FF7 Revelation's Disc Needs a Download — Bad News for Switch 2

The box still says Final Fantasy 7 Revelation on the front. It just doesn’t contain the game. Square Enix has confirmed that the physical edition of its trilogy-capper ships on a single disc with a mandatory online download — a first for the remake project, which previously spread Remake and Rebirth across two discs each. Director Naoki Hamaguchi told IGN the team considered matching Rebirth’s disc count but decided it would mean “a compromise in terms of the fidelity and the quality of the game,” and that the only realistic option was “a physical disc, but with certain sections of the game being a digital download format.”

For a PS5 owner on fiber, that’s an inconvenience. For a handheld-first player — a Switch 2 in a bag, a Steam Deck on a tray table — it lands differently. Physical media’s two real selling points are resale and permanence, and a disc that can’t install itself off the network delivers neither. Portable players, who lean on offline play more than anyone, feel that first.

The Disc Is a License, Not an Archive

On Steam Deck, none of this is new. Rebirth’s PC release was a download by default, and the platform has been effectively all-digital for a decade — so if you play on Deck, Square Enix’s disc drama is a conversation happening on another console. The version of this story that actually bites handheld players is whatever lands on Switch 2, where the cartridge still carries cultural and practical weight and where third parties have increasingly leaned on game-key cards: empty carts that hold a download license instead of data. Hamaguchi’s phrasing — “certain sections of the game being a digital download format” — is exactly the language you’d use to justify that kind of release.

The practical cost is the thing a disc is supposed to solve. Install Remake on a cartridge and a plane ride, a commute, a cabin with no Wi-Fi all still work. A mandatory download means the first-run setup isn’t just a convenience tax on launch night — it’s a hard dependency on connectivity at the exact moment you want to be playing somewhere else. Suspend-resume doesn’t help you if the game isn’t installed yet.

Where the Download Actually Hurts: Capacity, Not Curation

Square Enix hasn’t disclosed Revelation’s install size, and Hamaguchi’s refusal to go into technical detail is the most telling part of the whole statement — a three-disc release was apparently a bridge too far, but nobody will say why. We do have a reference point: Rebirth already asks for roughly 155GB on PC. A higher-fidelity finale won’t shrink that figure, and “certain sections” being digital means the disc installs a partial game and then pulls the rest down on top of it.

Now put that against handheld storage. Switch 2’s 256GB of internal space is expandable only via microSD Express, a standard that costs noticeably more per gigabyte than the microSD cards your previous console tolerated. On the Deck side, the LCD model’s 256GB baseline is already the tightest squeeze in the category, and microSD here is slower than the internal NVMe — fine for archive duty, rough for a game that streams assets mid-scene. This is the quiet math of the “no compromises” decision: Square Enix keeps its fidelity, and you pay for it in card space and Wi-Fi access.