Isn't Cloud's ability animation taken from the one in IX?
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Physical damage, learned from the Zorlin Shape, which is the weapon Cloud's is modeled after.
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Yes, that's what the attack is designed to resemble, but this is one of those things where the devil is in the details, and those details are usually something that the Design teams play especially close attention to. This one is specifically the symbol that Yuffie's Wind Ninjutsu utilize in INTERmission:
I'm familiar with this because a bit over two years ago, I started spending a rather exhaustive amount of time looking into the particular origins of the script & characters that they utilize in connection to the symbolism in Shingon Buddhism, and Yuffie has
unique ones for all of the different elements of her attacks, as well
for her Banishment Ninjutsu, in addition to a 13 character phrase that you see wrapped around Yuffie as she's casting, which is what's being utilized in the outer circle of Cloud's "Free Energy" C. Ability with Zidaine's Sword, and is even used as the icon for that ability:
This
VERY CLEARLY was not something that was made exclusively as a part of the team putting together unique assets like the Black Waltz enemies for a big
FFIX Crossover, but rather was an existing asset created as a part of Yuffie's inclusion into the game that was grabbed and repurposed because they don't have other things prepared and completed yet. Yuffie's character is work that we already know has been ongoing by the Development Team for quite some times, because
there were references to a Yuffie Maid Costume in the data for the Halloween Event, which further points to the issue that time & resources are stretched extremely thin, and that only becomes more exacerbated the longer that Engineering efforts get tied up in bugfixes from rushed & unstable releases, rather than focusing on actual development efforts.
On the pace of story chapters: Odysseus just recently invented the
scene choreography for some unused text in the original game. Very impressive, very cool stuff. I bring it up because it's stylistically similar to Ever Crisis, as the developers intended.
So imagine multiple Odys, working full time, with actual developer tools and access to a sizeable asset bank (from Remake and Rebirth). I know I'm going to sound like a bratty entitled gamer when I say this, but yeah, I think Applibot / Square Enix could put up a story chapter a bit sooner than 6+ weeks.
It's even more confounding when you think about how 2.5 years passed between EC's reveal trailer and the game's launch. What were they cooking in that time?
This is why it's important to talk about how Software development ACTUALLY works at a larger scale, because no one person has that level of control. If you're working on character design, level design, OR scene choreography, you have to run everything by the Design team for approval, because you're just creating what the Director or Product Lead of Design approves. If you're working on dialogue you're likely with the translation and i18n / l10n teams that are mostly a facet of the Design team and aren't usually a part of Engineering at all. Keep in mind that ALL of those chibi in-world assets are going to be interfacing with a different Engineering team who does all of the combat encounters with the high-quality character assets that have to sufficiently match to the chibi versions – which again, requires design approval and that's why the Weapon designs can be pumped out more aggressively because they don't show up in a secondary version.
The division of THOSE gameplay efforts are largely spread into what's likely 3 areas which are the Scenario (book icon), Combat (crossed swords icon), or Open Exploration (mountain icon). Depending which of those is highlighted, you know what to expect from that particular item as well as having an idea of the teams who are working on that.
Keep in mind that there are still NUMEROUS other areas of the game that also require work from various teams. Any of the battle scenarios from the Tower of the Cetra are a part of the Combat team, but there's also all of the UI & art assets included with that. All of the Banners & Gacha mechanics are a part of a team's responsibility, same with Chocobo exploration, or new weapons & upgrades, etc. etc. etc.
MOST of those teams can inter-operate and cover up for each other, but there's something that you can't rush which are the mixed scenarios that require ALL of the teams to contribute to a stable collective effort that include some of everything –
which are the Story sections.
Level design for maps require all of the exploration to be completed and those are typically things that are going to be able to be revisited and reused for things like the Criterion & Crisis Dungeons to unlock additional content, so they're not just a once-and-never-again effort... which, unlike Nibelheim which will eventually get used when that content releases –
literally everything for a single limited month-long
FFIX Crossover event
WOULD BE ONE-TIME USE ONLY. Not only that, but those maps need to have all of the exploration function and be able to transition in and out of combat states without issue, and have all of the battles therein work correctly.
