth.

Here’s the full question and answer:

Given this is a direct continuation Final Fantasy VII Remake, can players port over their save file and their character builds to continue their journey into Final Fantasy VII VII Rebirth?

Hamaguchi: We have announced that the Final Fantasy VII remake project will be a trilogy and that each entry will be a standalone game in its own right. Because of this, each game’s balancing is done independently and a player’s levels and abilities will not carry over from one game to the next. However, we have created some special bonuses for fans who played the previous game, allowing them to start with a little something extra.

Those bonuses, according to Square Enix’s listing for Rebirth on its website, will be summon materia. If you have PS4 or PS5 save data from Remake on your PS5, you’ll get Leviathan. If you have save data from Remake’s DLC expansion, Episode Intermission, you’ll get Ramuh.

The PlayStation Blog post has a few other interesting details.

• There will be new materia that weren’t included in the first game.
• Red XIII will be playable and has a new “revenge gauge” mechanic.
• Vincent Valentine may not be, however; while Rebirth’s new trailer gives us a glimpse of the mysterious character, creative director Tetsuya Nomura doesn’t explicitly say you’ll be able to directly control him in battle. (“There are characters who are accompanying members in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth that will become official party members in the next title.”)
• There are a “huge number” of mini-games, so I bet the Gold Saucer will be a blast.

And it sounds like Rebirth will end right around where, in the original PS1 version of Final Fantasy VII (**spoiler warning... from 1997**), Aerith is killed by Sephiroth. “Although there are some changes in the order of the locations, the locations depicted in [Rebirth] extend up to ‘The Forgotten Capital,’ where the greatest fate of Final Fantasy VII awaits you,” Nomura said. It seems like we’ll have to get through the entire journey to find out if that moment will play out as it did before; I have a hunch that it won’t.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will be released on PS5 on February 29th, 2024 (that’s Leap Day!), and you can watch a new trailer for it right now. Rebirth is the second game in a trilogy, and thanks to the new Rebirth trailer, I have a guess at what the third game might be called.