#FF7ECBeta

[getvalentined]

Okay this is cool though.

[nachtdaybreaker]

Played through the EverCrisis beta, have an image dump. Spoilers ahead.

I got into the EverCrisis beta! Just finished playing the entire thing! Going to post stuff! Spoilers ahead!

There's a series list in the story mode. Missions are bite-sized pieces of content. This is not a 1 for 1 remake, they cut out pretty much all the getting from point a to b. I'm not sure I like that, but they hit all the important notes from what I played.

Combat is atb based. You have a set skill bar that you can customize. No mana, just atb use. There's a manual, semi-manual and auto battle option. Also speed up. Story mode locks team composition, but there are other modes that allow free form teams.

So it is a gacha game, and the weapons and outfits have special skills. As far as gacha go, this one is pretty nice. It has pity mechanics, free gems, and I don't think any of it is necessary for the story.

Typical login rewards, home screen image can be changed, I assume you can unlock more. Beta tester progress will be wiped upon live release.

New characters are from First Soldier. Glenn was just dreaming when he was fighting Sephiroth in the trailer. Total bait lol.

So one of the story modes is First Soldier. It gets to live on here I guess! There was no chibi Sephiroth in the available story missions, but that's a teaser!

You can only play a handful of chapters from the available stories. There's a ton of other game modes, and some grindy stuff to enhance characters, weapons, etc. It's typical mobile game stuff.

I personally really enjoyed it and really look forward to it!

[getvalentined]

Got through the tutorial and the first reactor mission, currently downloading the rest of the game so it'll let me play it, figured I'd give some first impressions.

Gameplay

The controls are decent for a mobile game, if a bit...jagged? Drag-to-move is a little wonky, turns are really slow, and there isn't always a visual cue to show that you've properly interacted with a target in battle.

I don't have a screenshot of it but I feel like the placement of the action icon outside of battle is poor; when walking around, it's really easy for me to have blocked it by accident. It's got too much padding to use the space between that icon and the edge of the screen for the drag controls when moving, but too far from the edge for me to avoid covering it up.

It gave me the tutorial on how to switch modes in battle to defend against big attacks after Barret had already been hit twice by the big attack in question.

It gave me the tutorial on combining limit breaks after both characters had already built up and used their limit breaks once earlier in the battle.

In the pre-game tutorial, the screen went black after I used the limit break and I had to restart the game, but that hasn't happened in the game proper. (Yet.)

Visuals

So far the graphics seem pretty good. Obviously they're fine in battle, that's repurposed Remake models, but outside of battle they're pretty solid. The running animation is a bit slippy for everyone, they've all got a bit of moonwalking going on (especially during cutscenes) but it's not too bad so far.

I don't actually like most of the character portraits so far. The art looks unfinished, if not outright sloppy, particularly on Wedge.

The most finished looking portrait is Barret's. Even Cloud looks kinda like a warmup someone threw color onto.

Overall I think my issue there is that the style is really inconsistent. Line weights are all over the place with no rhyme or reason, some people get more shading than others, the light source is literally incomprehensible.

System

Download speed is horrible. It doesn't matter what kind of connection I'm on, it gives me about 0.01% every couple seconds. I understand this is because the servers are very busy right now, but since it has to be connected all the time this is not a good precedent.

Hopefully that improves because I have really good internet and a pretty nice phone and these were taken a full minute apart. I can now report that if I close and restart the game it runs a little faster for a while then all but stalls out. Not feeling that.

Edit: I can say with certainty now that the game crashes out every time it finishes loading something. It crashed out:

In the middle of the gacha tutorial when I pushed the "attempt" button

When I told it to download the whole game so it would stop having to do it every time I finish something

When it hit 100% on the progress bar for downloading the whole game

In the middle of the main menu tutorial when I pushed the "missions" button

It goes black or dumps me back to my homescreen and I have to restart the game. So that bodes really well for saving progress or actually getting the things that you're inevitably going to pay for.

[getvalentined]

Absolutely thrilled to report that the Ever Crisis beta tutorial starts with Sephiroth being Extremely Heterosexual.

[getvalentined]

Man. Ever Crisis is really pulling out all the stops on Ang*al being a self-righteous piece of shit, isn't it?

[getvalentined]

Ever Crisis: Final Overview

Okay so my final verdict on Ever Crisis as a whole is that it's worth playing! This is particularly true if you're the kind of person who is into micromanaging equipment and the like; if you enjoyed the junctioning system in FF8, the sphere grid in FF10, or the crystarium in FF13, EC's various systems will probably be fun. (Once you get them unlocked. It's a bit of a slow start in that.)

After finishing certain sections you get access to "criterion dungeons" which are kinda like other segments of the original game (playwise, not storywise) that were cut from the main portion of EC; they have limitations and prerequisites that mean they generally can't just be immediately cheesed by the autobattle system, making them difficult in a way that I personally consider highly enjoyable. A fun challenge with a little more free movement, albeit still not as much as I'd like.

Being able to look at it as a whole, I really think that this is a good way to handle it. The main story portion of EC is designed to carry you through the story so you can experience it firsthand without too much difficulty, broken into bite-size portions that you can clear in about 5 minutes a pop; criterion dungeons, enhancement material missions and multiplayer battles are for people who want more controlled gameplay on top of what the main story provides.

I do still think that the OG story section is the weakest in terms of gameplay, but once you get out of Chapter 1 it's actually not that bad! I think this is because the story doesn't really properly kick off until Cloud falls into the church anyway, so that whole first section is a bit of a slog—and it was probably quite difficult for the dev team to break it down into a period shorter than the 2+ hours it took in the original version. It's very clearly abridged, but actually not bad.

