Insofar as the recent content stuff in
EC: the new regions and story things are REALLY neat, and I'm glad that they've got those things rolling in. They've given me things ta look forward to (I haven't tried out what Yuffie's dialogue options are during her interaction that matches the OG's post-battle recruitment conversation, but I'm curious how those branch out).
I still find all the EX battles to be
extremely unsatisfying in how much they require arbitrary and painstakingly exact implementation of one specific strategy that's often reliant on using limit breaks to interrupt enemy attacks in order to beat them. They kinda burned me out on doing much with the game tbh, as it feels like what's left is just chores rather than anything really satisfying. Like, I haven't really leveled up anyone outside of my main team as there's not really any point and I've no interest in all the grinding to try and get materia that are 5 star AND have better stat boosts than the 4 star stuff I currently have.
Even the new Dungeons don't really seem to contribute much to anything that's actively useful gameplay, so I've been just forgetting to do them or check out the tower or anything else as they've sort of just arbitrary challenges that don't have a purpose to them. The upside is that I think that has made the really fantastically fleshed-out story bits feel ESPECIALLY welcome because they're such a breath of fresh air to have something that is of action
subtance rather than just more vapid
content.
A few things of note:
I forgot to mention this earlier, but the new CC Chapter actually gave us what I
believe is the very first time we've ever had a specific canon location of Banora. While the general Mideel region has been mentioned before, I think that this is the first time it's ever been explicitly placed on the World Map, and makes me wonder if we might be able to see the bombed-out ruins during
Rebirth. It also gives a better ability to be able to plot a more specific route that Zack ended up taking with Cloud on their way back to Midgar (which is exceptionally relevant with his apparent survival being a rather major story element in the
Remake project).
On a note of personal satisfaction, it made me smile ta see that
Ever Crisis still uses the name "Midgar Zolom" for our favourite gigantic swap serpent, so we'll have to see whether or not
Rebirth retains that particular naming convention or not.
Like what we saw previously in Mt. Nibel with how the Materia Fountain retained the blue/grey coloration present in
Rebirth rather than the green/brown that was used in the OG, I'd expect that the visuals that we're getting here are going to be somewhat close to what we see in the new game in 7 weeks... but not entirely. What's interesting is that
the Midgar Zolom that was showcased in the Rebirth Release Date Announcement trailer looks DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT from the way the model here does. In
Rebirth, it has more of a yellow-green coloration, a very spikey hood and lateral spines that continue along at the border of its underbelly, distinctive black patterns along its whole underbelly, and most notably, its horns are curl back and around and are wrapped directly against its skull behind its eyes –
matching the way that they look in the original FFVII.
In
Ever Crisis, there are no spikes on the hood, its underbelly is a single color, and the horns curl up and forwards and are separated out on either side of the head. This is far more reminiscent of the
FFXV Midgardsormr /
Hvitrormir /
Grootslang except that all of those also still have the more spikey scales along their hoods that this model lacks, so it's seemingly a new model rather than just grabbing an extant asset like with the
FFXV Behemoths in
Ever Crisis, but it's also not the asset from
Rebirth unless the slain version is going to be distinctly different from the one actively roaming the swamp.
(EDIT: The
FFVII version also has a split tail almost like a stingray barb, and while the earlier
Rebirth footage doesn't give a look at whether that feature is present,
the Destined for Rebirth trailer does show the split tail for a few frames, as well as the different facial sdesign and how its body is absolutely covered in dorsal spines as well. Meanwhile,
Ever Crisis' Midgar Zolom here only has a very short tail that's curling upwards a bit like you'd see with a python, and absolutely no spines to speak of as well as a radically different facial design).
Aside from the model discrepancy, I was rather surprised that the Midgar Zolom was just impaled directly upright with the tree trunk emerging from just behind the skull like this.
The original version in FFVII had the serpent flipped on its back and the spike of the tree emerging from its chest down near the base of the cobra hood. Even without the rivulets of blood pouring down the tree and onto its lower body –
the physical positioning of the original feels VASTLY more brutal than this does, because of what it implies about the confrontation that took place, and thus what it ALSO communicates about how powerful Sephiroth is.
The way
Ever Crisis portrays it, Sephiroth just had to lift up the snake's head slightly from its natural attack stance and push it back down onto the spike to kill it. (I expect that this is because
Ever Crisis is barely doing anything to the default pose of the Midgarsormr model, and is really just editing a tree into the scene). Whereas in the original
FFVII, Sephiroth would have had to physically overpower and twist the entire serpent over backwards before forcibly impaling it into the tree.
Very small differences in the designs can make for VASTLY different storytelling conveyance and
Ever Crisis still seems to be operating on rather thin margins when it comes to which assets they have access to and how much time they have to be able to craft these sorts of scenes.
Additionally, while Yuffie has a few weapons with C. Abilities that are currently using the wrong animations (but the in-game mechanics are fine),
the proper animation for her Ice Ninjutsu's final strike uses the symbol for "Lightning" rather than "Ice" something that I noticed given that
I was cataloging all the symbols for Yuffie's Elemental Ninjutsu in INTERmission back in 2021 (this Tweet shows Fire, Ice, Lightning, & Wind respectively, but that hashtag has a variety of other reference shots of her Ninjutsu). This is also why I recognized that Cloud's "Free Energy" C. Ability animation for the
FFIX crossover was utilizing Yuffie's elemental symbol for "Wind" rather than the actual symbol from Zidaine's Free Energy attack, because when the Mandala appears,
those 4 Bonji-like symbols are arranged in a specific pattern along with the 4 elemental Kanji that they correspond to.
