Square Enix trademarks Ever Crisis, The First Soldier, and Shinra logo in Japan

[Odysseus]

FF7 is such a large and varied series at this point, and many people will enjoy aspects that others despise. It's getting to be like Sonic in a way, everyone has their own ideas of what FF7 "should" be, and of course that leads to arguments. It doesn't help that Square is gearing up to make more FF7 than ever at this rate. I'm absolutely here for that bullshit, but I understand that a lot of people would have been happier had Square just left well enough alone. We're getting farther and farther from that original 1997 experience, and the scope of FF7 is totally different now than it was then.

Also, cheap mobile tie-ins are never too exciting anyway lol.

 

[Makoeyes987]

Naw, it's definitely not like Sonic.

Sonic's track record has almost killed it several times, losing Sega money with each attempted reboot and bizarre attempt at rewriting its own DNA. There's a difference between some side-game variety and schizophrenic identity seeking which Sonic has struggled with for over a decade, and almost never found it. FFVII's origins and history haven't been rebuilt over and over from the ground up to chase a fleeting game demographic for some inexplicable reason. Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic 2006, Lost World, Sonic Boom, Sonic Forces, etc etc.

FFVII branching out commercially with different mobile-games is not the same as poor Sonic and friends having to be remolded so often that Sonic Team literally lost what the idea of his game was and it took an outside fan developer to recapture the formula and deliver a blockbuster.

Every franchise has dabbled in Battle Royale inspired sub-gaming; that's hardly Sonic-like lol. FFVII is a franchise that's simply alive and at the very least, the profits that these games generate will ensure Part 2 doesn't languish because Square fails to see continuation of the Remake as a priority. And honestly, there's nothing cheap looking about these mobile games. Looking down on mobile today when several of the best selling and well-received games of 2020 are games that were done on mobile is just... That's not reality. Ever Crisis looks especially promising.

 

[Odysseus]

I'm more talking about audience perception of the different facets of the franchise than I am about how said franchise functions. Obviously Sonic is more of a clusterfuck of clashing ideas than FF7 ever was.

 

[crazyrabbits23]

As long as you don't have to spend a grand to roll on a banner in hopes you get a chance to be able to clear a chapter, it's cool

If the game let's you be free-to-play, I don't see what the big deal is.

First Soldier, maybe. I'm expecting EC to start with a "teaser pack" of chapters that are free, then you have to pay for each subsequent story/chapter.

I'd like to think S-E learned their lesson with XV -- namely, that parsing massive chunks of story/critical information to numerous formats and platforms (movies, tie-in games, novellas) just fragments the audience too much -- and that presenting a unified vision/chronology of the franchise in an easy-to-pickup format (and especially considering the positive reception) is the right direction to take. Hell, XV's screwed-up presentation of the story is what has me refusing to play it -- if I have to watch a movie, read a short novel and play a couple of tie-ins just to understand the setup for the story, the devs screwed up somewhere along the way.