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.

Three answers is a lot of them to have for a question that you've only been asked once or twice.

In the elusive scenario wherein someone actually asks me which among the Final Fantasy games is my favorite, my first answer might be Final Fantasy VII, as it was my first and it's the one I've played the most. I have read several terrible novels and played numerous bad spinoff games to 100% completion because of my love for Final Fantasy VII. I might then correct myself to my most practiced answer: Final Fantasy X. It is my firm and solemn belief, after all, that Final Fantasy X is The Best One for a litany of well-considered reasons, and I find myself with a ravenous hunger for it at least once per year.

Ask me on my most honest days, however... in my tender darkness, when the mind is powerless to stop my heart, and I will tell you that my favorite is Final Fantasy IX.

Final Fantasy IX is the only one in which the ATB system Gets In The Way, and while I can dock a point for it, I will never be able to make myself care. Drag as they might, no battle in Final Fantasy IX can dampen my love. No, not even you end up queuing commands too far ahead and the battlefield changes in frustrating ways before your attack goes off. If it really bothers you so much, play on PC where there are mods to get around it. I truly do not think that it is enough to get in the way of having an incredible time with Final Fantasy IX.

I don't even want to talk about the story. If I have to explain to you why the story of Final Fantasy IX is good then you're not going to appreciate it anyway. Yes, it would be nice if Freya has one or two more spotlight scenes and Amarant wasn't such a transparently tropey Zidane foil, and it would be nice if trance were better integrated in ALL respects, but look... Final Fantasy IX is so good that it made me immune to Persona 3. It is the only game whose ending consistently forces me to cry.

If you like anything about anything Hironobu Sakaguchi has ever done and you haven't played FFIX, please just do it. He deserves that much.

Xenosaga is so far up its own ass that it has formed a perfect circle. This is a 40 hour long game in which almost nothing happens. At the game's end the plot has barely moved from the starting line despite having seven hours of cutscenes. Combat is tedious, character progression is unremarkable, and there's really nothing to see here except the story, which you can maybe start to appreciate after playing two more games, studying the intricacies of Jungian psychology, and becoming a doctor of Judeo-christian theology. What? You haven't read the Kabbalah? What are you some kind of idiot?