First Look

What is Remako Mod?

The Final Fantasy VII Remako HD Field Mod is a project I’ve been working on for a bit. Major strides have been made in making FF7 look much better. Yet, the field backgrounds have always remained behind. Traditional upscaling such as Waifu2x leaves a lot to be desired and manual remodeling such as Team Avalanche takes a lot of time.

I’ve been looking into machine learning to do the upscaling and landed on a great program called AI Gigapixel. Initial results were very good and after some more tweaking with the generation algorithm, I ended on a good setup for upscaling FF7’s low-res pre-rendered field backgrounds by 400%.

After some in-game testing (boy, can FF7 be a chore to set up for modding) I’m now working on a mod that uses these AI-enhanced upscaled images. Among other things, this means lots of nights of leaving the program on to do its magic. I expect an initial release to be possible within a week or two.

Screenshots

Below is a comparison of the opening scene with vanilla at the top and Remako at the bottom. As you can see it’s a marked improvement and at times it looks like it’s a rerendered image.

Some other examples of the 400% upscaled field backgrounds (these shots are not in-game):