Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier (Android, 2021)

It’s always sad to see a game die, even one as shameless as Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier. This was Square Enix’s attempt to gobble up a slice of Fortnite‘s battle royale pie on the coattails of the Final Fantasy VII Remake.

With dollar signs flashing in Square Enix’s eyes, they contracted mobile developers ATeam Inc. and the game was unleashed on the world on iOS and Android in 2021. It promptly flopped and, claiming “a failure to deliver the intended experience”, the servers were unceremoniously yanked in January 2023.

The First Soldier‘s core problem is astonishingly straightforward: it’s a crapper version of Fortnite and Fortnite is right there being an actually good game. But even in its death throes, I wanted to try it out before I missed my chance forever (mainly after listening to Get Played‘s Heather Campbell singing its praises for months on end). So, I got on board in the months before it disappeared just to see it for myself.

What I found wasn’t great. By October 2022 the game was in the midst of a zombie-fuelled Halloween event, with the gimmick that dead players turn into melee-only zombies (something Fortnite had already done much more successfully). This essentially meant death resulted in a long and dull sprint around the dowdy map hoping to run into another player.

I put it down and came back to it around Christmas. To my surprise, I started racking up kills and winning matches! I was shocked, and for a brief moment wondered if I’d found a game I was great at just weeks before it disappeared forever. Then I realized that 90% of the enemies I’d been fighting were bots (and bad bots at that). Those victories turned to ash in my mouth – I’m still not entirely sure I ever fought another human player.

So where did it all go wrong? After all, a Final Fantasy-themed battle royale isn’t the worst idea in the world.

Being relegated to a mobile-only release didn’t help matters. I found the game almost unplayable on the touch-screen, resorting to using an Xbox controller and plugging my phone into a monitor (though even then it was clumsy as all hell).

Compounding that is it’s just plain ugly. Even on low-spec platforms Fortnite‘s dayglo cartoon aesthetic shines through, but The First Soldier‘s washed-out urban environments and blurry textures make it look like an N64 game that time forgot. The setting doesn’t do it many favors either, with your choices a dowdy industrial area full of boxy warehouses or a desert slum made up of cut n’ paste buildings.

The rotten cherry on top were the microtransactions, bewildering amount of in-game currencies, and gacha elements. For obvious reasons I didn’t spend a penny in the store, though even if I’d been inclined to much of what was on offer looked a bit naff.

All that said, there were a couple of potentially fun twists. Being able to choose your class before battle is theoretically a neat idea, though after experimenting with various ones I stuck with the bread n’ butter ‘Ranger’ type. Also, being able to use and upgrade Materia might have been fun if there had been a lot of other players to tangle with. I also liked being able to fly a helicopter around rather than jump off the Battle Bus.

The First Soldier was a soulless corporate product conceived in the boardroom, copies as much of Fortnite as possible minus the charm, and did almost everything it set out to do badly. All that, combined with the allegations of insider trading around its release (oh Yuji Naka…) leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

Even after reading the above you may still have wished you could try The First Soldier for yourself, but that ship has sailed (and capsized and is now lying in pieces at the bottom of the ocean).

Just trust me, you didn’t miss much.