Final Fantasy VII PC Gets an Incredible Upgrade with This Mod

Peter Donnell / 4 years ago

I’m on a bit of a mission to complete a lot of games, read a lot of books, watch a lot of movies, and right now, I’m pretty locked in on a solid rotation of all of them. However, I am so tempted to drop everything I’m doing… including some of this weeks work schedule and play Final Fantasy VII… again. I say again, as I played it just two years ago, again!

Final Fantasy VII Mod

I’m so eager to return, thanks to the work of Satsuki Yatoshi and their SYW mod. Similar projects have been undertaken in the past, with mixed results. The last HD makeover was pretty complicated to install. Not only is the new mod much easier to apply, but it also does more than any that have come before it.

You can expect to see much higher resolution assets in the game, but they’ve been done uniformly so that parts of the game aren’t over sharpened. This means better backgrounds, improved battlefields, a nicer world map, improved magic effects, sharper menus and text. The FMV videos have even had a good treatment, increasing their resolution and frame rates.

You’ll also see HD mini-games, such as the snowboarding and biking game, which is great for the main story, but even better news for your FF7 Gold Saucer lovers… myself included on that one, I always keep a spare save game there.

A lot of the work has been done using AI enhancement techniques, and I’m sure many of you are familiar with this concept by now. 689 improved backgrounds, 13996 upgraded animation files, 7000+ manually optimized layers, and so much more.

Upscaled HD Fields with full animations (plus char texture for 3D elements like the flipper in the bar for example)
Upscaled HD Battle backgrounds (plus textures for some enemies)
Upscaled HD Worldmap (plus effects)
From scratch HD Battle effects and magics by Kela51 (plus several fixes by myself)
Upscaled HD Minigames based on English version of my old waifu + updated texture (Aavock and myself)
From scratch HD Menus and Font by Aavock
Upscaled HD Animations (first mod with these animations)
Upscaled HD 30fps Movies (first mod with 30 FPS FMV)

Trailer

“The SYW mod represents the most accurate modern take on the PC version of Final Fantasy VII helped by deep learning techniques (such as ESRGAN). The package includes cleaner, more detailed and higher resolution background arts, battlefields, worldmap, magic effects, minigames and menus. All upscaled with AI.
The main goal of the SYW mod is to get as much as details as possible without having an oversharp and overclean effect; also to keep the rendering as natural as possible and constant in quality across the whole game.
This is a comparison between the Steam port & the SYW Mod.
This is a fan project and we have no affiliation with Square Enix. All copyright and trademarks belong to Square Enix. You need to purchase an original copy of Final Fantasy VII on Steam to play.” – Behemot Productions