Kotaku⁠73%

You Can Make Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Beautiful With A Single Mod ⁠93%

By John Walker⁠74%

7/23/2026, 11:30:45 AM

BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, and Appeal to Authority, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 78.4% saturation with 308 hits. Analysis detected 1,224 faulty-reasoning hits from 393 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 87.7% and a BS Rank of ⁠93% (1,661 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 92.40% of the article peer group.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was a somewhat divisive game (by which I mean, some people at Kotaku think it’s a total wonder and others get cross with them about that, and I watch on trying to pick a side), but most can agree that one of its big shortfalls was its bizarre and bland lighting. 
It looked like it was always lit by an invisible sun floating in the middle of every scene, resulting in this washed out, overly gray reality. 
But step forward a one-person modding team whose PC Shader Injector Mod makes an absolutely stunning difference, both the scenery and character appearance. 
It’s perhaps odd to get quite so focused on lighting in a game of the size, scale and complexity of Rebirth, but it really is extraordinary how deleterious it proves to the aesthetic experience. 
Scenes are so poorly lit that characters are often hard to pick out from the scenery, and otherwise beautiful areas end up looking flattened and washed out. 
But fear no more, because mod developer David “dddd5” Matos’s Shader Injector does absolutely breathtaking stuff. 
You know how I know? 
Because a proper grown up told me. 
Here’s Digital Foundary‘s coverage: 
The mod makes such a broad range of improvements, including completely reworking Rebirth‘s bizarre and lacking shadows, far better occluding light beneath objects and roofs, and creating far more realistic water, especially as it interacts with beaches. 
It also causes a dramatic improvement in character faces, removing their strangely 90s-looking angles and replacing them with far more rounded, natural-looking features. 
It’s very interesting to note how much better this looks than the deeply silly AI-driven DLSS 5 “upgrades. 
For me, a dimbo, the most immediately obvious change is the game just pops more. 
Where colors felt so grey and sad, they come far more to life with Shader Injector. 
Watching through the DF video, there are definitely scenes where the original still reads better to me, but they’re by far in the minority. 
If you want to get into the proper details of exactly what witchcraft is taking place here, then make sure to watch through the video above. 
However, if you just want Rebirth to look a damn sight better, you can grab the (free and open-source) mod from Nexus Mods right here. 
Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 19.8%John Walker: 1.7%Kotaku: 4.4%Confirmation Bias19.8%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 1.6%Anchoring Bias0.0%This article: 3.8%John Walker: 2.2%Kotaku: 4.0%Availability Heuristic3.8%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.6%Kotaku: 1.1%Representativeness Heuristic0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.8%Kotaku: 1.0%Hindsight Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 1.5%Kotaku: 1.7%Overconfidence Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 5.4%Kotaku: 5.8%Framing Effect0.0%This article: 6.4%John Walker: 0.8%Kotaku: 1.1%Loss Aversion6.4%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.6%Kotaku: 1.1%Status Quo Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.4%Sunk Cost Effect0.0%This article: 7.1%John Walker: 1.3%Kotaku: 2.9%Optimism Bias7.1%This article: 8.7%John Walker: 1.2%Kotaku: 3.4%Pessimism Bias8.7%This article: 36.1%John Walker: 17.8%Kotaku: 13.5%Negativity Bias36.1%This article: 3.8%John Walker: 1.3%Kotaku: 2.0%Self-Serving Bias3.8%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.7%Kotaku: 1.5%Fundamental Attribution Error0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.3%Actor-Observer Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 1.3%In-Group Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.3%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias0.0%This article: 5.9%John Walker: 7.0%Kotaku: 3.6%Halo Effect5.9%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.2%Kotaku: 0.3%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.1%Dunning-Kruger Effect0.0%This article: 6.1%John Walker: 1.5%Kotaku: 2.4%Recency Bias6.1%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.1%Kotaku: 0.6%Primacy Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.0%Blind-Spot Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.9%Kotaku: 1.3%Ad Hominem0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.6%Straw Man0.0%This article: 25.2%John Walker: 2.1%Kotaku: 2.6%Appeal to Authority25.2%This article: 4.6%John Walker: 3.1%Kotaku: 2.3%False Dilemma4.6%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.5%Kotaku: 1.0%Slippery Slope0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.6%Kotaku: 0.2%Circular Reasoning0.0%This article: 16.3%John Walker: 5.7%Kotaku: 9.4%Hasty Generalization16.3%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.2%Kotaku: 0.3%Red Herring0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 1.5%Kotaku: 1.1%Bandwagon0.0%This article: 22.1%John Walker: 3.4%Kotaku: 5.8%Appeal to Emotion22.1%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.3%Kotaku: 0.9%Begging the Question0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.3%Kotaku: 2.4%Post Hoc (False Cause)0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.9%Kotaku: 0.3%Tu Quoque0.0%This article: 8.4%John Walker: 0.7%Kotaku: 0.7%Burden of Proof8.4%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.2%Appeal to Nature0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.5%Composition/Division0.0%This article: 14.0%John Walker: 2.0%Kotaku: 4.3%Anecdotal14.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.1%No True Scotsman0.0%This article: 6.6%John Walker: 0.4%Kotaku: 2.0%Ambiguity (Equivocation)6.6%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.0%Gambler’s Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.1%Middle Ground0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 1.0%Kotaku: 0.5%Personal Incredulity0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.3%Kotaku: 0.2%Special Pleading0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.1%Genetic Fallacy0.0%This article: 1.8%John Walker: 2.0%Kotaku: 2.8%Unattributed Quote1.8%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 2.4%Kotaku: 1.6%Quote-first Misdirection0.0%This article: 78.4%John Walker: 30.8%Kotaku: 15.3%Biased Writer Voice78.4%This article: 1.0%John Walker: 0.3%Kotaku: 2.4%Indoctrination1.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.0%Kotaku: 0.6%Politically Left Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%John Walker: 0.4%Kotaku: 0.1%Politically Right Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 35.4%John Walker: 6.7%Kotaku: 3.5%Attempt to Sell a Product or S…35.4%

393 words analyzed.

Speakers

1speaker1.0%attributed speech389writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Writer's voice • 12 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 55 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 26 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 23 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 34 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 27 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 16 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 5 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 7 words • 100.0% coverageDigital Foundry • 4 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 37 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 23 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 18 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 15 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 16 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 24 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 26 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 25 words • 100.0% coverage
Selected voice

Digital Foundry

100%flagged-word coverage
4 attributed words100% of attributed speech99% writer coverage
0%50.0%100.0%Indoctrination+100.0 ptsWriter: 0.0%Digital Foundry: 100.0%100.0%Biased Writer Voice-79.2 ptsWriter: 79.2%Digital Foundry: 0.0%0.0%Attempt to Sell a Product -35.7 ptsWriter: 35.7%Digital Foundry: 0.0%0.0%Unattributed Quote-1.8 ptsWriter: 1.8%Digital Foundry: 0.0%0.0%

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.