FF7's Japan-Only Prequel Dies Before the West Can Play It

The first chapter of Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII launched in English yesterday. So did the announcement that the game carrying it is being killed.

Square Enix confirmed on the Ever Crisis website that Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis will end service on October 6, 2026, at 11:00 PM PDT. Two more chapters of Before Crisis are planned for August and September, and then the whole thing goes dark. For a game that was supposed to finally bring one of the most elusive entries in the FF7 universe to a global audience, the cruelty of that timeline is hard to overstate.

Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII originally launched on Japanese mobile phones in 2004. It was a prequel set six years before the events of FF7, following a group of Turks operatives through Midgar and beyond. Hajime Tabata, who would later direct Final Fantasy XV, helmed the project. It never left Japan. Not through official channels, not through fan translation, and not even through emulation. The game ran on a platform so locked down that no complete playable version exists outside its original hardware. For over two decades, Western fans have known Before Crisis only through wikis, YouTube summaries, and secondhand plot descriptions.

Ever Crisis was supposed to change that. The mobile game, which launched in September 2023, set out to retell the entire Compilation of Final Fantasy VII in a single package, remaking scenes from the original game, Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, and Before Crisis with updated visuals and a more faithful battle system. The Before Crisis chapters would have been the first time English-speaking players could experience that story in any playable form.

Three Chapters and Out

According to Siliconera's coverage of the first chapter, the Before Crisis remake introduces official English names for several Turks characters who previously only had weapon-based codenames. Elena's older sister, now named Aphromia (formerly just "Gun"), appears to be the focal point. A character called Rodd (formerly "Rod") also features alongside returning faces like Reno and the Avalanche operative Fuhito. Eight other Turks from the original game still don't have official English names, and given the timeline, they may never get them.

Square Enix has been on a mobile game culling spree. War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius shut down before January 2026. Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link closed without preserving its content. Mario Kart Tour is ending service on September 30, just days before Ever Crisis follows it. The pattern is clear, and I'm not surprised Ever Crisis landed on the chopping block. What stings is the collateral damage.

Brave Exvius did get a second life. Square Enix resurrected it as Final Fantasy Resonance, a standalone console release stripped of its gacha mechanics. As CGMagazine noted, before that announcement, Brave Exvius was assumed to be gone for good. There's no official word on whether Ever Crisis or its Before Crisis content will receive similar treatment, but the precedent exists. If Square Enix lets Before Crisis vanish again without preserving it in some form, they're burying a piece of FF7 history that took twenty years to surface.

I think this is one of the worst examples of the live-service preservation problem we've seen. This isn't a game that ran its course and players moved on. Before Crisis was actively being made accessible for the first time, to an audience that has been waiting since the PS2 era, and the plug is being pulled three months into that process. Three chapters out of what was originally a 24-episode game. Players aren't losing a game they finished. They're losing one they were never allowed to start.

The gacha model that funded Ever Crisis is part of why this hurts. Square Enix built the delivery mechanism for Before Crisis inside a monetisation structure that was always going to have an expiration date. When the revenue dried up, everything inside the wrapper died with it. A standalone release, even a budget one, would have avoided this entirely.

Ever Crisis is available on PC and mobile devices until October 6. The second Before Crisis chapter arrives in August, the third in September. After that, unless Square Enix announces a preservation plan, Before Crisis goes back to being a game that only exists in plot summaries.