Goodnight, Ever Crisis: Square Enix pulls the plug on its FFVII mobile retelling
Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis ended service on October 6, 2026, at 11:00 PM PDT — just over three years after its September 2023 launch on mobile (a Steam release followed that December). Square Enix announced the shutdown back in July.
What made this one different was the honesty. Producer Shoichi Ichikawa told players outright that the game simply became too expensive to run: the high visual bar fans expected from a Final Fantasy VII property — especially rendering high-fidelity character weapons and gear — couldn't be sustained while keeping gameplay balance fair. No vague corporate line about "market conditions." Just math.
The game retold the Compilation of FFVII — the original game, Crisis Core, and its own prequel story The First Soldier — through a mobile-optimized take on the classic Active Time Battle system. For fans who never warmed to the Remake trilogy's action combat, it was the closest thing to a faithful modern FFVII.
Square Enix marked the end with a farewell trailer that stuck to the three core storylines, closing on the full cast lined up in their Gear costumes — a send-off for the FFVII companion piece Ever Crisis launched as, rather than the anthology of spin-off events it became.
Now the hard part: there is no offline version. Once the servers closed, the game became permanently inaccessible, and Square Enix says account data will be deleted once the wind-down procedures finish. In-app purchases had already stopped, and refunds for unused paid currency are limited to players in Taiwan — everyone else's leftover balance is simply gone.
Ever Crisis joins a long Square Enix mobile graveyard. The First Soldier, its battle-royale sibling, lasted barely over a year before shutting down in January 2023. NieR Reincarnation is gone too. The Remake trilogy marches toward its 2027 finale, but this corner of the Compilation is lost media now. If you played it, all that remains are the memories — and the trailer.