Just... watch the cutscenes on YouTube, this really isn't worth it. Played through all the story available so far and it's just your typical grindfest gacha using every trick in the book to drive addictive personalities to bankruptcy. The music and visuals are quite nice, gameplay is alright but gets boring fast—granted at least it has a VERY smart auto battle—story recaps for FF7/CC are okay so far and fairly faithful despite being abridged (idk what people are on about with it following ff7r, it doesn't at all beyond copypasting the opening), but definitely not a substitute for the actual games. Unsurprisingly you can't get away with just beelining the story, you'll need to grind a ton and endure endless popups pathetically begging you to empty your wallet to make the grind faster (or y'know, play another game).

As for the original First Soldier story, aka the only notable thing here, it's... fine so far. Fun trio and Glenn is a top tier himbo, but they're limited by how brief the story is in this format (30 second cutscene before 3 waves of enemies, the usual gacha deal). Baby Sephiroth might be fun to see in later episodes, and I look forward to watching the rest on YouTube in the future.

Anyway time to uninstall this crap.

This review is brought to you by the GLENN GANG.

sadly, i did not finish ever crisis. not that you can really finish the game in the first place atm, cuz you know, episodic. But i was planning to at least finish all the story the game currently has.

Got most of the way there, but yeah nah. The game is just
so
fucking
grindy.

So, you need to be 40.000 power level for the next story mission.
First, lets do some xp grinding missions to grind levels.
Wanna upgrade ur stats? Sure, lets do another type of grinding mission to get materials to upgrade those.
Oh, you should level up ur weapon. heres another type of grind quest for materials.
whoops, weapon hit the level cap. here u can uncap it with materials from ANOTHER type of quests.

uh
yeah
I havent even mentioned the materia upgrade materials, mostly cuz i ignored those.

Now, if you get bored by the combat, which i wouldnt blame you, you can just put on auto battle and make the game play itself with more skill then a human ever could. U can just put ur phone down, do the dishes, maybe check phone to activate a limit break or 2, and ur grinding is done for you!
....which begs the question what you are doing this for in the first place.

I never really played a gacha before, and uh, yeah, i dont think i will in the future, lol


THE GOOD PARTS
Game is cute! its a neat lil (very) abridged recreation of the start of ff7 and crisis core, and i think the idea of putting the entire compilation into 1 game is cool! The models are cute, backgrounds are cozy, and the character portraits look great.

GLENN GANG GLENN GANG GLENN GANG
and also theres the FIRST SOLDIER story, a story that, unlike the title suggests, wasnt actually in the game the first soldier (rip), but actually is entirely new. It stars glenn, who is like jack from stranger of paradise if jack was more like zack, and his lil gang of shinra soldiers. Also heavily features the backstory of sephiroth, tho i havent gotten to that part yet.

Its defo the beefiest part of the game rn, but sadly, i think i will have to experience it by watching the cutscenes on youtube.

maybe one day when the games finished they will port over the game to consoles and take out the grind. prolly not, but who knows?

I'll keep playing because of how much of a sucker I am for the world of Final Fantasy VII, but as a game it's not great.
The character design and aesthetics is really good and the cutscenes are at the same level of the recent Remake and Crisis Core Reunion.
The combat system is simplified from the already very intuitive classic FF7 system although I had some connectivity problems where the combat would lag a bit. That plus the absence of voice acting if not for the beginning narration by Sephiroth made me enjoy the beginning of my adventure a bit less.
The stories are done in a way where you jump from narrative to narrative, for example stopping the original FF7 storyline to Cloud's first meeting with Aerith and then jumping to the beginning of Crisis Core.
The gacha is atrocious with a stamp system that is just vile.
Overall is an ok-ish game, I'll keep playing to relive the trauma that is the FF7 timeline and to see what they do with the new story for Young Sephiroth.

This game finally went out of beta.

Pros

The new models are perfect

The music is so great, it sounds like remastered versions of the original game.

The new battle system is pretty good, and is similar to the original's battle system with a couple new things to make it flow better.

