Highlights
- Setting up your experience: Install the game fully for smoother gameplay. Lowering graphical settings won't compromise visuals.
- Crank up auto-battle: Use auto-battle and increase speed for a better mobile gaming experience. Pay attention during boss battles for healing.
- Unlocking content: Progress through games to unlock story content and mechanics. Updates will add more games and chapters. Focus on story progress for unlocking mechanics quickly.
Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis is Square Enix’s latest attempt at cashing in on their biggest game. It is a free-to-play mobile game available on both iOS and Android devices. It plays similarly to many of their other mobile games such as War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia.
Free-to-play mobile games get a lot of flack for having gacha-based models but War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia are pretty good. Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis is good too and these tips should help players get the most out of their experience.
7 Setting Up Your Experience
There are not a ton of features in the options menu, but there are a few players should tweak before starting. First, be sure to fully install the game. It’s a big beast too that is only getting bigger by the week as is the case for a lot of mobile games from Square Enix.
The more data players download initially, the faster things will run. This is true if players place the game on the lowest graphical settings too, which should still make the game look good on a phone. Even on a tablet, the game looks relatively good on the lowest setting.
6 Crank Up That Auto-battle
The battle system is a lot like Final Fantasy 13 where characters can use specials based on a bar that raises. Players can have a lot of input on characters in battle, but they shouldn’t engage with them like a traditional RPG.
This is a mobile game, so players will get more out of it with the auto-battle feature. Have the party fight automatically and increase that speed in the options too. There is one caveat to this method. Pay attention during boss battles though to spam healing spells like Cure as sometimes the AI isn’t the best with it.
5 Unlocking Content
Players can play three games in this RPG universe once they download Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis. The games, so far, are the original games, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7, and Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier. Some story content is locked until players progress through certain chapters of each game. Also, some mechanics are locked away like ways to fuse Materia.
These games aren’t complete, like Final Fantasy 7 ends after the motorcycle chase outside of Shinra HQ. Updates will add more to these games, and chapters based on Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children, Before Crisis: Final Fantasy 7, and Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy 7 are coming too. Players should get through the story to unlock mechanics ASAP.
4 Pay Attention To Weapon Skills
In the original game, players could give their characters magic and special skills via Materia. Materia returns for all the games in this latest mobile adaptation, but these little orbs aren’t the only things that grant characters abilities. Weapons can give them skills too. For example, one of the best weapons out right now is for Tifa.
The weapon is called Lifeguard Wraps, and they grant her the ability called Healing Waves which will heal the entire party. So, the lesson here is to pay attention to weapon abilities besides base stats. Sometimes a low-tier weapon will have an amazing skill like Healing Waves attached.
3 Optimization Is Smarter Than You Think
It’s not as easy to unlock things as one may think because players have to worry about power levels like Light levels in Destiny. This is the overall strength of a character and these numbers can go up via traditional leveling up someone, like Cloud, giving him the best gear and Materia, and upgrading his personal skill tree.
If players meet the required power level of a mission, they should have no problem finishing it. There is a chance players can finish a mission below the recommended power level too if they utilize optimization. Different missions will require different load-outs, and the AI optimization is pretty smart.
2 Do Your Dailies
Veterans of mobile games probably know this, but Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis might be the first game fans of this series download. So, it is wise to go over some of the gacha-based basics. There are login bonuses for daily activity as well as daily missions. Players will eventually unlock the Chocobo Farm which has characters run on expeditions to get rewards based on time away from the game.
Be sure to unlock all three slots in this area ASAP. Also, players may miss this, but there are a lot of rewards given through basic gameplay that are hidden behind menus. The Gift Box menu is typically where Blue Crystals are kept and there is the other Mission menu that is set up like an achievement board in a console game. There is no reason to pay money if players wisely utilize all of these features.
1 Interrupting Enemies
One of the newer mechanics in this setup will allow players to temporarily break enemies for a counterattack. Big attacks, mostly from bosses, will be accompanied by a meter that counts down to the special. There is a separate icon that shows how many hits players have to land to break this attack.
Doing so will cause enemies to get Interrupted, which will cancel the ability and lower the enemy’s defenses. Be sure to go all out during these warning states, is the basic tip here. Funnily enough, a new indie game, Sea of Stars, has a similar break system, so maybe this will become a new trend in RPGs.
Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis was released on September 7, 2023 for iOS and Android devices.