The Ranked Dungeon events have had numerous bugs
on existing maps just configured with new enemies and different mechanics, like characters becoming frozen and uncontrollable when entering combat. This isn't something that's necessarily easy to do, and those things require a LOT of work to make sure that they're stable and function properly – and the team is already working to make sure that those things operate correctly with existing assets and new ones will be inherently less stable and less well-tested, meaning you're more likely to be able to boundary break, have abilities working incorrectly, or potentially end up softlocked.
Suffice to say, that no matter HOW talented you think someone is, a single person wouldn't be able to ACTUALLY accomplish anything on that sort of a scale because that's just flat-out not how any of that actually works, and their prioritization is going to be dictated by someone else who's in charge of the team that they're assigned to. This is just the nature of how software development goes when working at scale (as my last job was working for a local statup company that only had ~200 people in the entire company when I started, and had several thousand and was a global company at the end of my time there).
TBF I feel like there's a lot of sky is falling talk going on. The game is barely two months old. They said they would do new chapters once a month. They've released new content every week. They're even adjusting art assets based on feedback. They address bugs quickly, downtime is minimal, localization is excellent, production value is high. Getting a Steam port, too.
I've played FFBE since day one, and at its worst it has been a broken mess. Like maybe a tenth of the quality control EC is getting. I'm talking hackers sending currency to all players, days long maintenances, localization errors way beyond mistranslations, entire features bugged for months at a time. Its monetization is also quite a bit more predatory. They announced plans for a PC port and then never followed up, quietly canceling it. And that game has persisted for eight years.
Yes, this game needs work. There are some QOL issues, it's a bit too grindy, some of the systems (materia synthesis, mainly) are frustrating.
They'll get that stuff ironed out in time. Even if they don't radically overhaul things, just the nature of catch up mechanics and standard QOL updates means the stuff that's hard or grindy right now will be easier and more streamlined in the future.
This is specifically because we're looking at what is ostensibly some crossover of the team & management for the
FFVIIR-centric mobile games branch that managed to ensure that
The First SOLDIER died in
a single year. There are PLENTY of other divisions within the company that can justify different levels of poor performance because they don't have the same audience expectations or expenditure on the financial side of things for those games, and they also don't have the same pressures of showing certain levels of consistent profitability before the people with who control money divert it elsewhere.
We know that there's a lot more
Ever Crisis content because we've seen it – but that doesn't mean that it's anywhere
CLOSE to being feature complete for a single scenario, let alone at the point of an MVP for an update release, and not even remotely in the region of what it takes for a full story event. This is a double-edged sword because we also know that the team has spent a TON more money paying everyone to do that work already, which means that they're under extreme pressure to make up that difference, and ensure that they have a budget to be able to keep moving forward at all.
Lastly, it's also worth remembering that there's likely a collective freeze on any
FFVII-post Midgar Story content until
Rebirth is actually out, which is gonna be a lot of avoiding stepping on toes. This is why
Ever Crisis development work not only has to be able to inter-operate with the marketing constraints of
Rebirth, but whatever large scale delays happened with that game's development likely also shifted how and where their team had to refocus efforts on different story elements, because it'll come into play with how they roadmap all of their content release windows.
For all we know, they might have 75% of the entirety of Rebirth's content done because they've been able to directly borrow assets from those teams and benefit from that synergy... but all of that is off the table until March at the earliest –
which is critically Japan's new Fiscal Year and doesn't do a single goddamn thing for the team where they're at now. This is why things are especially rough, and even in the main game there are signs of people scrambling before release to get things done and releasing temporary assets.
As one example:
Crisis Core Reunion came out, so it should be in the clear to do that story, and most of the events have given assets for Zack so that his character is statistically likely for players to have decently equipped. The issue there is that Zack's combat scenarios all have to be balanced for a single character – which is different than all the other scenarios that are balanced for a team of 3. Additionally, despite the cinematics in
Ever Crisis: The First SOLDIER story utilizing a unique version of
Remake's Type-0 Behemoth, and
Crisis Core Reunion having semi-updated combat models for the regular Behemoth, the
Ever Crisis: Crisis Core story encounter (and thus all the other co-op and boss battles) are still all set up with
the Behemoth asset from FFXV.
This speaks to all of the sorts of behind-the-scenes development efforts that are going to hold up that content, but the same things that are also likely to be complicating the adaptation of
Before Crisis scenarios as well. Add to that that what you're attempting to do primarily is ensure that the work that one team does can be actively used by as many other teams as possible, and you'll get a clear idea that there are any NUMBER of things that can become a critical blocker to a MASSIVE pipeline of additional content.
