Square Enix has announced that Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis, a gacha game that incorporated stories from across the greater Final Fantasy VII series, will shut down later this year. In a post on the Ever Crisis website, game producer Shoichi Ichikawa was surprisingly candid about the reason for the game’s shut down. “It has become difficult to find a balance between production costs and the demand for character weapons and gear,” he said. Players will have a few more months to enjoy the game before Square Enix shuts the servers down on October 6th.
Ever Crisis was launched in 2023 on mobile and PC. With a simplified version of the original Final Fantasy VII’s combat, Ever Crisis was more than just a straight-up retelling of the time Cloud and a couple of his situationships banded together to stop another one of his situationships from blowing up the planet. Ever Crisis also incorporated new stories and new characters (some of whom found their way into the FFVII Remake series), fleshed out Sephiroth’s backstory a little more, and also put the whole Final Fantasy VII crew in weird but fun alternate universe storylines, like that one time where they were all in high school.
Ever Crisis also won’t be the first time Square Enix has spun up and then shut down a Final Fantasy VII mobile title within a couple of years. The company tried its hand at getting in on the battle royale craze (several years too late) with Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier. After launching in 2021, Square shut that game down two years later.
But like an agave plant in its death bloom, the Ever Crisis development team isn’t done with the game just yet. The developers plan to release a ton of content in the game’s last days, including re-running past events and serving up a final story chapter that producer Ichikawa says will send the game off in style.