For a mobile game the visuals are amazing, I'm surprised how well it ran.


Cons.

Why is this game on mobile????? This game is essentially FF7 remastered, yeah I know it includes crisis core, and a new Sephiroth story, but surely they could've found someway to do something with those.

This game's story follows FF7 remake instead of the original, meaning new players will be confused if it plays out the same way.

The chapters are releasing monthly, meaning that the stuff that rebirth is covering, will be released long before rebirth is even out if they don't delay it.

As with all mobile games, this game is a big battery killer, I lost 14 percent in about 25 minutes that the tutorial covers.

This game is still pretty good just brought down by the fact its a mobile game, I hope after it's all out, they release a full packaged console and PC version like with FF15 pocket, but one could dream.

Without a doubt, there's more effort on display here than you see in most gacha sludge. The production value is immediately apparent, and despite what some will tell you, the combat does have some reasonable depth to it. The thing is, about 99% of the average player's time will be spent on auto, because every one of these stupid gacha games relies on endlessly repeating trivial content in order to make numbers go up.

Nowhere is the effort expended over Ever Crisis clearer than in the monetization, because this is probably the most hilariously desperate cash-thieving I've ever seen. It's not on the soul-killing level of some past games where the player is so stamina-starved that they need to put in a nickel every three minutes of play, but like... you get premium currency for watching in-app ads every day. That's Neopets shit. Is this a Final Fantasy game or Gaia Online? This is on top of a season pass, a weapon gacha, and stamina timers, though I don't see how anyone could ever run afoul of those timers. I've been waterboarded with so many free stamina potions that I have been actively trying to burn through them and there are still literally about a hundred of them in my storage box which I can't even accept because I'm still holding too many. My point is that Ever Crisis uses every monetization strategy it possibly can. It just throws them all in there. It pops up ads for limited time cash shop deals every time you accomplish basically anything, but it's all for stuff that you really, really, REALLY don't need. Playing Ever Crisis as a free player is actually not hard at all. The gacha definitely isn't as cruel as some others I've played, and all of the GOOD content requires no stamina.

The biggest problem is that like, maybe 10% of potential players are ever going to get past this outrageous difficulty spike in Chapter 5 of the First Soldier stuff. That's a shame, because that main story/dungeon content is pretty good as far as these sorts of games go. The dungeon areas have pre-rendered backgrounds that are drop-dead gorgeous, and to my great surprise there's actually some amount of challenge to the story content. It's just a shame that it eventually forces the player to participate in hours and hours of auto-battling grind garbage.

I suppose I should at least gesture toward the elephant in the room, which is The Expectations. Ever Crisis was pitched to us as some sort of remake substitute for every part of the FF7 Compilation for those who are too lame to like FF7R. The people who thought this wasn't going to be a gacha must not have been paying much attention, because we knew that they were going to have microtransactions around costumes and weapons since the original announcement or very shortly thereafter. While I didn't think it was going to be THIS aggressive, I never really expected this to be anything else. Maybe you can tell.

As a specimen in its apocalyptically depressing genre, Ever Crisis is okay. As a "remake" of Final Fantasy 7 (or any other represented game) obviously it sucks. I'm going to keep playing it anyway, because I need another version of Before Crisis and because I'm a mark.

Update: It got worse.

A grim realization of several of gaming's worst trends. What was once announced as a really cool concept-- a faithful, no-frills remake of FFVII and its spinoffs, including the yet-unlocalized Before Crisis --is instead those games chopped up to be parceled out over several months, likely years, mixed with a truly heinous amount of F2P filler, grinding and sleeve-tugging bullshit.

So why haven't I uninstalled it from my phone yet? Because I'm morbidly curious about the Before Crisis storyline and, more importantly, because shut the fuck up, I don't have a problem.

