Four years after release Final Fantasy 7 Remake now has achievements on Epic Games Store
The first part of Square-Enix’s trilogy was originally exclusive to Epic
It’s now been over 4 years since Cloud, Tifa, Barret and the gang made their jump from PlayStation exclusive to multiplatform with the release of the Intergrade edition that contains story DLC that stars and introduces players to Yuffie, Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade released on PC through the Epic Games Store, it was exclusive to the store for around 6 months, but didn’t take advantage of the (at the time) newly released achievement system, with it launching on Epic on the 16th December 2021 and then releasing on Steam on the 17th June 2022.
That has changed now as Square-Enix looks to have gone back and enabled “Epic Games Store Achievements” for Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade, it seems like some kindly employees were able to to do this while juggling development work going on for port to Xbox Console, Xbox PC and Switch 2 which releases on January 22nd. Now players on the Epic Games Store can unlock achievements that are quite like a mashup of PlayStation and Xbox achievements with trophy rarity such as bronze, silver, gold, platinum awarded for 100% completion, XP values that remind of gamerscore, and as previously mentioned the platinum trophy for unlocking all all achievements, all this with the achievements now being visible in the launcher.
What did they have before?
When Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade first hit the Epic Games Store the storefront’s achievement system was releatively new with the feature launching in April 2021, which makes Square-Enix’s decision to omit the better achievements system confusing as they didn’t take advantage of this feature while they were able to. Perhaps the feature was delivered at a time when they were on clean up and didn’t want to go back and mess around with the code, alternatively it could be because the inclusion of achievements on Epic Games Store was originally optional and they were fine just shipping without them, it’s difficult to know why.
Before this iteration of achievements, which has come to be known as “Epic Games Store Achievements” were available games played through the Epic Games Launcher did have achievements but they were known as “Epic Online Service Achievements” or “EOS Achievements”, these are standard, basic, boring achievements that don’t have any specialness to them and from what Epic have indicated were mainly developed as a parent for developers to use which you develop once and can then apply to other achievement systems such as PlayStation Trophies, Xbox Achievements, Steam Achievements and even the Epic Games Store Achievements, because of this “EOS Achievements” are limited, since you create the baseline and are then meant to the child (PlayStation etc) add the flourish on to the system as it needs it. An example would be only PlayStation trophies require a platinum rarity, but this is not required for any other system.
EGS Achievements vs EOS Achievements
Why I’m happy for this to have happened
I have had multiple personal issues with “EOS Achievements” were that you can’t view them in the Epic Launcher or even through the web for instance, there’s no way for you to show off the achievement progress or even view see what games you’ve unlocked all the achievements on, this is what “Epic Games Store Achievements” fixed. The other issue that I have with this achievement style and it’s something that Square-Enix are fixing, at least for the Final Fantasy 7 series, as Final Fantasy 7 Remake had “EOS Achievements” and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has “Epic Games Store Achievements” this is because there are games that released before the “Epic Games Store Achievements” were made available, even then “Epic Games Store Achievements” were always optional, which more often than not resulted in developers just not implementing them and leaving players with the “EOS Achievements” as they were deemed good enough.
This ultimately prompted Epic to make “Epic Games Store Achievements” mandatory if a game launches on another 3rd party storefront on PC with achievements then you need to have them on Epic as well, this has been implemented since March 2023 which resulted in many sequel’s in a series launching on Epic with achievements but the original not having them, this is most prevelant with Sony, God of War 2018 and God of War Ragnarok, Spider-Man Remastered and Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West (this was fixed with Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered).
This is a nice thing to see because it shows that it could be done and could cascade into other Square-Enix games having them enabled too, I know I would really like for the Kingdom Hearts series to have them enabled as well, and in the very best case scenario is that we might see other companies go back and enable the achievements for their older games too, but maybe that’s putting the horse before the cart.
