Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis Has a Stamina Problem. Here’s How to Fix It

How does a skater grind a rail without a skateboard? 

He doesn't. 

How do you grind a grindy gacha without stamina/energy?

You don't. 

Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis has been out for a little over a week now. I've been loving it so far. It's got a couple of problems, but nothing too major. All except one: stamina. 

This game is super grindy. And Square Enix doesn't give players nearly enough stamina to keep up. 

I'm only prioritizing three characters, as is recommended of all players. Due to how grindy the game is and the lack of stamina, you either focus most of your efforts on making three characters strong or risk spreading yourself thin, trying to work on more, and having no strong characters.

I'm only working on Cloud, Aerith, and Glenn. And the grind is still pretty awful. Young Sephiroth is right around the corner, but how excited can I be for him if I don't have the stamina to level him up?

The Developers Know There's a Problem

The fact that there's a 0 stamina cost character exp stage confirms that Square Enix is aware that Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis has a bit of a stamina issue. But instead of fixing that stamina issue, they provided a workaround.

Except it isn't much of a workaround since the character exp you gain from the 0 stamina missions is so laughably low that those missions aren't worth doing (Unless you use an auto-clicker and leave it on all day). More than that, even if the 0 stamina cost character exp missions did alleviate character exp grinding issues, that does nothing to help with stamina issues with any other stages. 

All the weapon enhancement and materia synthesis stages give woefully underwhelming drops. Even with a Cactaur encounter during a 3X run AND the temporary 20% drop increase, the clear rewards aren't good, let alone great. As it turns out, a 20% drop increase on a stage with poor drop quantities still has poor drop quantities. 

For weapon unlocking materials, doing a 3X run of the highest difficulty stage tends to get you three materials on average per run. You need 30 to unlock a single weapon to level 70. That's around 600 stamina, or 12 stamina potions. And you need 15 weapons for your three characters. 

And here's the thing: all this wouldn't be a big deal if the stamina bottleneck didn't exist. Sure, the lack of auto/clear tickets will make grinding a long task, but I'm okay with that so long as I can get things done. 

Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross has the best stamina potion system I've ever seen in any gacha game. In 7DSGC, you can use the 3-star dupe coins you get from summoning 3-star characters in the coin shop to exchange them for resources. One such resource is stamina potions. The conversion is at a 1:1 ratio and makes stamina a complete non-issue in 7DSGC. You need to grind a significant amount in that game so that implementation is a godsend.

Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis is infinitely more grindy than Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross and handles stamina infinitely worse. 

How to Fix Stamina Issues in Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis

Make Stamina Potions Full Refills

The first thing Square Enix needs to do is make stamina potions refill your stamina completely. It never made sense to me how level 30 players get the same value out of stamina potions as level 1 players.

Once you've unlocked the high-level stages, a single three-run of nearly anything will wipe out that stamina potion. It also feels pretty bad seeing stamina potions restoring 50 stamina, but right above it, Square Enix advertises 100 stamina refills if you use your blue krystals. 

Making stamina potions full restores rewards players who have invested their time into Ever Crisis and makes farming much more reasonable. 

Make Stamina Potions More Farmable

The next thing Square Enix needs to do is make stamina potions more farmable. You get four from Daily Challenges just by periodically logging in throughout the day, but bizarrely, only one from Weekly Challenges. But this amount is nowhere near enough to keep up with how much you need to grind. 

You get some here and there from Daily and Weekly Objectives and the Season Pass. But that's nowhere near enough to keep up with how much you need to grind. 

For starters, they can put stamina potions in the Co-Op Exchange shop at the cost of 10 Co-Op medals each. You can only farm 2,000 Co-Op medals a week, so players must sacrifice other rewards if they want to stock up on stamina potions this way. 

Half Stamina Cost Events

Half Stamina Cost Events are common in games like this, and they'd definitely help players farm without blitzing through all of their stamina potions. They've already introduced drop rate increase and rare encounter rate increase events this week, so I don't see Half Stamina Costs Events being out of the question. 

Weapon Part Blueprints Shop Exchange

But I think the best way to alleviate the stamina potion drought is to follow the example of Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross: Create a Weapon Parts Blueprint Exchange shop and have stamina potions be one of the items you can exchange for. A 1:1 ratio would be fantastic, but I'd even accept 2:1 if I had to. 

Just like you'll only be building up 3-4 characters for now, you'll only focus on a few weapons. And some weapons might never interest you (Looking at you, Lucia's tranquilizer gun).

Why have a ton of weapon parts blueprints collecting virtual dust when players can convert them into something they can actually use? A 5-star weapon is worth 200 weapon parts blueprints. Imagine if you could exchange those for 100-200 stamina potions. 

Not only will this mostly fix what is arguably the game's biggest problem, but it also promotes more player choice. A shop like this also provides a silver lining in the event that a player gets shafted on their latest summoning session. 

Square Enix could go even further and start creating some Weapons Parts Blueprint Exchange Shop exclusive outfits or weapons. That will incentivize players to farm up as many blueprints as possible, from summoning or otherwise, to get exclusive rewards.

Crisis Core Celebration Campaign: Helpful but not a Solution

Happy #CrisisCore 16th Anniversary!

To celebrate CRISIS CORE -FINAL FANTASY VII- 's 16th anniversary, we're giving away Stamina Tonic x10 every day for 16 days starting Sep. 16 PDT!

Why not take this chance to relive some of the most iconic CRISIS CORE moments in #FF7EC? pic.twitter.com/bAtrUORaQn

— FINAL FANTASY VII EVER CRISIS_EN｜FF7EC (@FFVII_EC_EN) September 13, 2023

In celebration of Final Fantasy 7 Crisis Core's 16-year anniversary, Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis is running a stamina campaign. Having started on September 16, players will get ten stamina potions daily for the next 16 days.

Don't get me wrong, that's a huge help, especially with the developers having released Part 2 of the Beach Event, but it's a band-aid solution. I'd rather they fix the stamina problem entirely than provide workarounds.

Grindy or Stamina Bottleneck: Pick One

I look at gacha games like this: if a game is going to be very grindy, then stamina needs to be a non-issue.

If the game isn't a grind fest, I can accept players needing to be a bit wiser with using stamina/energy.

But a game that's incredibly grindy AND has a massive stamina bottleneck? That's a no-no.

Square Enix, your bottom line isn't going to skyrocket by bottlenecking stamina. It's not like Square Enix offers good stamina potion packages for money. And even if they did, the game has a 99 stamina potion limit, so whales can't even hoard stamina potions. And since this game has no auto-play functionality or clear tickets, you can't quickly use stamina potions you've saved up.

You'll make plenty of money from the various weapons, outfits, and krystal offers running. We're talking about a game based on Final Fantasy 7. It's not like this franchise is short on fans. I myself will likely pull out the wallet when Vincent Valentine and Genesis Rhapsodos come to the game.

All bottlenecking stamina will do is make players less interested in playing your game.

I really like Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis, despite how grindy it is, so please. Put the stamina bottleneck out to pasture and let us grind in tedious peace.

If you're looking to get started in Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis or reroll your account, check out our updated Reroll Guide! Stay tuned for more Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis content here at ESTNN.