Started playing this game around a year ago to get to know the story a bit as i haven't played FFVII yet.
Story is divided into FFVII Storyline, Crisis Core and The First Soldier 1 & 2 which are prequels during Sephiroths youth.
Regularly they add new/rotating events and added at least 3 new characters since i started playing. They also added a guild system a while ago.
Depending on the event it can sometimes become a bit grindy (at least if you don't invest any money in the game, not sure about if you play p2w) but can be played for free without problems.
It also has an auto fight system if you want to use it so I usually just let it fight for me while working on other things on the side (and then forget to close the game and it keeps running all day ^^')

WOW TIFA LOOKS SO CUTE IN HER BUNNY OUTFIT, AND AERITH LOOKS GORGEOUS IN HER PRISM OUTFIT!!


… Wait a minute why is my bank account now empty!! I swear i didn’t spend that much?!!!

First day player here.

As much as I enjoy the new story (namely, episodes of ECFS and events), characters (I absolutely adore Team Glenn), as well as gameplay (this adaptation of the ATB-based RPG gameplay is charming), I still can't manage to say that I have the best experience playing this game.

Here are my issues:
1. The game is EXTREMELY biased towards certain characters. Let me speak with an obvious example here:
This review is written during the FFVI Crossover in November 2024. At this point in time, Cloud has just gotten his fifth limited skin being Locke (his other limited skins in chronological order: FFIX crossover, Half Anniversary, Monster Hunter crossover, First Anniversary, FFVI crossover). He hasn't gotten *any* single unlimited banner skin since literally the beginning of 2024.
Now let's compare that with Barret, who's also an important member of the original FFVII protagonist party. He's been here since the game launches, same duration with Cloud. But to this day, Barret has ONLY 4 skins in total, INCLUDING his original/default gear. To think that Cloud literally has more limited banner skins than Barret with all his property is insane. Game's been shafting Team Glenn, but at least it makes slightly more sense because they are new characters and few people care about them (much to my sadness but OK). Barret, though, is a beloved character that's been around since the 1997 OG FFVII, and it just absolutely breaks me to see him get forgotten while the game consistently pumps out new banners for Cloud, Aerith and Tifa on a daily basis. The devs genuinely need to make more reasonable banner releasing days.

2. With the ongoing issue of biased banners comes the problem of characters not being able to catch up with the meta. Because, well, you can't do anything in a new meta without getting your weapons & gears updated. So at this point in time, you either have to build a team with really strong Cloud/Aerith/Tifa, you know those few chars, or risk not being able to beat the vast majority of new hard levels. So essentially players are forced to drop entire characters instead of just, like, certain older builds, because no new builds are coming out. Besides the example with Barret, this situation also applies to Glenn, Matt, and Zack. It's been so long since these few got *anything* new and they are starting to feel weak. This game only has so many characters to choose from and I don't want to drop them just so I can pass hard cotent.

3. Moving on to the actual gameplay itself, high difficulty bosses at this point are just spammers with stat sticks. I appreciate that new designs and patterns are being implemented into new bosses because I would have deleted the game otherwise. There are only a few modes of events and they are very grindy, so it's super easy to get tired from essentially just the same stuff coming back to your face in a different look. Also we need significant QoL updates. I would appreciate if you give us an option to skip the bosses' animations when playing. Sometimes it takes trial and error to tackle down hard levels, and having to watch an 12 second boss skill animation every round gets frustrating very quickly (I'm talking about this with Shiva & Ramuh EX2 in mind).

4. Finally, there are TOO MANY factors that are luck dependent. I get that this game is a mobile game and depends on gacha to make money. That I understand. What I DON'T understand is the fact that this game keeps on adding luck based systems outside of gacha (the banners & tickets). Like, why do we get random rolls for materia stats and rarity? I've been playing since literally the first day of this game and to this day I still don't have a five star Cure materia. On top of that, this game starts to give blind boxes as rewards for the most basic things such as logging on. Seriously, why?? Can't you just give the same rewards to everyone? The thoughts that someone can make like 3000 more blue crystals by doing absolutely nothing drives me crazy. If I log onto the game everyday and someone else logs onto the game everyday, why is there even a possibility that one of us will get more rewards? Seems hardly fair.

I can go on and on but I will stop for now. I'm not lying when I say that I really enjoy some parts of this game. You can probably tell that by the hours I spent in this game (I have more on my mobile device). I seriously want it to do well. And this can actually be achieved if the devs listen to feedback and implement them. This is the reason why I'm writing this painfully long review. Anyways, a big thank you goes to you devs for bringing us this game and making many things possible. I genuinely hope that one day this game will get fixed, and in such a way that makes me change my mind about this negative review.