FF7 Revelation's 200GB Problem Hits Switch 2 and Steam Deck
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is going to demand a serious chunk of your handheld’s storage before it ever asks you to care about Cloud Strife’s next move — and Square Enix has already confirmed the number. The lead has pegged the threequel at “probably going to be around 200 GB of game,” which is not a footnote if you’re running a Switch 2 or a 512GB Steam Deck. Meanwhile, series director Naoki Hamaguchi is telling GamesRadar+ that Cloud “is still the main character,” even though the spike-headed hero has been scarce in the trailers. That absence is deliberate: this entry finally hands real narrative weight to the rest of the party, with free on-the-fly switching between members and character-specific side content built around Red XIII, Tifa, and Yuffie.
200GB on a 256GB Switch 2: The Install Math Nobody Wants to Do
Switch 2 ships with 256GB of internal storage. Subtract the system reservation and a couple of current staples — a big open-world game and a live-service title — and a 200GB JRPG simply will not fit without expansion. The source also notes that Revelation’s physical disc “requires a download,” which means the cartridge is not a get-out-of-jail card here; you’re installing regardless of how you buy it. On Steam Deck the math is less brutal but still tight: the 256GB LCD and 512GB OLED models both need a microSD for this one, and even the 1TB OLED gets uncomfortable if you keep a rotation loaded. Budget for a fast microSD Express card on Switch 2 rather than the cheap UHS-I card in your Switch 1 drawer, and an A2 microSD on Deck — load times will lag the NVMe, but the engine streams well and the prior two entries already proved Deck can carry this series with the right settings.
On-the-Fly Party Swapping Is Quietly a Handheld Win
Hamaguchi’s reveal that you can “freely switch between each party member on the fly” and bring different compositions into side quests reads like a combat feature, but it doubles as portable-friendly design. Character-shuffling gives you a natural cadence to stop and hit suspend-resume on a commute without feeling like you’ve abandoned a 45-minute dungeon run, and the character-specific hooks — Red XIII’s Queen’s Blood arc, Tifa’s piano minigame, the Wutai return that should finally pay off Yuffie — are exactly the kind of self-contained beats that survive a twenty-minute window. A game this size lives or dies on whether players actually finish it; a 200GB RPG that respects short sessions is far more likely to stay installed than get deleted to make room for the next download.