That results in teams having to scramble to compile whatever scraps of viable assets exist to be able to make a shippable update, and thus you'll end up with less things that are intentionally designed in a multi-purpose capacity that the Design team had a direct hand in crafting, and more things like grabbing one of Yuffie's assets because it's easy enough for that to be made to passingly resemble something for Zidaine for an event that barely has completed work on ANYTHING, and is exponentially more bare bones than if they were able to do anything that had assets that were made to be reusable and not one-off.
Even then, the fact that the Halloween Event being set in reusable asset locations, with reusable enemies was haphazardly cobbled together and was missing numerous assets, and that the planned Iron Giant Hunt had one of its two finished weapons released preemptively and thus wasn't able to be a part of that tiny event points to this being a deeper issue of holdups for them being able to release content that's more feature complete AND of marketing/sales overaggressively making predatory decisions for the game in an attempt to financially mask that struggle from the people who control the budget and only look at the numbers.
I think you're just not familiar with the gacha space. And don't take this as a defense, they're all predatory and definitely prey on people with gambling / impulse control / FOMO issues. But this is pretty firmly on the generous side of monetization compared to a lot of stuff, especially the big ones.
Genshin Impact for example is simultaneously the most successful and most predatory games out there, the pity rate for a 5-star unit in that game (the weapons and characters are both gacha) comes out to about $350 IIRC, and that's just for one copy, not even getting the dupes needed to unlock their skills. FFBE's current pity rate is around 40k lapis which means you can pull for a unit about once every other month, and again even then you might not get enough copies to fully unlock their skill set.
So not for nothing, as far as gacha games go, this one is in a pretty damn good spot.
This is one of those things that I'll have to repeat, which is that just because the bar is
INCREDIBLY low for ethical implementation of monetization schemes in gacha games doesn't mean that
Ever Crisis not being a more egregious example doesn't make what they're doing still a negative thing that should actively be spoken up against.
A core part of how those mechanics work is that they establish the low baseline as a psychological normal by utilizing a system of inconsistent reward that's linked into preemptively triggering a dopamine reward. This is why there's a long animation of Cloud walking up to and attacking the Iron Giant that you have to tap to interact with before the pull happens, and why there are a number of different configurations to what that attack animation are going to be. All of those delayed responses are a dopamine farm, and the inconsistency for what causes them is what inherently makes them addictive.
The animation is a consistent dopamine feedback (because dopamine is released on the anticipation of a reward not on the delivery of reward) and that's that's
why clicker training works on humans, whereas the actual reward from the pull varies massively in value based upon a random table. That last part works because it's utilizing the same psychological framework that
Intermittent Reinforcement does to allow a narcissist to maintain control over someone else's actions in an abusive relationship. It doesn't matter whether or not you are fully cognisant of what's happening, it's simply repeated exposure to that pattern over time that will make it have an influence on your behaviour and expectations of the person who's using it to their advantage. That dual system is designed to significantly amplify that particular series of experiences which is inherently a part of all gambling addiction.
This is because the dopamine release happens in your Hypothalamus which is a part of your Limbic system, and your Amygdala is a part of that, and will establish a feedback loop of an emotional response based on what your body is already doing. However, the understanding of the system mechanics at work takes place in your Prefrontal Cortex which is a totally different region of your brain. The resting level of dopamine in the Prefrontal Cortex is what manages impulsive behaviour, because the Prefrontal Cortex & Amygdala have an inhibitory relationship to one another via a shared pathway. The lower the resting level of dopamine in the PFC, the more you're going to have impulsive behaviour that reacts based on where that dopamine is being generated back in the Limbic system where cognitive function is inhibited by the Amygdala. The more often that pattern occurs, the more the brain will acclimate itself towards relying on it as a source of dopamine for the aforementioend reasons.
The more you play games or use gameplay systems like this, the more acclimated you are to that type of exploitive abuse where it's easier to see things in a positive light within what is still inherently a deeply abusive psychological framework,
which is all it really is. This is why those sorts of things go as far back as early MMOs with their random loot table drops and how we even got to having the Common, Epic, & Legendary tiers of loot drops in the first place being a core component to the early iterations of that as a type of game design making
World of Warcraft insanely successful. I never really engaged in MMOs, and especially after I'd worked in a Drug & Alcohol Rehabilitation facility and learned more about the mechanics of addiction dependency also having a significant social component – which MMOs also rely on with guilds and other groupings, I never really engaged in MMOs because of that element being the core driving mechanic in doing quests and grinding, rather than actually having good design.