I was actually kind of excited about this game for several reasons. The art for this game is probably some of the best I've ever seen for the series, the costumes for the characters look good, the music is great, and most importantly it would bring parts of the compilation that never got an official release to the West finally, like Before Crisis. All for the best price of free. I was disappointed when they announced the game was going to be a gacha, and I have a strict mental block of not paying a penny to mobile game microtransactions, but I figured this game is so approachable to me I might as well give it a try. Yet somehow they still managed to drop the ball in so many ways and so hard at those with this game. I genuinely couldn't even get past the opening bombing mission; it was just so mindless and an obvious cash grab.

First off, they advertised that all compilation titles would be playable at launch in some degree, when that just obviously never happened. All that's been available at launch is the Midgar section of the original game, the first few chapters of Crisis Core, and some new story for First Soldier. To be honest, ever since Remake launched I've grown so tired of Midgar content because that's all they've been able to advertise for a while now. And yet these few chapters are all based in Midgar. It's all becoming repetitive, especially since both the original game and Crisis Core got remade recently.

Second off, I REALLY hate how you're forced to play other chapters of other games before playing the chapter I want to play. I was really only interested in the other compilation titles and maybe the First Soldier story, because everything else has been done to death already or is still being remade. I don't really want to play the bombing mission for the 30,000th time, I'm tired of it. I don't want to play Crisis Core again, when that game is already designed to be as replayable as possible. Yet here we are, still at square one. I get that this game will feature episodic releases, but if I'm not hooked in at the start there's no way I could really care for anything else. I just want something new again, so it really sucks that I have to play everything I've already gone through dozens of times just to get to the First Soldier story I may be interested in.

Third, the combat system was designed to be more in line with traditional ATB based JRPG combat, which is great for people who want that more traditional experience, but this is just a joke made in spite of that kind of system. It's not even ATB, it's just "wait for bar to fill up, press button". It's not fun at all. At least with the original FFVII, you had so much more freedom with your commands when your bar does fill up, but with Ever Crisis it's just pathetic. Really hard sell on this.

Finally, the gacha elements are everywhere. I get that this game is a gacha, so they're supposed to get you to gamble your life savings away, but everyday I've gotten notifications on my phone saying shit like "5 STAR PULL GUARANTEED!!! NEW COSTUME!!! DRAW NOW!!! GIVE BIG DADDY SQUARE ENIX MONEY!!!" There's even achievements in game for logging in everyday and pulling something from the slot machine. I think they might as well just lock away parts of the game behind gacha elements with how in your face it all is.

Overall, a MASSIVE disappointment. If you like gacha games I guess it's for you, but with probably being the biggest fan of FFVII I know amongst my small circle of friends this game just sends me into an ephemeral rage. I'm sorry. 3/10.

This game is way too grindy. While most F2P games nowadays you can play 15-30 minutes a day, this one will have you play for hours if you don't want to fall behind.

The entire system is based around the weapons that you pull, and then you spend hours levelling up to the point of becoming usable. But every week there's a new event in which you'll have to discard the previous build and start over. The event weapons are almost all complete trash, in general they only give you good base stats, if you want to get the really strong abilities you got to depend on luck of pulling several of the same weapon, or spend a lot of cash.

The materia system is also really bad, to get a really low chance of getting good materia you'll have to spend rare materials that were only given away in one event so far, and even then the stats they give you are random and you could end up with something of high rarity but that is weaker than the cheaper stuff you made.

Though, all of this is not really as bad as the fact they recently released a boss that is not beatable unless you spent thousands in real cash. There's no indication if this going to be the norm from now on, and if they will rerelease the event in the future when regulars players are strong enough to beat it.

As it stands, not even being a huge fan is enough to keep me playing. The extra prequel story they're releasing is also not good enough either to keep me interested. Ever Crisis is an unfortunate blemish on FFVII's history.

Like every gacha game, I turned on auto-combat the moment it became available so I can't comment much on the gameplay.

The visuals are stunning and it's great at evoking the feel of the 3D models on the PS1 while still being an upgrade. It's also pretty faithful to the original story and the bonus chapters feel much more well integrated than the new content in FF7 Remake.

Like every gacha game, unfortunately, there's too many currencies and menus and systems that aren't intuitive and unless you're really going to commit yourself to it, it's far too easy to fall off the treadmill and never come back.