I've been paying close attention to this specifically because in
INTERmission Yuffie had 4 Elemental Ninjutsu as well as the ability to use Ninjutsu without assigning them to an element, which roughly matched to the 5 elements in Shinto (Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, & Void) which worked because
FFVII Remake only had 4 elements with counters paired as Fire/Ice & Wind/Lightning. This is why
Yuffie's Ninjutsu animations always start with a pentagon of 5 symbols for her casting animation. Even when
she's casting Banishment and
casting through a different symbol placed between the 5 orbs, there's been a specific design to their placement and even the Mandala that appears having a sideways clockwise rotation rather than being placed upright.
From the beginning, this already presented a rather notable difference since
Ever Crisis has 6 different elements Earth, Water, Lightning, Wind, Fire, & Ice as well as having different foils between those elements: Fire/Ice, Wind/Earth, Lightning/Water, as well as also having the non-elemental damage option that could still correspond to a "Void" element attack. I figured that this meant we'd be reusing some of those symbols for Water & Earth, or that they'd take two of
her other Ninjutsu casting symbols that
don't get used for specific elements and assigning those to the 2 extra elements. However, with this shuffling a design between elements that both already existed, there's always the possibility that ALL of the symbols have gotten totally reassigned to match different elements altogether.
I mentioned it on the official Twitter post about the bug with those attacks, so hopefully it'll get corrected or clarified as I'd like to still be able to use things in
Ever Crisis as a part of doing analysis on design in the
FFVII games. It's already tough when there are bits of weirdness from shortcuts in development with its design consistency to the rest of the
Compilation (like using the asset for the
FFXV Behemoths rather than any
FFVII-style Behemoths). However, when it doesn't adhere to specific designs within its own internal framework that's even more bothersome, because it means that I have to be able to track and discount or clarify conflicting design between different games.
This has added in an additional detail that I'll have to spend some extra time breaking down with
Rebirth, and I'm hoping it won't have to involve discarding preexisting designs from
INTERmission, or at the very least that there's still a unified design framework that
Ever Crisis &
Rebirth both share if they both have an expanded set of elemental attacks from the 4 that
Remake was using. As much as it's helpful having them split out into individual games that can be analyzed on within their own combat systems, it's a bit frustrating when those grind up against the core design elements of how certain details are built out.
Especially with Yuffie's Ninjutsu having so many details that are intrinsically built from Shinto's five elements, not to mention the mysticism from both Wuxing's five elements (Earth, Wood, Metal, Fire, & Water) as well as Onmyodo's five elements (Fire, Wind, Earth, Water, & Thunder) both also including the dichotomy of Yin & Yang they're a core foundation for a lot of Wutai's unique cultural design as an older Japan that still had close connections to China in a juxtaposition that distinguishes it from Midgar which is more of the modern post-war Japan that was integrated with America and those two ways of life were heavily antithetical and biased against one another. There's a lot of careful thought that gets put into creating those things, which is why I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the assets are being used correctly rather than just being haphazardly copy/pasted when they need a visual effect.
While it may seem like a lot of nit-picking (which it admittedly is), it's because
Remake is a game that spent a massive amount of time showing a level of polish that can be achieved by a development team where they're allowed to really go all-out and aren't cutting corners in design and execution of things like this – and it seems like
Rebirth is being afforded that same level of scrutiny and careful attention to detail in its own execution. This is something that
Ever Crisis always seems to be out of the loop on, and that they're forced to keep covering for that in a way that feels reflective of how, rather than being able to focus on creating substantive developments as its own
Compilation title, the game is stuck being a means to an end for generating a river of monetizable content at the expense of its own soul in a way that epitomizes the mobile gaming industry in juxtaposition to the core gaming development world.
This is still bothersome since this predatory model for mobile dev justifies cut corners because it prints money by being just good enough to not lose hold of its audience, but especially while the software & gaming industry keep getting ravaged by layoffs and struggles to remain profitable, it's an uphill battle to keep making sure that it's not just settling for this sort of thing when the devs WANT to do more.
I think that this disconnect was most apparent in the recent Apex x FFVII Rebirth crossover where collecting everything was going to cost $360 where the MASSIVE fan outcry about exploitive gacha over those cosmetics (which are exactly like what Ever Crisis does as a constant staple for its content) made them drop their prices by 90% compared to what they were initially charging for them.
There's a COLOSSAL difference between what something IS worth and what the executives in charge of those decisions are going to try to force you to pay for something once they think that it's been sufficiently normalized within the wider industry. They WANT to normalize robbing you absolutely blind so that no one speaks up, and it's worth reiterating JUST how vastly exploitive this side of the industry is and how much it's going to constantly attempt to worm its way in to everything else, as well as why and how
Ever Crisis doesn't operate like the other titles that it stands alongside.
X 
) is the best since launch, there's just a couple of extras needed to fully surpass watermelon event I think.