These days, I'm someone who's even more vulnerable to those sorts of things, having been stuck in an abusive relationship that had a feedback cycle of that type of Intermittent Reinforcement – where I was 100% aware of what was happening, why it was happening, and all of the mechanics behind it... but that doesn't prevent those patterns from forcibly altering your brain's responses because the understanding in the PFC can't prevent how that is rewiring the Amygdala's response to the dopamine release. Especially as I take medication for ADHD which uses a stimulant to alter the resting level of dopamine in your brain (and by extension in the PFC), I'm particularly used to watching for very specific changes in my behaviour that are related specifically to these frameworks, as I have to know how to preemptively mitigate exposure to the parts of them that will be significantly damaging –
because being able to fully dive into all of the content of an FFVII-related title is still extremely important to me.
That's why for
Ever Crisis, I actively conduct my way in the game to be as straightforward as possible, where I just treat it as 3000 crystals per Stamp and for 10 random 3★ weapons, and I don't watch through the animations and only look at the end list of what's there. Even then that doesn't fully eliminate how that pattern will have a persisting influence on you, because weapon rarity and everything else, but it's also why I'm VERY critical of the places where gacha and monetization strategies are used to mask bad game design. There's a reason that rehabilitation requires intervention of external parties with a deep knowledge of the mechanics of addiction, and how that all works because those things LITERALLY change what the baseline "normal" you expect from something the same way that being in abusive relationships do, or anything else that relies on this particular framework.
That's why it's still important to highlight when those predatory tactics are being employed
even in small amounts, because it's not JUST the monetary extortion of Whales that's an issue, but the fact that when that mechanic becomes successful ONCE, it influences BOTH parties to become more desperate with how deeply they're going to continue to push that dynamic and how exploitive it needs to be to chase that success. That's because how much how money a random amount of Whales have to be able to spend on a game will vary event-to-event... which means that the Intermittent Reinforcement is ALSO influencing who's using that to secure a budget, because how much one banner makes vs. another will change and so if that starts trending down, they'll try to make it more appealing again to get a spike in that compensation. This is why Genshin is both the most successful AND one of the most exploitive. They're mutually reinforcing dynamics, and because that is counterintuitive to the "free market will choose the better system and the worse one will fail" of your external cognitive understanding of not wanting those system to be successful.
This is why companies in the mobile environment ended up saturated with gacha games – because that's more self-reinforcing than a stable exchange for a known value. It also reinforces bad game design like how in
Ever Crisis the "value" of what you can use Blue Crystals on is make no sense whatsoever, which dictates the feeling of inconsistency in what you exchange earned rewards for... and then pushes you into the psychological framework of the gacha systems where that inconsistency feels like an understood mechanic, especially because so many other games utilize a version of that – except that it's not something that you can just understand your way past.
The inherent issue is that the more
Ever Crisis replies upon that, the more it will become codependent upon it and slowly work itself out of having a healthy and stable monetary balance with the general audience. If there are 100 Whales who spend $200 to unlock both skins on the Stamp Cards, that's MORE desirable than having TWENTY THOUSAND people buy them as DLC for $2 – because even though they make the same amount of money (individual transaction fees & taxes notwithstanding), the psychological addiction goes both ways and reinforces that behaviour.
That's specifically why you HAVE to keep talking about the ways in which this sort of thing is bad for the long-term health of the game, even if at the surface it seems positively benign compared to any other modern gacha. Consistency in being outspoken about it is where you eventually get opportunities to make change, because gambling systems will have more and more victims fall off, and they will add to the majority who
eventually have enough influence to allow the people on the inside to make a change that is to everyone's collective benefit – and THOSE have to be strongly supported so that they can eventually dial back on that type of gambling crutch being shoehorned in lieu of any actual satisfying game design – which
Ever Crisis HAS, but is being undercut by the monetization in ways I've tl;dr'd about before.
X 
Shoot, being outed because I never played IX. I knew it'd catch up to me someday.