102GB and No Physical Copy: FF7 Rebirth Tests Switch 2

One hundred and two gigabytes. That's how much space Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will demand on your Nintendo Switch 2 when it launches on June 3, according to the game's listing on the Japanese My Nintendo Store. To put that in perspective, the Switch 2 ships with 256GB of internal storage. A single game will eat nearly 40% of it before you've downloaded anything else.

The figure comes from the Japanese store page, though the European Nintendo listing reportedly shows a slightly smaller 91.5GB, which may not account for a day-one patch. Either way, FF7 Rebirth is comfortably the biggest game on the platform. Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, which launched earlier on Switch 2, sits at 90.4GB. Split Fiction takes up 71GB. Cyberpunk 2077 Special Edition, previously one of the heftiest downloads on the system, clocks in at just 60GB. Rebirth blows past it by 42GB.

But the file size alone isn't what makes this . It's the fact that there is no physical option.

The Box Without a Game

When Cyberpunk 2077 Special Edition came to Switch 2, CD Projekt Red made sure the full game was available on the retail cartridge. If you bought the box, you got the game. Square Enix is taking a different approach with FF7 Rebirth. The retail version ships as a Game Key Card, the same method used for Remake Intergrade. You buy a box at a store, open it, and find a code. Then you download the entire 102GB game. There is no cartridge with game data on it.

I get why this happens. Switch 2 cartridges have storage limits, and 102GB is an enormous amount of data to fit on one. But the result is a retail product that functions identically to a digital purchase, except you had to drive to a shop and pay the same price for a piece of cardboard with a code on it. For anyone without fast internet, or anyone on a capped data plan, this is a real problem. And for anyone who just prefers owning a physical copy of a game they paid $49.99 for, the Game Key Card model is a frustrating half-measure.

CDPR showed with Cyberpunk that it's possible to ship a full game on a Switch 2 cartridge at 60GB. Square Enix's game is bigger, sure, but the gap between "difficult" and "we didn't try" matters. When the box on the shelf looks identical to every other game but contains nothing playable, that's a consumer transparency issue. At minimum, the packaging needs to make this extremely clear at point of sale.

The storage math gets ugly fast for anyone planning to build a Switch 2 library. Rebirth plus Remake Intergrade alone would consume roughly 192GB, leaving you with around 64GB for everything else on a stock console. A microSD card becomes mandatory, not optional, and high-capacity cards aren't cheap. Nintendo's decision to ship the Switch 2 with 256GB of storage looked reasonable at launch. Games like this are already exposing it as tight.

Square Enix isn't the only publisher leaning on download-only retail releases, but FF7 Rebirth is the most aggressive example yet on Switch 2 simply because of the sheer volume of data involved. It sets an uncomfortable precedent. If the biggest third-party games on the platform all ship as key cards, the Switch 2's physical game library becomes a shelf of download codes, and the value proposition of buying at retail collapses entirely.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launches on Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S on June 3. The Nintendo Switch 2 itself went on sale on May 25, 2026, and early adopters juggling storage are about to feel the squeeze.