I Bought A PS5 For The Sole Purpose Of Playing FFVII Rebirth. Now It’s Out On PC, And I’m Full Of Regret – Aftermath

None of this was necessary10:45 AM EST on January 24, 2025Much of last year was a blur to me, but I absolutely remember what I was doing around this time in ye olde monthe of January 2024 (give or take a couple weeks): trudging through the cold carrying a freshly-purchased PlayStation 5 back to my apartment. I’d spent years relying exclusively on my PC to experience the current generation of games, but I needed to play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth as soon as humanly possible. No exclusivity window would dissuade me. I would finally and ruefully eat the cost of a new console. Then I blinked, a year passed, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth came to PC.This is not to say that I never played my PS5 copy of FFVII Rebirth, to this day the only PS5 game I own. I became obsessed with Queen’s Blood and made it all the way to chapter eight of the main story. I even managed to figure out how to stream the game to my Steam Deck using Chris Person tech magic. But as happens with a great many games, life intervened, and I fell off playing it before I could reach the (apparently-controversial) ending. One thing led to another – by which I mean 2024 led to 2025 – and now we’re here.This is especially galling because of the trouble I went through to obtain my PS5. Originally I ordered one off Amazon, but when I received the notification that it had arrived, I couldn’t find it. Turns out, it had been stolen from my building’s mailroom – pilfered, apparently, at random alongside several other boxes, but I have to imagine that the thief felt like he’d hit the jackpot when he realized what he’d nabbed. I ended up going to my building’s super to pull security footage, but by that point the thief was long gone. I learned only one thing of note from the footage: For whatever reason, the thief had chosen to wear a weirdly ostentatious jacket that day – not the precise jacket from Drive (2011), but one with a similar coloration and pattern. I spent weeks wondering why somebody would dress up in such identifiable clothing before going on a stealing spree. I swore that if I ever saw that jacket, guy in tow, walking around my neighborhood, I’d fire off some stern words like “Hey man, what gives” or “Please return my PS5; you’ve made me very sad.” Nothing ever came of it.Finally, options exhausted, I decided to just buy a PS5 in-person at my local GameStop. If The Jacketed Man wanted to steal this one, he’d have to fight me for it. Fortunately, my second attempt at purchasing a PS5 proved uneventful. I took it home, plugged it in, and downloaded a pre-release review copy of Rebirth.  Yep, that’s right: I managed to get my hands on a copy of the game slightly before everybody else, and even then, I failed to finish it in a timely fashion. It’s embarrassing! All the more so because even though I can now play it on my platform of choice – with bleeding-edge graphics on my PC and wherever I want on my Steam Deck (not just in my home via Chris Person tech magic) – I’m not going to because I’m just far enough in the PS5 version that I have no desire to do it all over again. In short, I am a weak-willed fool, a stain on my family’s legacy. That said, I think there’s a small silver lining to all of this: I played plenty of other games last year, large and (mostly) small. There’s such an abundance of great stuff coming out all the time that even games you’ve been anticipating for years can fall by the wayside. And so, in a sense, you don’t need those games – or rather, you are more capable of waiting for them than you might think. Exclusivity windows, like time, are an illusion, and both will pass before you know it.Enjoyed this article? Consider sharing it! New visitors get a few free articles before hitting the paywall, and your shares help more people discover Aftermath.Co-owner of the good website Aftermath. Reporter interested in labor and livestreaming. Send tips to nathan@aftermath.site.Sign up for our free newsletterNews site Quartz is publishing a whole lot of AI-generated articlesThey’re bad, and you don’t have to.They’re right, computers DO suckCNN is pivoting to video Aftermath is an independent, worker-owned website about video games and internet cultureSign up for our free newsletter© Copyright 2025Made in partnership with Lede

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