Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis Explained

Square Enix stole the recent State of Play with the announcement of Intergrade, the PS5 upgrade of Final Fantasy 7 Remake that will include a Yuffie DLC. It also revealed a mobile battle royale game called Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier, as well as Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis. While the sequel to the highly successful Final Fantasy 7 Remake has not been announced yet, fans of the series can still expect to return to Midgar very soon. Ever Crisis is probably the most mysterious announcement of the three due to a wide range of unique features that combine the nostalgia of Final Fantasy 7 with the updated combat system from the remake.

Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis is a mobile game coming in 2022 that will compile the entire Final Fantasy 7 timeline. That's a lot of content; so far, Ever Crisis is confirmed to include the events of the original Final Fantasy 7, Advent Children, Before Crisis, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerberus. It feels unlikely that Square Enix will release the entire timeline at once, however, simply due to the volume of content it needs to develop. Additional stories will probably be made available in updates or in-app purchases following the game's launch.

In the trailer showcased at the State of Play event, one of the most surprising features of Ever Crisis is the polygonal character design, which is reminiscent of the original Final Fantasy 7 that introduced so many players to the world. In non-combat story and exploration sequences, the characters look like a combination of the updated models from the remake and the original game. Every character also has a 2D avatar that appears on the screen during dialogue, which appears to be text-only.

The combat was another big surprise. The new 2D avatars are still present on the screen, but the blocky character design switches to graphics indistinguishable from Final Fantasy 7 Remake. The trailer showcased some of the combat against the Scorpion Sentinel, the first boss in the remake, and it looked almost identical to the remake. By combining an updated, but not a completely redesigned, original graphics with the updated graphics, Ever Crisis promises to balance nostalgia and newness in a way that the remake didn't. This should be exciting for fans of Final Fantasy 7 who felt like the remake took too many liberties.

The biggest thing that seems to separate Final Fantasy 7 Remake combat from Ever Crisis is the possibility for party selection. In the remake, players only have access to up to 3 party members at one time (which means if Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and Barret are all present, one will be excluded from player control) and party members are selected according to the plot. Tifa cannot join the party, for example, if Cloud is exploring Sector 5 with Aerith while Tifa is back in Sector 7.

This type of automatic party selection is different from what players of the original Final Fantasy 7 experienced; party selection in the original game is complex but does allow for players to customize their party after reaching a certain point in the game. Unlike previous Final Fantasy games, it doesn't 100% depend on the needs of the plot.