Since Final Fantasy VII: Remake hit shelves, fan debate has raged over the new plot elements. On one side are traditionalists who see the addition of swarms of magic flying ghost monsters as a distraction from the original’s themes. On the other, optimists are certain that this rat’s nest of bewildering metatextual loose ends will be satisfyingly wrapped up in 2027’s Revelations.
However, Square-Enix and AppLibot have quietly been releasing a fully faithful and incredible-looking, completely separate remake of Final Fantasy VII that’s flown under the radar and is about to be shut down forever.
Enter Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis, an ambitious mobile/PC title that set out to retell the stories of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children, and the lost media Japan-only feature phone game Before Crisis. Heck, they even squeeze in some scenes from the actually-surprisingly-good Tifa/Aerith novel Traces of Two Pasts.
Ever Crisis is dyin’, Cloud!
On top of all that is a lengthy new two-part story about the adventures of kid Sephiroth, apparently salvaged from the ashes of the failed battle royale title The First Soldier. This is all presented with HD pre-rendered backgrounds, beautiful new chibi character models, new FMVs, and a dynamic and fun ATB turn-based battle system.
But there’s a fly in the ointment – Ever Crisis is a mobile-focused gacha game, a phrase that’ll cause a huge swathe of gamers to dismiss it out of hand. Arguably they’re right to do so; gacha games usually feel like they’re constantly trying to weasel their way into your wallet with lengthy cooldown timers, difficulty spikes, and slot machine draws for rare items.
At first glance, Ever Crisis doesn’t do itself any favors on that front. The game is stuffed with a head-spinning amount of upgrade materials for characters, weapons, and materia, combined with a baffling UI that, possibly intentionally, isn’t eager to explain any of this.
Out of my way. I’m going to see my gacha
In a perverse twist, Ever Crisis turned out to be quite bad at being a gacha game – not great for Square-Enix bean counters, but great for us. From July 2026 onwards, it’s been impossible to spend real money in the in-game store, but even before then the game would shower you with enough free stuff to enjoy story mode without paying a penny. It seems the game was too generous, as the Producer’s Letter about the shutdown noted that balancing “visual quality and development costs” had been an “ongoing challenge.”
That Ever Crisis is being shut down months before Revelations is a strong indication it was hemorrhaging money. After all, part of Ever Crisis‘ mission is to allow casual gamers to enjoy the full VII story in one place, so you’d think it’d be a crucial part of getting everyone up to speed before the final instalment. Plus, Ever Crisis character Glenn Lodbrok pops up in Rebirth and is almost certainly returning in Revelations, meaning you’ll have a cryptic character whose game can no longer be played.
As someone just there to enjoy the various story modes, I had a bunch of fun with Ever Crisis. At its core is a beautiful reworking of Final Fantasy VII, created with obvious love for the original, and with way more effort than was strictly necessary. The other stories aren’t quite as essential: having the kid Sephiroth story be about a ragtag group of Shinra soldiers committing genocide and then feeling vaguely bad about it is certainly a choice, and I can only pity the poor developers tasked with retelling the histrionic nonsense of Dirge of Cerberus. But, hey, it’s all here if you want it, for free.
Ever Crisis will no longer talk, no longer laugh, cry… or get angry…
Sadly, there comes a point where it’s clear the hammer came down on the dev team. The game recycles assets from Remake and Rebirth throughout, but once you’re into territory that will be covered in Revelations, things move suspiciously quickly towards the finale, with events like the Huge Materia train sequence detailed in an on-screen caption rather than actually shown.
One of the most exciting things about Ever Crisis was the promise that the Turks-centric prequel Before Crisis would finally return from lost media purgatory. To the developers’ credit, they did retell Before Crisis before the shutdown. However, it’s a sequence of non-interactive cutscenes with moments where battles were clearly supposed to take place but don’t, likely to avoid having to create combat assets for the Before Crisis characters. The Before Crisis story also doesn’t make much sense, though it’s impossible to say whether something was lost in translation or if it was always bad.
So much hard work has gone into Ever Crisis that it’s surreal to know it’s going to vanish in a puff of digital smoke next week. I’m sure there will be fan projects that’ll bring it back in some form; after all, Nier Reincarnation crawled out of its digital grave, albeit with the technical hurdle of requiring you to run your own private server to fool the app into thinking it’s dialling home.
But I can only echo the Ever Crisis fans’ hope that the colossal amounts of time, talent, and money spent updating the classic Final Fantasy VII mean this will return in some form someday. After all, Final Fantasy Resonance sort of brings back the shuttered mobile title Brave Exvius. Is it really too crazy to imagine that, after Revelations has wrapped up, we get Final Fantasy VII Remake Classic?
In the meantime, if you’re curious, you have until October 7 to enjoy Ever Crisis, then it’s gone forever. That’s enough time to get through the main VII story, or to see the kid Sephiroth story and Before Crisis. I’m not going to argue that Ever Crisis is some hidden gem, but it’s way better than its gacha trash reputation suggests.
