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.

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.

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.

i was on a lot of hopium for the first few weeks post release but yea this game hasn't been very good.... i was very interested in playing all the different ff7 game stories but content release has been so sparse it's hard to do even that! all they care about is grinding and grinding with massive difficulty curves through pure number increase. obviously there are microtransactions out the wazoo but they like, don't even help unless you spend hundreds if that's something you're interested in. this game is just a hamster wheel carrot on a stick keys jingling in your face extravaganza

This was supposed to be the only way to play Before Crisis stuff on top of the rest of the compilation but right now this ain't it and i doubt it'll ever will.

As of right now you can only play a very abridged version of the beginning of FF7 (all of midgar) and the beginning of Crisis Core (Operation tamblin, in wutai) and the beginning of a brand new story set during the early day of SOLDIER.

A bit over 2 months after the game released, we only had one single story update that added one measly chapter (which is like one dungeon, 2 "cuscenes" and like 5 fights, so not a lot of content) There's been a lot of events going on tho! Sometimes even multiples of them happening at once!

The game is extremely grindy, and that fact is made worse by the content onslaught of events. Levelling up characters is slow. Creating new materias for better stats? Slow. Farming events to get all they can offer to you? Also slow! Getting better weapons? Oh boy welcome to everyone's favorite part of gacha games, MTX city!

To get better version of each weapons, you need to roll for them, and to really get weapons with good stats, multiple versions of a single weapon are required. The game really drip feeds you crystals, which as i understand is common practice, but it also bombards you with a lot, a lot, of microtransaction. Looking at the shop rn, there are 12 daily packs you can buy, and on top of that you also have monthly packs, weekly packs, just buying currency outside of a pack, a monthly battlepass... The game does everything it can to get people to spend money.
For example, each event will feature one or more "special roll" where you can get stamps for getting guaranteed weapons but also new costumes, yknow the thing people usually look the most for in gachas. The rate for getting stamps is abysmall, on top of that you can't roll a lot without paying, on top of that getting both costumes requires a lot of stamps, and on top of all that they always add another stamp card mid event with different costumes!

FFVII EC is a waste of time. The story content, as of right now, is very lackluster, and in term of gacha games.. Either don't fucking play gachas or play some that are less predatory than that lol

Um gacha safado com um grind pesado demais, até pra mim. Digo isso com muita tristeza, pois é um jogo muito bonito, com um modo história que dá aquele gostinho de um remaster do Final Fantasy 7 clássico. E ainda conta com uma falta de localização em PT-BR, que é um absurdo em 2023, tanto para um jogo mobile quanto para a própria Square Enix.

Não recomendo.

PS.: Esperei o lançamento na Steam pra jogar de verdade e mesmo assim não deu pra aguentar esse gameplay. Que decepção...

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.

This is the only way to "enjoy" and discover:

- The First Soldier
- Before Crisis

Yep. With a gacha. That's how Square Enix appreciate and respect its fans.
Positive thing is that this is on Steam as well.

As someone who has played OG, Crisis Core and Reunion, Remake, and seen Advent Children, I feel like I can always just go on my phone and doomscroll while simultaneously playing the game. The game is very pretty for a classic-style remake of the OG and compilation. But the abridged structure that they went with to do a classic remake of the series (especially the original) is a bit rough imo. The game is free, so I don't think that's a huge detriment, but this is definitely not what I'd recommend to a newcomer who wants to experience the compilation for the first time. If EC was an actual 1:1 classic remake of the OG, then sure. But the rest of the compilation was told in cutscenes, many of them with lots of voice acting and also cinematics only doable in the style of CG cutscenes or a full movie. I guess as an OG fan I'm fine with this game; it does look super pretty and has amazing OST rearrangements after all. But the gameplay is honestly just so meh. The battles (at least early on from what I've played) are very easy to beat by doing almost nothing and no real strategy.

I have yet to play the exclusive Sephiroth side story. I intend to play it one day but not soon probably. To be quite honest I think it's pretty jarring that one of the most iconic gaming villains of all time has his entire backstory revealed and told to us for the first time in a free-to-play game that was originally exclusive to mobile (until the PC release three months later). If you really want FFVII players and the fans to like Sephiroth more than they already do, this is not the way I would have done it. Back when the Yuffie DLC for Remake dropped, I remember seeing people brainstorm a DLC episode for Sephiroth for Remake (or some other entry in the trilogy). And I think that would've been much more effective, and would've done pretty good numbers considering who we're talking about here.