Compilation of Final Fantasy VII

• 1. A World Expanded

  ›

  The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII arrived not as a sequel but as a declaration. When Square Enix officially announced the project in 2003 with the reveal of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, it positioned the effort as "polymorphic content" - a strategy to place well-known properties on multiple platforms and reach as wide an audience as possible. At its core were three video games and one film, built around a 1997 role-playing game that had earned near-universal critical acclaim and cult status. The questions the announcement raised were not small ones: could spinoffs do justice to one of gaming's most beloved worlds? Would new entries deepen the mythology or dilute it? And who, exactly, would shepherd this expansion?

  Yoshinori Kitase, director of the original Final Fantasy VII, and Tetsuya Nomura, its main character designer, created the Compilation together. Kitase's reasoning for choosing VII over other entries in the franchise was direct: the original game's ending left far more development opportunities open for its characters and setting than other titles in the series had. There was also a financial argument. Following the strong commercial performance of Final Fantasy X-2 just before the 2003 merger of Square and Enix, then-CEO Yoichi Wada concluded the company could tap into fan demand for more of VII's story. What began as a single film commission would grow into something far larger than even Nomura anticipated.

• 2. The Staff Reassembled

  ›

  One condition was attached to the project from the start: the original Final Fantasy VII creative team had to return. Nomura came back as the main character designer for every Compilation entry. Writer Kazushige Nojima, art director Yusuke Naora, and composer Nobuo Uematsu were all brought back as well. Their presence gave the expanding series a coherent creative spine.

  Advant Children began as something modest. Visual Works, the animation studio responsible for CGI cutscenes in Square's games, originally envisioned it as a short film presentation. Early in pre-production, plans to turn it into a video game were discussed, but Visual Works lacked experience in game production, so it stayed a film. Once Advent Children was underway, the team concluded that one title was not enough to fully explore the VII universe. Before Crisis, Dirge of Cerberus, and Crisis Core were each conceived to cover different corners of the world and its characters. Nomura later said he had been surprised by the addition of those games, having originally assumed the film would be the project's only product.

  Each new title had a distinct origin. Before Crisis came from Hajime Tabata, a new Square Enix employee in the mobile division, responding to a prompt from Nomura to design a game featuring the Turks. Dirge of Cerberus grew out of Vincent Valentine's choice of weapon, Kitase's personal fondness for first-person shooters, and an interest in the creative challenge the genre posed. Crisis Core started as either a Final Fantasy spinoff or a port of Before Crisis for the PlayStation Portable, and evolved through conversations with Kitase and Nomura into a full Compilation entry. The team's internal shorthand for the series eventually followed a lettering formula: AC for Advent Children, BC for Before Crisis, CC for Crisis Core, DC for Dirge of Cerberus. The sequence nearly broke when Crisis Core was briefly considered under the title Before Crisis Core, but the "Before" was dropped.

• 3. Formats and Genres

  ›

  None of the Compilation's core titles were traditional role-playing games, a deliberate choice. Traditional RPGs demanded long production timelines and large development teams, which the team felt would draw too much attention and resources to individual entries. The experience of making Final Fantasy X-2 had also reminded staff that they did not need to stay within the boundaries of serious, traditional RPGs.

  Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII was an action role-playing game split into 24 episodes, distributed through a monthly subscription model. It launched on the 24th of September 2004, for NTT DoCoMo's FOMA iMode, then expanded to SoftBank Mobile and EZweb on January 30 and the 5th of April 2007, respectively. Dirge of Cerberus combined first-person and third-person shooter elements; its multiplayer mode was removed for the western release, and the developers reworked the localized version because they were not satisfied with the original Japanese edition. Crisis Core had originally been planned as a pure action game before becoming an action RPG, a compromise that kept the project within the team's design strengths while incorporating new elements.

  The film Advent Children was released in Japan on the 14th of September 2005, and received a single special western cinema screening on the 3rd of April 2006, at the Arclight Theatre in Los Angeles before wider release in Europe and North America. A director's cut, Advent Children Complete, followed in 2009 as a Blu-ray exclusive, featuring graphical retouches, additional footage, and rerecorded voice work. A demo for Final Fantasy XIII was bundled with the Japanese limited edition. The animated short Last Order: Final Fantasy VII, which detailed the destruction of the town of Nibelheim, was packaged with a limited edition of Advent Children called Advent Pieces, limited to exactly 77,777 copies.

