Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis may not be the traditional remake some players are looking for, but it offers another unique approach. The mobile title for Android and iOS’s closed beta test is running until July 14, 2023, and I had the chance to preview it.
This beta build severely limited what’s available to players, only allowing me to progress through a certain point in the story. If you’ve ever played a mobile RPG like Fire Emblem Heroes or Dragalia Lost, you’ll likely know what to expect here.
What is unique about Final Fantasy Ever Crisis is that its single player content—there’s also multiplayer content—is divided among three storylines. You have the plot pulled from the original FFVII, Crisis Core: FFVII, and the new story The First Soldier. Each of the three has its own story progression with missions, bits of exploration, and combat.
Screenshot by Siliconera
For the beta, I only had the chance to check out the first few chapters of the original FFVII through the early parts in Midgar. To its credit, the look of this game feels much like the PS1 installment with its character models. It has that familiar, almost chibi-style in exploration and cutscenes before moving to more detailed battle models.
This game starts just as I remembered, with the classic cutscene of Cloud running along the train. Unfortunately, it feels a bit like the summarized version of the story. Many sections of the game are divided up into chapters with one or two battles and a few waves of enemies in typical mobile fashion.
There is occasionally the chance to explore, but this part is mostly linear without much to see or do outside of random encounters. I honestly wasn’t even a huge fan of the exploratory parts of this mobile game, as they felt unnecessary alongside the more linear nature of this “remake.”
Screenshot by Siliconera
The battles, on the other hand, aren’t exactly how you remember them. They aren’t turn-based at all, in fact, featuring your characters in a party of three doing most basic moves on their own. There is its own version of the ATB gauge that goes up over time. Once it reaches enough segments, you can use certain magic skills like Thunder, Cure, and weapon skills. There is also a Limit Break gauge that goes up as you deal damage and get hit, and you can control when your “leader” and their allies unleash that special attack. The combat is fairly basic and not that engaging, so I mostly used auto-battle once I unlocked the feature.
Screenshot by Siliconera
Outside of combat and the typical story, you have the basic gacha mechanics. You pull weapons, rather than characters, and enhancing all of them with materials you gather. Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis doesn’t do anything inherently unique or different from other similar gacha mobile RPGs. That said, it at least has its classic characters and storylines to follow. But with the barebones nature of the gameplay, it can feel a bit disappointing. This is especially true if you wanted this to be the more faithful “remake.”
Other mobile RPGs like Fantasian and Another Eden show that rich exploration, gameplay, and story can work on mobile. But Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis opts for a different approach, taking the safest and currently most uninspired route. We’ll see if that changes any with the full release in the near future, especially since this game tends to be quite a grind during the closed beta.
Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis will release for Android and iOS in 2023.
Published: Jul 13, 2023 03:00 pm