Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis isn’t terrible, but did anyone really want a gacha version of FF7?

Translate

SHOULD I PLAY FINAL FANTASY VII EVER CRISIS?

If you’re a truly obsessive fan of the Final Fantasy franchise in general or Final Fantasy VII in particular, then you already know you’re going to be playing this. For more casual fans or total newcomers, though, Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis will be a pretty poor introduction. This new mobile version advertises itself as offering the totality of the Final Fantasy VII experience, including the story from the original game, side plots from spin-off games, and even some never-before-scene prequel stuff.

That sounds promising, especially for such a notoriously complicated story. The problem is that Ever Crisis presents this grand history of Final Fantasy VII as a series of disconnected, contextless chapters that jump around the timeline. And it layers on a frustrating helping of free-to-play gacha annoyances and grinding just to access it all.

TIME PLAYED

In the ten hours that I’ve played Ever Crisis over the past few days, I’ve cleared the first chapters of each of the three different storylines currently available in the game. I’ve also explored a bunch of the game’s side content, including dungeons, co-op fights, upgrade material grinding, and the game’s first timed event.

WHAT’S AWESOME IN FINAL FANTASY VII EVER CRISIS?

• Unforgettable characters. While my personal feelings on Final Fantasy VII have shifted all over the place across the twenty-five years since I first played it on PlayStation, these days I’m pretty firmly a fan. And a big reason for coming around in its favor is the case. The core Final Fantasy VII crew of Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Aerith, and (eventually) Red XIII are all just fantastic and incredibly likable characters. Crisis Core’s Zack is great too, though he suffers from a less impressive supporting cast. While Ever Crisis struggles with showing off the overarching plot in a way that makes sense, it does a solid job of nailing the character moments.

• A fun, fast-paced combat system. It’s strange that there are now three ways to play through the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII with three completely distinct combat systems...and all three are somehow good! Ever Crisis’s take on combat is not the action-RPG style of Final Fantasy VII Remake, but it still moves faster than the original. Equipping materia to match enemy weaknesses in each episode offers a nice bit of strategy. The battles themselves require targeting those weaknesses, interrupting enemy attacks, and carefully swapping back and forth between offense and defense modes in a cycle I found very engaging.

• Fun limited-time event. Like most live-service mobile games, Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis has a section devoted to events, the first of which is a “seasonal story” called “Beach Festival Fun!” While the new main story content in Ever Crisis didn’t impress me, this event has been a really fun beach episode, giving different characters time to shine and showing off the game’s goofy sense of humor. Also you get to fight a giant tonberry that looks like a watermelon. It’s cool.

WHAT SUCKS IN FINAL FANTASY VII EVER CRISIS?

• The new story. Titled “Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier”—not to be confused with the now-shut-down battle royale spin-off of the same name—the first original storyline in Ever Crisis is...pretty underwhelming. Though it’s pitched as a story about Sephiroth’s origins, the new tale mostly focuses on three newcomers who are about as boring as their names (Lucia, Glenn, and Matt). These three are Shinra goons who are looking for a spot to build a mako reactor. In the first chapter, at least, I didn’t learn much else about them, and I don’t feel like there’s a strong hook making me want to play more other than the vague promise of learning more about Sephiroth at some point.

• Extremely limited story content. In the announcement and lead-up to Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis, Square Enix positioned it as a game that would bring together everything in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII—from the base game to PlayStation 2 shooter spin-off Dirge of Cerberus to the CG movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Maybe that’s what it will be someday, but as of launch, those last two examples I mentioned aren’t part of the game at all yet. And even with stuff like base Final Fantasy VII and Crisis Core, players can essentially only experience the very beginning of each game’s story. New chapters are supposed to be added monthly, at least, but this is a pretty sparse package for now.

• Every free-to-play trick in the book. Yes, Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis is a gacha game where you spend currency to pull weapons to equip your characters with. But it’s more than just a gacha game. Ever Crisis employs every annoying free-to-play ploy there is. There’s a stamina system with limited energy that needs to be refilled if you’re doing a lot of grinding at once; there’s store offers that pop up for extremely limited-time deals whenever you hit certain milestones (only $4.99 - a 2500% value!!!); it even allows players to watch ads to earn a small amount of in-game money, which is one that I feel like most of the bigger free-to-play gacha games avoid. If you play lots of free-to-play titles, all this begging to open your wallet might roll right off your back, but console Final Fantasy fans tempted to mobile for the first time are in for a rude awakening.

• The endless gacha grind hits early. The final boss of the first chapter of Crisis Core was my first wall in Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis. Beloved Final Fantasy summon Ifrit was level 15, and though my power level was supposedly high enough to tackle the fight, my level 11 Zack couldn’t actually pull through. I ended up having to grind for an hour or so to get Zack up to level 15, while also upgrading his best weapon as much as possible. I don’t know how much of the story mode content will be gated in this way, but it’s not a promising sign that I ran into this problem so early.

[Review written by TapTap editor Kef.]

💬 Are you excited for a new way to experience Final Fantasy VII’s world and story, or is Ever Crisis too full of free-to-play fluff for you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Mentioned games

Comments

Ellie Kin

I agree with a lot, except that the arc with the new characters is boring. I found it very interesting, I even took screenshots of some phrases that clearly had their own metaphorical message, which cannot but please. The fact that the topic of union is already being raised here, despite the fact that we may be on different sides, is wonderful (maybe someone will understand that we are all one species and will stop making others feel bad). The biggest problem is the grind and lack of additional content (I finished everything in the game in five days). Thanks for the detailed and interesting review 🩵

09/14/2023

Ngrh7oel

if you ever played nier reincarnation, ...same gacha method free diamond by waching video add, grinding until u get bored for build your equipment, to pass through the story we have to build power 😅this is the copy of it just add FF VII element and story content.....i guess in my opinion 😄😅 because aplibot is the dev who bring nier reincarnation to mobile too 😄

09/19/2023