No. I won't play this game anymore.

It may be disrespectful, but I hate this mobile spin-off. I don't want to see such a great game overwhelmed with terrible battle gameplay and gotcha elements everywhere.

I'll only wait 'till Rebirth. Let us meet on 2/29, 2024.
-
Update: I redownloaded it after the Rebirth released last month. Maybe I should give it a try again

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...

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Can't exactly 'review' it since it's only been out for over a week but.. It's not that bad of a game. Time will tell out it pans out so far it's fine.
Maybe it's the free stuff they give basically everyday but the gacha's not that bad. Gacha's gacha but it's not that hard to get a 10 pull everyday or so.
What's bad though is the pacing. It forces you to play FF7 till Aerith, then it forces you to play CC till Ifrit, then it forces you to play FS until whatever happens in there and THEN you can continue FF7. Not to mention that you need to keep playing both campaigns to unlock features on top of grinding your characters so that they can continue through the story in the first place. But that's just mobile games I guess.
But yeah, so far, it's alright.
Not the worst FF7 game Square's made.

First Impressions, this game is pretty underwhelming. When this was announced I was mostly interested in the Final Fantasy VII portion of this bundle. For those unaware this is an interesting mobile collection of three games. The original PS1 game, the PSP's Crisis Core game, and what I believe is a new title, "First Soldier".
Before playing any of this game however I spent an obnoxious amount of time making my way through menus and "gatcha game spins". The collectables included weapons and outfits for the characters. These can be used in any of the 3 titles as far as I could tell and can be equiped anytime before starting an episode. So right off the bat my initial hopes that this was going to be an episodic port of the original game with new models slapped on top was sadly not going to be the case. No controller support made the game annoying to play on my tablet in DeX mode. Combat was pretty mindless and automatic, even when swapped to manual mode. Instead of using the original turn based system the characters now fight on their own, with the only input needed from the player being to tap on large icons to cast spells and do techniques. Overworld navigation is pretty lack luster, story is railroaded, ultimately this is about as abridged a remake of this game can be.
As a time killer I can see this being alright but for myself I don't see much reason to continue. I never thought this was going to top the absolutely steller port of the original game for Switch by any means, but I did expect more from it than this.