Still not a fan of the cast of First SOLDIER. I'll get through that with gritted teeth.

There are some fairly egregious graphical issues and artistic inconsistencies, including an actual visible erasing error in Aerith's portrait, but those are mostly things that can be fixed between now and the proper launch.

The biggest graphical concerns for me were with regard to screen flashing. The screen flashes to black in between each wave of a fight, and then flashes back to life when the new wave has loaded, which is a huge issue for photosensitivity and is something I commented on extensively in the official survey.

Likewise, I experienced some pretty severe shader flickering, which is a big accessibility issue—I sent in a video, which I will not embed here because y'all don't need to see that. In spite of stating that I didn't expect a response to the inquiry in question, I received a clearly-not-canned reply within about eight hours stating that it is in fact a serious issue and that they would be working to rectify it as quickly as possible, although they were sorry that they probably wouldn't have an update to fix it before the end of the beta. That was a pleasant surprise, and gives me a lot of hope for cleaning up those issues and making the game more accessible.

Overall, as a whole game with all titles and systems taken into account, I'd give Ever Crisis a solid 7.5/10.

[getvalentined]

Super funny to me to see iPhone users still being pissed about the Ever Crisis closed beta not being open to them.

The vast majority of apps in the States launch on iPhone, and Android users are lucky to get crumbs within a year. iPhone apps get issues fixed faster, they get updates faster, they get preferential treatment almost every time.

However, while about 44% of Japan uses iPhones, over 51% are on Android, and in China (the single largest mobile game market on Earth) a staggering 78% of the market share belongs to Android. That's the main audience here.

Of course the beta ran on Android.

But iPhone users don't get preferential treatment on a closed beta for once in their lives and it's apparently some kind of discrimination. The entitlement is absolutely mind-boggling.

[getvalentined]

My Verdict on Ever Crisis' OG Section: This Game Has No Gameplay

I felt like I was maybe being uncharitable when playing this yesterday, because I was in a bit of a bad headspace and also I was very tired, so I replayed it today and...no. No, I was not.

There is essentially no gameplay. I'm not even joking.

After you finish Main Section 1.1 you unlock autobattles, which render the battle mechanic entirely irrelevant as a form of gameplay for the OG section. You'd think this would mean that the gameplay would focus on roaming around, leaving the battle up to the computer and giving players the freedom to engage with the world—and you'd be completely, utterly wrong!

Player controlled movement is available for a short period in Main Section 1.1 and Main Section 3.1. Both of these instances are basically opening a chest, walking Cloud to a ladder, climbing down the ladder, opening another chest, and then crossing a platform to reach a catwalk. I think one of them had also had some stairs.

There is no player controlled movement in (please bear with me here) Main Section 1.2, Main Section 2.1, Main Section 2.2, Sub Section 1.1, Sub Section 1.2, Sub Section 1.3, Main Section 3.2, Main Section 3.3, or Main Section 3.4, after which this part of the beta is over.

Okay, so it's not free movement. In that case, the gameplay should lean into interaction, right? There's a lot f dialogue, so it would make sense to give players more input on that—and yeah, that would make sense, but that's not where we're going either.

According to my notes, (which I didn't start taking until about halfway through to prove to myself that I wasn't going insane, so I may be missing one or two) there are six instances of player input on dialogue.

Buying a flower from Aerith (MS 1.2)

Giving the flower to Tifa or Marlene (MS 2.1)

Getting a drink at the bar (MS 2.2)

Remembering the childhood promise to Tifa (MS 2.2)

Whether Cloud says he'll be okay when he falls from the Reactor 5 catwalk (MS 3.1)

Remembering Aerith as either the flower peddler or the slum drunk (MS 3.2)

Just so you all get this straight, I'm saying that you can't walk around, you can't talk to anyone, and battles literally run themselves.

This game has no gameplay. There is no game in this game.

I literally felt like I had more control over the randomized gacha pulls than over the actual game—and I'm starting to think that's the entire point.

I have other things I want to comment on (graphics, art, controls, the fact that I can fry an egg on my phone within 45 seconds of loading the game even if I'm just sitting in the main menu) but I have to get images together for that and I literally do not have the energy after pouring a large portion of my day into replaying the OG section and discovering that it was worse than I thought because I was too tired yesterday to realize how bad it was.

[getvalentined]

Transferring all my screen recordings of the EC beta over to dropbox is going to take 8000 years but at least I can make some nice gifs when it's done.

Genuinely sad that the beta test ends tonight, once you get out of the absolute slog that is Chapter 1 of the OG section, it's a fun game! I had to do some level grinding to make it through Chapter 2 (that difficulty spike with regard to recommended power is bonkers) but I expect any FF title to have a fair amount of level grinding in it.

The First SOLDIER section is the worst. It's not the weakest with regards to gameplay overall, the battles are super repetitive but it has the exact level of free movement that I wanted in the OG section (and have been shown very clearly that I cannot have), but the cast is just. So fucking bad. The dialogue is terrible. The costume design is terrible. The pacing is terrible. The character interactions are terrible. The characters are terrible.

The most interesting person in the entire thing is a nameless ~native~ child in a shawl made of belts who appears to live in a weird fruit orchard with his dog.

[getvalentined]

God the music in First SOLDIER is so good but the characters are so bad

[getvalentined]

The more I play this game, the more I feel like it should be on the Switch. It plays like a Switch title, not because it's too complex for standard mobile but because the actual controls and actions feel like they would be much more intuitive specifically on the Switch.

It doesn't feel like a Playstation title squeezed into a mobile game, which is what I was most concerned about, but it does play like a game that should be on a dedicated console. It'd probably be great on the OLED, but even the Lite would give it enough room to breathe to improve playability by a staggering margin.