• 4. Release and Delay

  ›

  Advent Children was the first Compilation title conceived and the second released. Post-production problems pushed its launch back repeatedly, which meant Before Crisis - the second title to enter development - became the first to reach players when it launched in September 2004. The film's delays also shaped one other production decision: Japanese animation studio Madhouse, hired to produce a commercial for Before Crisis, impressed the team enough that they were chosen to produce Last Order as well, partly because key Nibelheim scenes in Advent Children felt needlessly disjointed.

  Before Crisis never reached western markets. The mobile phones available in North America at the time of its development could not support the game. Later, producer Kosei Ito left Square Enix in 2008 and Hajime Tabata moved to other projects, leaving localization plans without the people who had championed them. It remains the only core Compilation title unreleased outside Japan.

  Crisis Core launched in Japan on the 13th of September 2007, and sold 350,000 copies on its release date there. North America received it on the 24th of March 2008, where it sold 301,600 copies in its first month. A remaster, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, arrived in late 2022 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Final Fantasy VII Remake, the first installment in a planned remake trilogy, was released for PlayStation 4 on the 10th of April 2020, and shipped and sold over 3.5 million copies within three days.

• 5. Reception and Criticism

  ›

  Compared to the original Final Fantasy VII's near-universal critical acclaim, the Compilation titles earned a mixed response. In July 2007, Edge magazine wrote that the entries "could be of a high quality, but there is also a perversion of the original." RPG Site's Alex Donaldson called the series "too far detached from the lore of Final Fantasy VII" and described the titles prior to Crisis Core as having "expanded, extended, and retconned the story into what some would call an unrecognizable mess," a characterization he attributed to RPGFan's Stephen Meyerink. Alexa Ray Corriea, writing for Polygon, argued that few of the Compilation titles were good and that they served only to "cheapen the 1997 PlayStation original."

  Advant Children's reception split cleanly: critics praised its presentation, graphics, and appeal to fans, but agreed that its story was confusing for newcomers to the series. Dirge of Cerberus divided opinion further; Famitsu gave it a delayed and notably critical review, while other critics appreciated the focus on Vincent Valentine's character and development. Before Crisis, due to its Japan-only status, attracted limited western coverage, but the previews it did receive were largely positive about the gameplay and graphics for a mobile title.

  Crisis Core stood out. Critics broadly praised its intimate storytelling and action-oriented combat, and it became the most respected Compilation title before the Remake trilogy. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second installment in the Remake trilogy, holds the highest average Metacritic score among Compilation entries at 92 out of 100. Former staff members have cited the Compilation, alongside other franchise extensions, as a factor in eroding the series' market presence and fan trust in the West.

• 6. Sales and Legacy

  ›

  Sales figures across the Compilation varied widely by title and format. Advent Children sold 1 million units in Japan, 1.3 million in North America, and 100,000 in Europe through 2006, totaling 2.4 million copies worldwide. The original version went on to sell four million copies worldwide by 2009. Advent Children Complete sold 100,000 copies on its first day of release in Japan alone and was cited as contributing to increased PlayStation 3 console sales. Before Crisis registered 200,000 users on launch day, at the time making it the best-selling mobile game up to that point, and was accessed 1.6 million times by June 2006.

  Dirge of Cerberus shipped 392,000 units in its first week and sold 460,000 units in North America and 270,000 in Europe. Crisis Core sold 2.1 million units worldwide. Final Fantasy VII Remake shipped and sold over 3.5 million copies within three days of launch, becoming one of the biggest PlayStation 4 launches and the fastest-selling PS4 exclusive in history; by September 2023, it had shipped and digitally sold over 7 million units worldwide. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has sold over 3.5 million copies across PlayStation and Steam.

  In 2006, while Compilation titles were still being released, Wada stated the franchise could remain active until 2017, the twentieth anniversary of Final Fantasy VII's release. In later interviews, multiple staff including Nomura said the Compilation was always intended to extend only to three games and a film, ending with Crisis Core, because releasing further entries risked saturating the market. The thinking behind the project nonetheless proved influential: it directly inspired the creation of Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy, a subseries linking multiple games through a shared mythos, and the battle sequences in Advent Children served as inspiration for Motomu Toriyama when designing the combat system for Final Fantasy XIII.