There’s a lot that the PlayStation 5 gets right as a pure gaming console, but save-game transfers aren’t one of them. With many a last-gen game getting a visual upgrade, the issue over transferring PS4 save files from those titles onto the PS5-enhanced game has highlighted some backwards design over the last couple of months.
Final Fantasy VII Remake’s upcoming Intergrade update is a prime example here. While Intergrade will allow you to get all the graphical bells and whistles extras that you’d expect from an updated game at this stage such as an increased rate of frames and a higher resolution to help justify dropping a month’s salary on a TV, shifting a save game over requires some South Korean internet magic in case you’re in a rush.
According to Square Enix, you’ll need to download the latest patch and select “upload save data” from the main menu from the PS4 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake. From there, you can start the improved version where you left off in Cloud’s remade adventure that featured a lot of awkward pauses between characters so that Square Enix could pad the runtime out as much as possible. Reaction noises!
While that doesn’t sound like a Herculean effort, it’s worth noting, and I checked it this morning just to make certain that I wasn’t high on superglue again, almost 91 gigabytes in size. Fibre to the home does ease the load, but with the PS5 having a notoriously slim amount of space on its fancy SSD, dedicating a Call of Duty-sized chunk of space to last year’s game just so that you can move a save file over to this year’s updated version is madness. At this point I am very glad to have a 1.5 Terabyte external hard drive hooked up, but that’s a luxury that many people do without.
Final Fantasy VII isn’t the only guilty culprit here, as Marvel’s Avengers and Borderlands 3 also required old-gen storage hogs before new-gen updates could be applied. Compare that to the Xbox Series X|S, and Smart Delivery may just be one of the most underrated features that Microsoft has ever produced. You get a game, you install it, you upgrade it, and saves work. End of story.
Heck, even the PS Plus benefit of cloud-saves doesn’t appear to be a solution, which further highlights some very old-gen thinking from Sony. I absolutely adore the PS5, but it’s clear that some aspects of its design have been very rushed, and more than six months later, fixes have yet to be seen for the console. Heck, you can’t even change the background yet, as you’re still stuck with the same golden champagne aesthetic that was available from launch day.
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and its delightful Yuffie content will be available later this month on PS5 for a fresh batch of timed exclusivity, and you can expect a chonkin’ big download for that Materia girl in a Materia world.
Last Updated: June 4, 2021
