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Square Enix announced late last night that another of their live-service gacha games is being put out to pasture, this time the omnibus Final Fantasy VII Compilation title, Ever Crisis. The game released for mobile on September 7, 2023, so its impending shutdown on October 6 of this year will wrap it up in just about 37 months.

When announced, the game had two big selling points to players; first was the potential to replay the original stories of Final Fantasy VII, and second was to experience a new story that predated the events of Crisis Core. Of course, the gacha element also brought in many of the hallmarks of that genre, such as content crossovers and unique cosmetics, some of which I must say were pretty fun.

It appears that before end-of-service, the game will complete the original Final Fantasy VII storyline, as well as an event that will cover the story of Before Crisis, marking the first time that game will have an official localization outside of Japan. However, there is no roadmap for any further content in the First Soldier storyline, which I find unfortunate given that plot has been canonicalized in Remake - and one would presume that it will expand further in Revelation.

There have been no announcements regarding whether any of the story-driven content may live on in another form, though the recent announcement of Final Fantasy Resonance may not rule it out in the long run.

To editorialize just a little bit, it's really unfortunate that the focus of the game went so heavily into the gacha mechanics as the lifecycle progressed; this was kind of unavoidable since the purpose of a gacha is to bring in more money than it costs to run it, but it doesn't feel like they actually completed the First Soldier storyline in a way that will make it fold into Revelation properly.

In hindsight, would have likely been better to have completely avoided connecting it in Remake, though now I have to wonder if Revelation will cover enough of it to make any further inclusion in Ever Crisis pointless anyway - the final episode of First Soldier in EC seemed to be veering further away from plot points that would matter to Cloud's story regardless, and the most interesting potential crossover storyline it showed was in a limited-time event, which have uniformly been non-canon.

All that said, though, I was a day one player to see the new story content, and picked it up again once it released to Steam a couple months after the mobile launch. I was one of the many F2P players, which is probably part of the reason the game didn't survive, but I thought a number of the crossover events and the gacha pulls for them were a lot of fun. It's worth looking around for some of the cosmetics and art online, because the team put some decent thought into them; the Final Fantasy VI and IX crossovers, and the Ever Crisis Academy storyline, were among my favorites.

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