Tired of waiting for that Final Fantasy VII remake? Well, this new mod won’t make the original game look like a modern triple-A title, but it will help the classic role-playing game’s backgrounds look a lot nicer.
FF7 Remako HD Graphics has had its beta release today. You can find a download link for it here. The mod, which works for PC versions of Final Fantasy VII, increases the resolution of the game’s prerendered backgrounds by a factor of four. And it’s all thanks to machine learning.
“Using state of the art AI neural networks, this up-scaling tries to emulate the detail the original renders would have had,” the mod’s website notes. “This helps the new visuals to come as close to a higher resolution re-rendering of the original as possible with current technology.”
You can see what this mod looks like in the below trailer.
Final Fantasy VII used prerendered backgrounds so that its world could have more detail than what would have been possible otherwise for a game in 1997. This was a popular technique in the era, and you can see it in other games for the original PlayStation, including the Resident Evil trilogy. But those backgrounds still had to be a file size small enough to fit on a PlayStation disc, so they lost a lot of their original sharpness to compression.
This mod brings those images to a clarity that is closer to their original quality.
